adamantyr

TI BASIC and Extended BASIC are slow... neither are particularly good at animation this way, you can see the "wipe" effect as the old pattern overwrites the new one. Very easy in assembly, using a random routine to pad out an 8-byte value. This would create an extremely "chaotic" pattern that wildly changes rapidly. A trickier one is to have the pattern change in an incremental fashion... having it stay more or less the same but only have a few pixels change value at a time. Off the top of my head, the easiest way to do this is to create a random "bit mask" with very sparse changes, and then apply it with an XOR over top the old pattern so that it only gradually changes a few pixels at a time to different bit values. Adamantyr

What name you want to be known by: Adam Haase Game programming experience: TI games in BASIC and Extended BASIC, GL-Trek (college 3D graphics project using OpenGL in C++), assembly conversion of TI-Trek, Dark Maze (SSGC game entry) Original experience with the TI: Getting past the Dramite stage in Parsec successfully... and then immediately dying from a saucer slamming into my ship from behind. Favorite TI game: Tunnels of Doom Current Projects: Assembly multi-disk CRPG for the TI-99/4a

Thank you, Owen, and thank you, everyone. I must admit, even I'm surprised at how well the game turned out. And how lucky I was that I spec'ed out all the features and the number of levels I wanted and managed to get it ALL into the 14k I had available. The only thing I ended up cutting was the fancy opening title sequence. If I had any criticisms of my work, I probably should have put in a level skip option... it seems that playing all 16 levels in one sitting is a bit much to ask. Also, I STILL don't know if anyone's actually finished the game! Adamantyr

Contest results yet? Adamantyr

That is because "CONTINUE" is its own statement and can only be executed in immediate mode. IIRC, the syntax is 10 ON BREAK NEXT Opps, my memory failed me on that one. Adamantyr

You can put it right at the start of the program once, and it will ignore the BREAK key. Keep in mind that means you can't break to debug either. Adamantyr

ON BREAK CONTINUE Adamantyr

Me too! There was other more obscure CoCo magazines as well. My brother's friend had a whole set of Color Computer Magazine, which included a pretty cool Star Trek game. I've never been able to find them online digitized anywhere... Adamantyr

Old computer magazines are pretty cool to vintage enthusiasts... and a lot of them have not been scanned in or digitized for preservation. I'd at least check out eBay or make some posts here on AtariAge before consigning them to oblivion. Adamantyr

I am stuck on 13. I can't open the path to the 3rd emitter. And you have downloaded the latest version on the thread? Because it was missing a corridor. If the chamber is isolated, your version is old. Adamantyr Makes sense. I thought I had the latest version. I'll double check it tonight. Ever get past level 13? I certainly hope so! Adamantyr

Yes, it was released. I have one of the few cartridges that Asgard produced. (Gary Bowser can tell you more about that, apparently only a handful were actually shipped.) I put up a PDF scan of the manual on WHTech, you can find it here: ftp://ftp.whtech.com/programming/Extended%20Basic/ExtendedBasic3.pdf Adamantyr

Agreed! Old computer magazines rock... there's just nothing like it now. And most of my co-workers never even started programming until college. Adamantyr

I don't see why the contest can't be extended through the weekend. Right, Owen? Adamantyr

Good to hear. Feel free to post your discoveries on the thread. Nobody's EVER done a full walk-through of the game. All I can say is, your first parties must have had really BAD stats... I think the 1.0 version of Legends is a lot more difficult, and it also has slightly different artwork. Adamantyr

And you were looking at the same character? Each character class has different XP requirements. Adamantyr

Yes, you need 168 more experience points before you can train. Adamantyr

You also need gold. Are you sure it's not telling you how much gold you need? Adamantyr

Go to the Adventurer's Guild in Wizard's Rock. Adamantyr

You can go exploring sooner, but obviously the further away from Wizard's Rock you are, the more likely you are to get into trouble. The more levels of experience you have, the bigger pool of hit points and magic points to get around and survive encounters. Dungeons come in two flavors: Those with items, those with monsters. Item dungeons have a lot of traps, which means you can take a lot of damage disarming them. Item dungeons also have equipment, which lets you make your characters a bit stronger despite their level, at least for melee and defensive power. Monster dungeons have monster encounters instead of traps. Items are usually just potions, although there are valuable quest items in these places as well... One nasty problem is that if monsters in dungeons cast the slow spell, it PERSISTS until you leave the dungeon. I really would like to think that's a bug and not deliberate. To fix the persistent slow issue, change this line in LGDN~MON to the following: 1600 CALL LINK("A",0) :: CALL LINK("A",10) :: CALL COLOR(#3,1) :: CALL LOCATE(#4,R*8-7,C*8-7) :: SL,_P=0 Adamantyr

Yep, that's the job. Each level of experience increases your fighting/spell-casting prowess, and also increases hit and magic points. It may take some time, but level 4 is probably a good level to go exploring around with. (Wizard can cast Firestorm2 at that level.) Yes. There's only one way in the game to revive dead characters, and you need a quest item to do it. Adamantyr

You mean the stock party that's level 1, right? You didn't use the PDATA file I had above that has them all at level 15? Adamantyr

While I was creating a high-level party for Tursi's debugging efforts, I did notice a few things that are useful to know: 1) Never NEVER take the first set of statistics you roll up. It's a random system and each class has their own variant range for each attribute 2) Charisma affects how much it costs to train in a BIG way. A score of 9 here will cost you a fortune later 3) Gold and assets are party-based, and remain even with a brand-new party 4) You'll probably run out of gold before you run out of experience; only a few monsters have high gold return for XP 5) This game is all about grinding levels old-school fashion. If you dislike this kind of gaming, just cheat to get your characters up high enough level and go exploring Adamantyr

Err... posts #28 and #38 have all the pieces you need? Adamantyr

For Legends, you can just copy all the files into a single disk folder. They even say this in the instruction manual, that you can copy the whole thing to a single disk if you had 180k or 360k drives, or all to a single RAMdisk. Adamantyr

AH HA! I remember running into this before! And yes, that is the problem. The forward slash is an illegal character to use for filenames on the PC because they're used for folder separators. Adamantyr