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EricBall

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  1. EricBall
    I'll also update the Leprechaun Level Editor in a minute.
     
    Updates:
    1. enemies on ropes will fall if you pass under them
    2. enemies get off ladders before they get to the top
    3. simple enemy-enemy collision detection to keep them from getting stuck together (sometimes they pass through each other, sometimes they bounce, but they shouldn't stay in lockstep)
    4. code tweaks and a fix so the player doesn't always face left when stopped
     
    I haven't put in the drop-off detection yet. From a code perspective it's an extension of the ladder enhancement, but I'm not sure how it will impact gameplay. I'm concerned it might lead to the enemies getting stuck more easily when the player is higher than them. Even now there are a lot of cases the enemy AI doesn't effectively chase the player. (It's easy enough to put in a kind of "left-wall-follow" logic, the trick is knowing when to stop!)
     
    Hmm.... I wonder if hunting until the enemy is either in the same column or row would work (and going in the right direction...)
     
    No walking on heads yet. That impacts a different chunk of code. I've learned to keep the deltas small.
  2. EricBall

    Leprechaun WIP

    By EricBall,

    Reset now works. This now resets the level (except for the level timer) back to the initial state.
     
    TODOs
    1. Make level timer difficulty (speed) dependent. i.e. At higher difficulties the timer will count down more slowly.
    2. Handle out of time & end of level (all gold picked up) states
    3. Start on the end-of-level scoring screen.
    4. Start on level loader
     
    I'll update the editor as soon as I get home and find my password.
  3. EricBall
    This past weekend I reinstalled my primary PC from scratch - both to clean up the cruft and dump the Win98 partitition that I never used. Of course one of the first orders of business was to make a complete backup to my external 320GB hard drive. (Highly recommended - big drives are relatively cheap and easy to use in an external USB case. And, if you don't leave it except when you're using it, it should last for years.)
     
    But while I was at it, I decided to chuck some of the old CD & DVD backups I had on the drive too. Then I can spend some time sorting through, eliminating duplicates, and organizing. Then make a backup of the most important stuff to DVD in case the external drive fails, or I accidentally kill it.
     
    Anyway, I discovered the backups I'd made circa 1999-2002 were created using a dedicated backup program which used a proprietary format. No problem, I thought, I have the install CD and license key. I'll just reinstall, restore, then I can put the CDRWs in the re-use pile. First problem - the [email protected]#[email protected] program wouldn't install on Windows XP! 95, 98 or NT4 only! (Of course, I discovered this after I vaporized my Win98 partition, figures.) Compatibility mode wasn't much better, it installed but didn't recognize the CD drives.
     
    Fortunately, I've got New England pack-rat blood in my background, so I've got a few old computers laying around, including a couple of working ThinkPads with fresh Win98 installs. Well, the backup program didn't like the first one I tried, and the uninstall trashed something so I'm probably going to have to rebuild it. I had better success with the second one (without the mWave sound+modem DSP) but it still wouldn't recognize the CD. Then it hit me - the #$^&@#( thing wants a CD burner even to restore! Again, my pack-rat tendencies pay off and I haul my external parallel-port burner out of storage. That does the trick, and I'm off to the races seeing if there's anything worth restoring.
     
    I've since discovered that one of the CDs is unreadable. I had the same problem when I made a CD of all kinds of stuff I had laying around on floppies (both 3.5 and 5.25) and DC2120 tape. There were a few disks which were unreadable (and the one with a pirate copy of Orcad which I'd password protected and now couldn't recall what obvious password I would have used).
     
    The morals of the story:
    1. Your backups are only as good as your last restore.
    2. Avoid proprietary media (i.e tape) and formats like the plague. I'm sure WinXP would still read 5.25 360K FAT12 floppies (given the hardware), but once you drop off the upgrade treadmill it's surprising how quickly that proprietary media/format becomes unreadable.
    3. Keep your backup media up to date. My external drive should be good as long as USB2 is common. But Macsters with Firewire drives might want to think about upgrading.
  4. EricBall

    GCN - Mario Golf

    By EricBall,

    My five-year-old son picked this one out from the local video store ($5/7 days each or three for $10), I think mostly based on Mario (and Chomp) being on the cover.
     
    I have mixed feelings about this title. When I first read through the manual, I realized that MG is more of a golf simulation with Nintendo characters than a Mario Cart or Mario Party style golf game. I was really worried that my son (and wife) would have real difficulty playing with the complicated control scheme. Fortunately, I discovered that the Automatic mode is reasonably easy to use (press A to start the swing, press A again to complete the swing) and the auto-aim works well enough (with some notable exceptions). I never tried to use the Manual mode, although I often adjusted my aim point and sometimes the club.
     
    However, putting is, IMHO, much harder than it should be. It's far more difficult to make short putts than it needs to be; even after I realized you could hit A when the power meter returns from maximum. I think there should be an option so once you get inside a certain distance the putt is automatically successfull. You also need to manually adjust for slope and wet greens (rain). Again, it would be nice if there was an option to make this easier / more automatic.
     
    But, I will say that the three of us had fun playing a couple of rounds of Skins. Which brings up one big plus - it's possible to play all four players with a any number of controllers, even only one (although if a player has their own controller they can taunt the other players when it's not their turn). Skins play is great because there's no stroke carryover between holes, so if you have a bad hole you're still in the game. Ties also tend to even out abilities.
     
    Minor gripe - music. After playing a game or two I had to turn it off. It's far too repetitive, with the same short song played throughout the entire course. The voice (yes, actual English speech) is also repetitive ("Nice Shot", "Nice On"...) but I didn't find it annoying (unlike BP in NASCAR64).
     
    Major gripe - Tournament play. First, in order to unlock courses (including the fantasy ones with Chomp in the bunkers, which really should have been open to start with) you have to play and win each new 18 hole course. For some reason Tournament is only open for solo play (Why not for any number of players? And, thinking of it, why stop at 4 players for any of the modes since you can share controllers?), and you are facing a large number of players (many not selectable for normal play, unlockable maybe?) whom you never see play. And in order to win you have to be under par over the course. Take an extra stroke getting to the green, or three-putt and you drop down the leaderboard. Mario Party had a better system - simply playing a complete game on the easier boards unlocked the next level of difficulty, with the top board only being unlocked once you had played all the others.
     
    I should also mention that the courses get difficult fairly quickly - like the DK Jungle course where an over or under hit gets you an OB penalty as the ball falls out of the trees, or the Desert course where the small patches of fairway are surrounded by sand, rock, OB and tall cliffs blocking the direct path.
     
    Oh, and although it's a golf simulation at heart, I question whether 1W should be used on the fairway, or the rough.
     
    Definitely a try before you buy title. I can't see buying it, and probably won't rent it again; although my son might.
  5. EricBall
    This was one of the CGN launch titles, and I'm agreeing with some of the comments I recall reading at that time.
     
    My biggest complaint is the linearity of the game. As opposed to SM64 where you had the opportunity to open multiple worlds very quickly, with very few roadblocks other than the Bowser battles, LM plods along - forcing you to visit rooms in a preset order (often requiring you to traverse the same hallways and stairways over and over). An in spite of this, I occasionally found I didn't know where I was supposed to go next. The built-in map is neat, but it really needs to highlight rooms which are open but you haven't visited yet.
     
    The flashlight + vaccuum mechanic works well, for the most part. There were a couple of times I wished I had more control over Luigi's movements once he "hooks" a ghost, rather than being randomly dragged around the room and into dangers. It's also annoying that you can't "reel in" Boos and prevent them from escaping the room. I also found it wasn't always obvious what needed to be done to reveal the hearts of the portrait/boss ghosts (or how to defeat them). Of course, one major advantage of playing these games years after they first arrived is the availability of online guides.
     
    I'm not quite done the game yet, but I can see that it will be a short game. Not much replay value either. Sure I could go back and try to pick up more gold, cash & jewels, but that's not much fun. It's not like going back in SM64 and seeing if you can get all of the stars. There may be some ghosts in LM which can be skipped, but you don't know which are only going to give coins until after you've defeated them.
     
    I'd recommend Luigi's Mansion for a 7-day rental.
  6. EricBall
    My current challenge is rewriting the movement routine to use fractional positioning for both the player and enemies. (Well, the enemies already used fractional positioning, but now I'm giving them two speeds.) There are actually four different speeds:
    falling speed - 20 pixels per second
    fast player - 13.3 pixels per second
    slow player / fast enemy - 10 pixels per second
    slow enemy - 8 pixels per second
     
    Weird numbers, but those are the integer movements which match up with the round-robin movement logic which does each enemy & player every 1/10th of a second.
     
    Of course, these values don't translate into an even number of 256th pixels per frame so I'm using my super-duper fractional adder which handles the remainders: (NTSC falling)

    7$ CMP #FALLING BNE 8$ LDA YFPOS,X CMP #170 ADC #85 STA YFPOS,X BVC 8$ DEC YPOS,X BVS 8$
    Unfortunately, although I can make it work for 5 of the 8 possibilities (NTSC/PAL), 3 of them aren't 100% reversible. This is important because the player can change direction in mid-stride (the enemies don't), so if the calculations aren't symetrical in both directions, then the player could manage to get off-grid and all kinds of weird things would happen. (Because most of the movement logic is only done when the player/enemy is on grid.)
     
    Fortunately, one of the 3 possibilities is slow NTSC enemy so I can ignore it. Unfortunately, that still leaves two which I need to figure out how to fix. Right now I'm trying things out in a spreadsheet to see if I can come up with some exception logic to make one direction look like the other.
     
    One good thing with all of this is it will make player & enemy movement even smoother since everyone's position is updated every frame (even if it's just fractionally).
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