The Codex

Yah, I wanna play man!

Hey, I'm like a DJ - I love requests, as long as it's the kind of stuff I want to play. Yep, that's easy enough to do with a pop-up dialog ("swap character ___ with ___"). Let me get a little clarification on how exactly it should act: 1) Should it swap characters, so that all character A instances become B, and all B become A? Or do you want just unidirectional swapping, wherein all A become B but existing B stay put? (Of course, I can implement both options, but I want to see what makes more sense for general use.) 2) Should the character patterns swap as well? I'm guessing that's a yes. Is that the character mode which acts a bit like bitmap mode, where you can color each 8-byte line separately? If so I may not support it right away, but could look into leveraging some of the stuff from Tadataka to implement it later. It would require a different file format to support this though, as colorsets are done in a very XB-like way in the datafiles currently. Sure, I'm game to allow any kind of import and export. All I need is a sample file and a short explanation of how it stores data and I'm happy to do the filter for it. I still want to implement DSK saves and ColecoVision data formats as well. I can do that as well. In fact, I'll probably release the source for Magellan. There's no reason to keep that secret, and if folks want to learn from it or improve it, that's cool with me too. I'll likely release that the same time I put out the proper manual.

Woo, okay, been putting it off too long, so here it is. The first official version of Magellan can be had from my site here: Magellan The URL will stay the same for subsequent releases, so you'll know that whenever you click it you're getting the latest. No doubt there will still be feature and bug changes, and I still need to add a proper manual with screenshots. But this baby has all the features in place, including the ability to copy and paste between maps, and it loads the default TI character set for you on startup. Oh, and as for your question Bones, that's certainly possible. Can you explain the format a little more? Once I understand it, encoding it should be pretty straightforward. I'll be offline for the next day or two, so if you have any questions or comments about this release, I'll follow up on them upon my return. Thanks to everyone for shaping this release along the way! Hope it continues to remain useful for you!

Great work man, I'll give this a play over the weekend! And I can ping the artist about using his work, at least in an electronic document form at minimum. Never hurts to ask, a lot of web folks are happy to share.

For viewport rendering as in Beryl I always go for the easy-out. I maintain two variables - OffsetX and OffsetY - which are the upper left corner of the where the visible map chunk begins. Every time the player moves I update the offsets with this rule: OffsetX = PlayerX - (ViewportWidth / 2) OffsetY = PlayerY - (ViewportHeight / 2) IF (OffsetX < 0) THEN OffsetX = 0 IF (OffsetY < 0) THEN OffsetY = 0 IF (OffsetX > (MapWidth - ViewportWidth)) THEN OffsetX = (MapWidth - ViewportWidth) IF (OffsetX > (MapHeight - ViewportHeight)) THEN OffsetX = (MapHeight - ViewportHeight) Then I just draw the map chunk in the viewport using my offsets as the start points: FOR Y = 0 TO ViewportHeight FOR X = 0 TO ViewportWidth DRAW MAP[OffsetY + Y][OffsetX + X] AT VIEWPORT[Y][X] NEXT X NEXT Y Obviously this is pseudocode, but you get the idea.

I thought about that too, and yeah, you could definitely make the parallel. Darkhounds essentially look like a skinned dog giving off smoke, so your puppy is a good match for that. I say go for it, since you wanted to use the darkhounds anyway, and the magma world is a perfect setting for them.

ToD doesn't use sprites for anything except missile animations and the targeting cursor I believe, so you could certainly get away with using character graphics for just about everything. Again, the main issue is how much RAM you can snatch for graphical allocation. Does anyone know the practical maximum in this regard? Is it around 2K, or more?

Thanks folks! I'd love for that to be an actual manual cover, though I'd need to get permission to reuse the art from the artist first. Glad you all like it!

Ah, I get ya, combining sprites and characters. Sorta like Tursi did with his zombie game. Clever! Good way to get around the sprite and color limitations of the hardware.

I like the look of those extra commands. This is a new one on me too, and it does sound like a step up from XB. Rarity of carts would be an issue, though if Tursi wants to include a memory image of it in Classic99 I expect that would speed adoption amongst developers.

Nice! For big evil black dogs I've always been partial to the folklore name Barguest. But given there are lots of graves and religious icons around, it might be even better suited to a Church Grim (same link). I like the sound of that especially for this beastie, and you could combine it into one word (Churchgrim). Love the idea of the saplings as well. Feels like the quest will be more than just beating the bad guy, it may also be about restoring the world. One thing about the monster sprites, it would be cool if they were different colors that the environment, to make them stand out more. Since sprites are one of the few elements you get free pick of color on, go wild with it man!

Special bonus level, destroy the source of the zombie plague - the Meadow of Mad Cows!

Kinda went over your specifications (this is two sprites each, top and bottom, plus another for the sword), and he looks a bit demonic, but see what you think.

Ha, I actually like that!

Heh heh, yeah, I'm not a big fan of arrays starting at 1 (that part of XB messed me up big time when I moved to other computers), but for the competition it turned out to be handy. My code is no oil painting at the best of times, but I'm afraid my 30-line stuff is about on par with crayon sketches done using only the feet.

Fantastic news Filip, the TI programming renaissance continues! Looking forward to what both you and Matthew are cooking up here. With tools like these it will be fun getting back into assembly again.

How awesome is that? Super cool Tursi, I'm looking forward to giving this a spin tonight! Let me know if I can clear up any of my superdense code, and can't wait to see the zombie-blasting integrated in!

Looking good man, I like the new additions!

Hope you like them Filip! Most of the binary spec is based on your draft document, so let me know if there are any further changes you'd recommend to what I've done with it.

Ah, sorry I missed the posts here, was only checking PMs. I'd let it go for $50, almost half of which is shipping because the glossy paper be heavy. Let me know if you're interested at that price. If no one is then I will entertain offers for chunks of the set. Thanks!

Some good ideas there Matthew! I've incorporated two of them (right-mouse erase and improved hex character display) into this. I'm of two minds about the text cursor, as half of me thinks it would be nice to position it with the mouse at any time, while the other half thinks it would get messy if the mouse moved while you were typing stuff in. I'll let folks weigh in on what they prefer and do it that way. I've also added the clone tool (for copying and pasting areas of a map to itself) and the binary format export (see included magellan_binary.txt file for the schema of this format). In the meantime, the newest and hopefully last beta of Magellan is posted on the first post. Apart from bug fixes or last minute brilliant additions, the next release will be the official Magellan 1.0 version.

No problem man, every programmer has their own terminology for these things. In games like this with multiple Worlds containing multiple Maps (or Levels, etc), I often create a Universe object at the top which does the really high-level stuff, like determine the order of Worlds and how they connect. But for now the two-tier approach should suit your game fine.

I don't know if this helps, but perhaps you can think of your data in two discrete chunks - Maps and Worlds. Each Map is a specific screen within a World, whereas a World represents a whole level in your game. Each World contains the assets that are consistent across all Maps in that World (character graphics, colorset assignments, monsters, music), and each Map contains only the data to render that one screen (plus possibly any "exit" information, depending on how you are handling moving between maps). So any time you change Worlds you get a longish wait while all the assets are loaded in, but moving between Maps is a shortish wait since you only load the minimum changes. In your case, since you have a 28x18 visible map, that's 504 bytes of data to load (each byte being a character at one of the map positions), plus anything else map specific like monster and item locations. Even with all that stuff a particular Map should be no more than 1K of data to load for each one, less if you do some compression tricks.

Normally I would but mad busy at work. Sorry mate, hope some others can make it.