adamantyr

At least 20 hours of work... probably closer to 30. Let's not just have three entries, three winners! Don't get discouraged, guys. TI BASIC is pretty rough... frankly, I'm surprised the game came out so well. I got VERY lucky that the only thing I ended up having to cut was the opening title sequence. Adamantyr

Hint: Energy balls that hit emitters will deactivate the prior emitter and fire from that emitter instead, in the direction it faces. Adamantyr

The Flooraway series by R. Truman in the UK Collection come to mind. They're pretty comparable platform games. Adamantyr

Damn it... AtariAge's stupid uploader wouldn't replace it, it just kept the same one. I deleted my entire archive of zips and made sure I put the FULLY updated one on the thread alone. Adamantyr

Joystick required. Classic99 maps that to the PC arrow keys. O/B was an old version; you use the fire button (Q on keyboard) and it alternates between portals. Adamantyr Roger that. Now, WTH is the cube thing about? (No, I never played the "real" game) Cubes are used to activate buttons, and can be pushed around and used as a platform to jump a bit higher. They're basically part of the puzzle. Adamantyr

Joystick required. Classic99 maps that to the PC arrow keys. O/B was an old version; you use the fire button (Q on keyboard) and it alternates between portals. Adamantyr

Here's a game that we typed in on the TI-99/4a a very long time ago... I'm not sure of the original source. I know we didn't find it in Compute! magazine, because I have an archive disk of all issues and I've never seen it there. I'm pretty sure this one was another "for all platforms", since anyone who knew TI BASIC would know that updating counters are NOT advisable. What impresses me is that the opening title sequence is pretty neat... although the game itself is rather simple. Also on Classic99, the music has this nasty high-pitch in the background... or maybe it was always there and I never heard it on iron? Dunno. Code is below, it should be easily cut-and-paste able into Classic99. Enjoy! Adamantyr

Got a link to it? Adamantyr

Update done, should have levels 12 and 13 playable now. (Also fixed one thing that made level 13 a bit too easy.) Adamantyr

Best way to deal with it is to scale back the features in the game. I had to ditch what I thought was a pretty nifty title sequence to make room for level data and code changes in Aperture. And to be honest, I got pretty lucky I could squeeze my desired level count (16) into the game... I was ready to have to stick with 10 or 12 levels if need be. AI is really hard to write, in ANY form of BASIC. Most AI relies upon vast amounts of stored data to make weighted decisions, and a lot of calculations. Heck, I started to write out my design for a turn-based strategy game... but even at a glance, I suspect it's way too much for TI BASIC to do. Adamantyr

Argh... exactly what I did NOT WANT to happen... One code bug... it doesn't consider electric lines for the platforms as traversable when falling. This breaks Level 12. And Level 13 is missing a corridor necessary to finish it. Now I have to revise two program versions and redo the level code for the disk version. I'll update the zip on the submission thread tonight with the fixes. Adamantyr

Okay, so mine's done... how's everyone else doing? The top 3 doesn't mean much if there was only three entries! Adamantyr

Okay, I'm done! Unless someone shows that a certain level is impossible, anyway... I've attached the final version to the Basic Contest entry thread. This includes a disk-based version which should work on iron with a disk system, as it loads the levels off disk instead. Adamantyr

(Programmer's name) - Adam Haase (Name of entry) - Aperture (attachment) - APERTURE.zip Update: Fixed level 13 issues, can now fall through platform tracks, AND updated ZIP file so it should have the correct entries

Thanks. Nice audio, by the way. Don't hear the game, but hear plenty of personal background. Adamantyr

That's interesting... the L2 map just goes north to south. You must have walked out of boundary somehow, since it keeps you locked in most of the time. Legends is definitely a "slog", and I found out recently it's really just a poor-man clone of Phantasie I and II. That being said, the lack of many CRPG's on the TI makes it better than nothing. Adamantyr

Legends has a lot of grinding. And yeah, 1st level blows. First thing, be sure to make new characters at the guild. Don't use the stock party, they are laughably weak. Make sure they have high stats, you can re-roll over and over until you get the right ones. Second, watch what kind of terrain you're on. The plains (three dots in an arc) should have things like flies and skeletons, relatively easy to defeat. You don't need to move around, you can just stand still and let encounters come to you. Forests have nasty enemies, but they're also more lucrative. I think the mystical bears and the giant cats offer the best XP/gold return. Third, the level system when you leave Wizard's Rock will increase monster HP, but ALSO increases XP and gold by the same factor level. This let you level up much faster, but it's a "skip out, fight, go back into Wizard's Rock". You can get a quest item later that lets you heal and resurrect the whole party without having to re-enter town, which helps. Finally, stealth potions are a MUST if you need to travel. The first dungeon will contain some nice weapon and armor upgrades that you should go for. Use stealth potions to get there without too many fights. Adamantyr

Ah, good point. Yeah, you have to do a MOV *R10,R11 and then B *R11. I first saw this used by Bruce Harrison in his Art of Assembly articles. The point of using a stack to store return addresses is it allows you to call BL in a nested situation. Sometimes this is a good thing to have. I've found a nested system useful for building complex code designs that reuse a lot of functions, like the file loader for my CRPG. If the program is sluggish at the wrong place, you optimize for speed there by unrolling loops, removing branches and jumps, etc. Apply the cycle increases to where it matters. Adamantyr

Latest version: I've fixed the broken levels and some control issues, and visually inspected all levels to make sure all major errors are accounted for. Loading off disk is a good idea to make it disk-friendly. However, writing a level editor does not appeal... when I submit the entry on the contest list, I'll provide an in-depth overview of the code here. The level encoding system is NOT easy to write an editor for. Adamantyr

The END directive has to be at the absolute end of the program. It tells the compiler to cease at that line. That is why it threw an undefined symbol, it never reached the CLS section at all. Yep, only one BL at a time. It will overwrite the address in R11 each time. You can build a stack address to have multiple levels if you want, like this: RSTACK BSS 32 . . . START LI R10,RSTACK . . . BL @HERE . . . HERE MOV R11,*R10+ * Code follows B @SUBRET . . . SUBRET DECT R10 B *R10 Adamantyr

Quick heads up... Level 12 is currently unsolvable... I forgot to include a small passageway that's needed. I also need to take a quick look at cube moving. There's at least one state that can move it into a square and obliterate what's there. It's not a show-stopper, but I'd like to get that one fixed. Adamantyr

So who's got the furthest so far? Adamantyr

You can jump up from boxes another space. Could prove handy later. Adamantyr

Fixed the cube drop loop. Fortunately it's not a huge hit to do so; I just check if the portal direction is up. If so, it doesn't check gravity for the cube. That's the best I can do in BASIC. So has anyone actually gotten past Test Chamber 5? I'm not hearing any feedback at all on that. Adamantyr

Out the cube? What does that mean? Can you provide a screenshot? Or do you mean, you push a cube into a portal where it falls into a portal, then comes back up and falls down again? Adamantyr