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Mord's Blog

A blog by Mord

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About this blog

I'm really not sure what I'll use this blog for so I should probably leave this blank, but that would require backspacing. Much easier to just hit a period and stop typing.

Entries in this blog

 

Sell A Band

Lately been listening to various bands on this site. An interesting method for helping artists get CDs recorded without the need of a record label that would potentially put them into debt and/or give them just a couple pennies per CD sold, etc etc.   Yeah, I'm not a big fan of record labels.   At any rate, I recommend poking around and listening to a few bands and reading the How It Works page. I signed up mostly to download the few free downloads available, but listening to songs with
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On track for a weekend version 0.015!

I wrote a small diagram for visualizing what the display code was doing in the top 2 lines where the graphics corrupt. I'm going to keep that diagram. It kind of puts the code into a very simple to understand light. At any rate I knew for a while that there was a 1-off error corrupting the graphics I just wasn't sure what variable was off. Turns out it wasn't a variable but a constant. I was loading Gamefieldsize and Gamefieldsize+1 as the scanline to calculate the initial switchdraw grap
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(Action RPG) Version 0.018 - 16k Rom

Version 0.018 is complete. This upgrades the rom to 16k. And the amount of space available in each bank is awesome.   I've spliced up the code as detailed in the previous post. The rom plays essentially the same as the previous version/beta as far as anyone were to tell by playing it. There's just a lot more space available to add things now.   As I mentioned, I took a stab at trying to modify the Random Number generator. After reading it over and actually understanding what it was d
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Back To Programming and Currently Playing!

I'm finished with Ar Tonelico II. I wish the game didn't end as I really liked it despite the l33t spellchecker editing job and the bug with Raki in the NA release.   Next up, I've chosen to re-complete Ys The Ark of Napishtim for my Games Complete list. I started in on it a couple weeks ago actually, although I've only been playing on the weekend. I'm about to enter the second last dungeon at this point.   For programming, I apparently lied about getting back to work on Action RPG rig
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Games and Code

There's little more to my life these days it seems other than those thing in the topic. .... Well, if you don't count sleep and work.   Persona 3 FES is moving along at a nice pace this weekend. I got up to the top of the 4th block of Tartarus and the social links are coming along fine. I may not max them out by the end of the game but that isn't overly important as far as my Games Complete list is concerned. But I will try to get them there all the same.   I haven't done much with
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I'm a slow programmer.

That subject works on so many levels.   Anyway, I sat down and patched the relative exits for the proper detection of the Zero Nybble case. No bugs or troubles in adding it. I altered room 6 so that it used relative exits for the dead exits instead of normal exits in the main rom. Since there's literally no visible change to the player (... again. ) I'm not going to bother posting the rom this time.   The rest of this week is going to be split up between thinking about items/mobs an
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Begin Debugging Phase!

Always such a fun phase.   After spending a while thinking of how to do what I wanted to do, then another week writing and rewriting and doublechecking what was written, I finally started pasting the new code for holdable objects into the rom. And for the first time sinc... ok for probably the first time, the game didn't need any tweaking just to display the kernel properly on first assembly!   However the key wasn't responding to the collision routines.   That was a quick fix. I j
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Perhaps a bit late.

For version 0.016. While writing the code I've been thinking about how it would react in flicker conditions. And it's quite likely I'll need to make some extra modifications to the Object Manager to give object preference at times. In other words, some objects, particularly room-loaded objects, may be negatively affected by flickering. So for those objects, it would be best to not let them flicker at all, at the cost of the other objects flickering a little worse. (or perhaps a lot worse, bu
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Back to the Code.

I've also been playing Aardwolf more actively lately, but the main thing to report is that I've added the new code to the main sources yesterday. I had added most of it and things worked for the most part, properly. I noticed one of the hearts that would jump to a new position/room whenever I entered a new room and it kind of puzzled me for a bit.   Then I remembered this was expected. Local_03 slot is cleared when leaving a room - all local/room slots will be like that eventually, so obv
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One hundred million billion dollars

I was discussing/ranting to nobody in particular on irc about how I'd go about doing a colecovision cartridge release, to get an idea of how much money it'd cost me to pull it off, I ended the rant with:     [19:55] <Mord> then take a large gold brick and put it in as a bonus since by then the gold brick will be cheap compared to everything else that's gone into the design. [19:56] <Mordiechu> but everyone will be going "ooo, gold brick. must buy~"   That aside, it'd still be f
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Adding Dreamcast to the Mix

Dynasty Warriors 6 is something I can hack away at for an hour after I get home from work in the morning. So, for the weekends I think I'll add a little more spice. As such, since the Dreamcast is technically hooked up anyway, I'm going to replay Grandia II for the Game Complete list. I should finish that before christmas no problem.   After christmas I'll play through Ar Tonelico in preparation for the release of Ar Tonelico 2 on January 20. When all that's said and done, or maybe befor
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Wow. SAP and Winamp is funky.

I downloaded the new updated SAP archive the other day and had the tunes playing on random/looping.   Then I went to work and forgot it was still playing. I use Winamp for these as I tend to prefer having a one stop shop for my audio - as a result I download winamp plugins whenever I find I need one.   Anyway. When I got home the computer was sluggish. I opened up task manager and found Winamp was using 99% of the system resources.
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Another Week Passes.

Adding this special type of room object is proving to be a bit more difficult than I had planned. The idea is that one of the 3 room object slots would be able to avoid flickering even in the worst of conditions by just causing the other sprite to handle the flickering of all the other possible objects. This is best for when collision between two objects is important.   At any rate it's not working properly yet. Haven't had a chance to check the object's AI and collision routines - I jus
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(Action RPG) Fixed-Point movement

I've changed the way the player moves to make use of fixed-point math. In the rom right now I replaced the castle with a simple square in the middle so I could work on screen clipping with the new movement code. Took me a while to get that right, once again due to my confusing how cmp works with setting the carry flag. I seem to keep testing for the opposite case than what's called for. ^^;   Also, another strange thing I had going was that movement got busted as soon as I swapped in the n
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What to play, what to play.

Persona 3 FES is probably going to be shafted again as I'm having trouble really getting into the game. I'm not giving up on it just yet of course, as I haven't gotten into it too much yet and still have more characters to meet etc.   However.   I own War Song on the genesis now, and I've been dying to play through that for the longest time. I played it a few times on my cousin's genesis in the past, and really enjoyed it. I never did play it enough to finish it however, or even get close
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Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Finished Dawn of Sorrow today, and added it to my little Games Complete list on my website.   Had it solved long ago, but I'm not adding games to the list unless I complete them after the list was started. Which means playing through a lot of games again. Nearing the end of Mana Khemia. I'll have to pick some more games to continue on with soon.
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Mana Khemia

Finished this last weekend. I have a few save games near the end so that I can pick a different ending without redoing the entire game, but I'm not to interested in actually doing that for now. I think I missed making like 1 item in the game, which of course prevented me from unlocking everybody's stats 100%. Some were as low as 95% due to that particular item blocking a few other items behind it. Ah well, not too important.   For a change of pace I've switched to the PS2 version of Dynasty
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So close, yet still so far.

I've ironed out 99% of what I found wrong with the display since version 0.014. There's no more stretching at the top of the screen, an object of coordinate Y can now be positioned in exactly the same place regardless of if P0 or P1 is displaying it. (noticable when you pick up a heart when the key is in the same room. )   While not intended, in the rom so far the heart always ends up being slotted in P0. The key will display with P0 if the heart isn't on the screen. If the heart is present
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Grandia II

And Grandia II is complete. Dreamcast version as I mentioned before. I have the PS2 version but I find it to suffer from some texture glitches in battle as well as slowdown. I'm pretty sure I missed one of the training books as I only had 7. Had all 8 mana eggs however. Ah well, I'm not aiming for perfection on these.   Since I got swallowed up in this game, I didn't bother playing much of Dynasty Warriors 6 at all for the last week or so. I guess this means I should focus on DW6 rather t
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(Action RPG) Ice Kingdom (or: BLARG!)

Procrastinating on the rom again. Punishment for this is near but for now I show one of the potential incarnations of the Ice Kingdom that I had mentioned I drew up a couple years ago. When I get around to actually designing the area it'll probably look quite different. (After all, the capabilities of the engine are far more than what the concept assumed when it was created!)   As you can see from the map, there appear to be 2 different entrances. One on the far side of the maze, and one ne
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Persona 3 FES

I've blasted my way through Ys The Ark of Napishtim. I like how everything is voiced in the game, although I'm sure that's a big reason why the game feels so short.   Next up, will be Persona 3 FES. I've started this one a couple of times but I always got distracted by other games. Then when I finally sat back down to it, I was completely lost so would start over. X_X   Going to give it a shot again and since there aren't really any games I'm aware of being released soon that I'm going to
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(Action RPG) Version 0.016

And finished. Had several weird things happen this version to work around, as well as unexpected (read: braindead) semantic problems to deal with.   Anyway, nonflickering room objects are now added. Having some objects avoid flickering can help with making sure collisions register asap. (As soon as the object it reacts to gets swapped in)     One use, as demonstrated in this version, is castle gates/doors/etc that are locked. The black key does indeed unlock the castle and you can go
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(Action RPG) Game Play

One of the things I've been wrestling with as I write the basic engines for Action RPG is exactly how the player will be able to move about and interact in the game. As I make more and more progress it's getting harder to put off these decisions! So on the way to work yesterday I started writing down more notes and thought them over.   I intend on the player having access to a limited inventory screen to store various usable items, this may include some types of keys.   Of those items, o
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P0/P1 Collisions

I've worked on that some more since the last time I looked at it. And I was apparently wrong with it being a problem with the Tick based code. (That might have been a problem as well, but fixing it didn't change the behaviour)   The real problem, (this time I'm pretty sure it's the case!) is that I was examining the P1P0 collision during the Vertical Blank of the following frame in AI routines. The problem is that, by necessity, the AI routines are processed after the Object Manager does it'
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Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles

Finished this on the PSP today, the good ending. Got all the maidens and maria unlocked and both the original Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night unlocked.   Funny thing. While just playing with SotN I decided I wouldn't attempt for the keep-all-your-gear trick with Death at the beginning. I could never get it to work anyway on the playstation. At the last second I figgered "What the heck." and got it. So I moved on to the first save point for it and saved. Didn't feel like playing
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