Denial

Ghislain · Last edited by Ghislain on Mon Nov 02, 2009 5:53 am; edited 7 times in total

Well, I only really started this morning, but I was thinking of a concept for a sequel to Dunjon II for some time. So after a few minutes I came up with the following mock-up screen:

(**edit: moved original mockup screen from picpaste to imagehosting)

This is not final but will be a loose basis of how the finished game will look like. The upper left section shows the maze from a first-person perspective (ala Wizardry). You also see the monsters that you encounter (up to 16 of them), with the first letter of the monster name representing the individual ones The upper right section shows the party members. The middle right section shows the active/selected player's statistics and items. The middle left section shows the party's common items and supplies (gold, healing potions, ammunition and a group-wide spell or curse that is affecting everyone in the party). The bottom section will be for scrolling text.

As with the first 2 versions of Dunjon, this is going to be a "generic RPG" where there's no specific quest--you pretty much wander in the dungeon hunting for some orc and to find some cool magic items. And like it's predecessors, your characters tend to die a lot. But this time, you will adventure as a group so if someone does die, you just create a new character to replace him or her.

I will work within the following parameters:

-will be a game for the unexpanded VIC-20
-only PETSCII graphics
-save game feature
-lots of ML to speed up the display

Maybe I shouldn't put this out there only because 70% of the projects at this stage never actually get finished, but hopefully by making this announcement, it will give me motivation to see this through the end.
_________________
"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." -- Ezra Pound

orion70 · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 10:01 am Post subject:

VERY WELL! I'm eager to try it- so please don't leave this project in the drawer.

The type of display reminds me of Ultima: escape from Mt. Drash.
That one was for 16K VIC, and probably yours will end up to be far less expensive Wink

.

ral-clan · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:49 am Post subject:

This looks great. I like the fact it's going to be for the unexpanded VIC.

Since it is PETSCII, could you please allow users to define the screen colours? I would love to run this game with a black background, black border and green text. It would feel like I was running it on a PET.

Ghislain · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:52 am Post subject:

Ghislain · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 6:57 am Post subject:

Yesterday I got as far as preparing the display and created a routine that will clear a section of the screen (by passing coordinates, location, etc).

The next thing that I will work on is displaying the player stats. I've never done arithmetic in machine language before (aside from 1-byte numbers) and my RPG games have always involved a lot of numbers.

I was planning on using _some_ ML for this and I could take the easy way out by using BASIC, but I want the game to run as quickly as possible, especially when it comes to the display aspect of it.

So I'm not sure which one to use--BCD or standard hexadecimal. Both have their strong points and weak points. I'll probably use a combination of both.

I'm also thinking of changing the number of characters in a party from 6 to 4 -- only because I can save on memory as well as display space on the screen. As well, with 4 characters, I can easily fit them in one contiguous memory space between 828-1023 and thus save the game to and from disk.
_________________
"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." -- Ezra Pound

Kweepa · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 8:27 am Post subject:

I would choose non-BCD for a larger project. BCD is good when you want to optimise the number printing routine for space, but the savings slowly disappear when you have a lot of operations on different numbers, as you have to sed and cld around each operation.

carlsson · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 8:41 am Post subject:

If you don't fancy writing your own routines to convert a "hexadecimal" number to ASCII, there are some routines in the Basic ROM you can use with certain limitations (i.e. converting it to FAC FLPT format). See the sticky thread about ROM calls. I believe I used one of those when displaying the six digit score in Jewels.
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Anders Carlsson

Ghislain · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 8:58 am Post subject:

Ghislain · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 9:03 am Post subject:

carlsson · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 10:41 am Post subject:

Assuming you simply want to print something to screen:

Ghislain · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 11:16 am Post subject:

Royas · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 12:32 pm Post subject:

This looks awesome.

I wouldn't mind seeing user definable fore/background colors myself, since I like blue on green , and ... I dont think anyone else does.

Cool

How will the character system be? Lots of classes/races?

and, I agree 4 characters should be good, and will be a different approach than the typical 6 in every CRPG ever made!

rhurst · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:00 pm Post subject:

Ghislain · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 2:35 pm Post subject:

rhurst · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 6:49 pm Post subject:

You did not d/l the doc archive and unpack it? It includes the necessary doc/vic20.cfg (listed below) to assist in assigning memory: