Mord

So... any news?

Yeah, they've almost lost sales from me in the past over this but more importantly they most likely ARE losing sales from me today. I gave up bothering to ask them if they have niche title A or B in. Half of the time the answer would be no, and most of the other times it'd be like a gutted copy which I don't want. It's been years since I've even bothered bringing a gutted copy up to the counter and ask if they have any sealed copies left. (Something that has happened in the past.) Sucks to be them I guess. Perhaps they shouldn't mutilate the merch.

With esports as big as it is (For what it's worth. Never did care for the term.) getting involved in that directly with their own tournaments, etc, is something that would probably make a lot of sense. I'm sure they'd be able to add this kind of thing to their business model right now. They could even have special tournaments with new games being released meaning nobody would be an expert either way but it'd be potentially great exposure and drive some sales.

No, Ian works at Luna Games, but Pat doesn't. That's why it's always Ian's "tales from the video game store" segments. As for Gamestop going the publisher type route, that would at least save them in name but there's no way they'd be able to keep all the stores open that way. They should have also dabbled in getting their own dev groups working under them so they'd be creating new games in addition to porting/etc games already made in other markets. I doubt their meager finances would enable them to attempt that now or any time soon though.

I see that video cuts off the PS2 portion at the end.

Certainly the lack of software was an issue, plus their massive push to be an all-in-one-entertainment-device. (You know, the thing Sony tried to make the PS3 at the start of that generation but finally abandoned and concentrated on games.) But the slow start and sharing a lot of their library with the PC market pretty much caused the shortage of games to intensify. With the PS4 having double the install base developers were much more likely to develop on the PS4 if they had to choose just one platform. The PS4 also gets a lot of titles from Japan which avoids Microsoft like the plague so the titles end up being exclusive there too. As time drags on the shortage of games is going to continue unless Microsoft tries to pull an Epic Store and outright buy exclusives left right and center. I was late to the 360 for the exact same reason. Never could understand why people were jumping on the platform just because it would be easy to replace the console under the extremely generous return program given it meant you had to keep getting interrupted every so often to get a new console. My own 360 hasn't RRODed, but to be honest I wouldn't expect it to when I've probably played it for perhaps 24 hours since I purchased it... a LONG time ago. It hasn't even been switched on in years although I suppose it's still hooked up technically.

Sounds like the best he'll be able to do is have someone forward his questions for him or do some extensive searches in the forum to see if the question has already been answered. At the very least there's been a lot of odd issues we've already resolved. At the very least they should re-read this thread entirely if needed. They should also keep Random Terrain's 7800Basic page bookmarked as it's excellent for looking stuff up.

Eh, I'm still assuming it didn't do particularly well this generation due to all the BS they tried to pull originally that turned off a lot of gamers that were previously loyal to them as shown by them losing a large number of their preorders for the system that they never did recover from. There's also the elitist attitude of their staff at the time that insulted a lot of people who were complaining about the 24-hr login requirement initially planned by saying "You want an offline console? We got you covered, it's called a 360." The fact that a bulk of the microsoft console library is often a PC port certainly helped people walk away from it however (If they had good PCs at least) - they would miss virtually nothing by boycotting the system. But remember that PS4 preorders and demand surged at the same time, so not everybody walked away from xbones to the PC. Plenty went to the PS4 as well.

Rather hard to decide myself. I'm normally Physical Only but the console makers have seen to it that most physical releases are made of utter crap. Can't really get behind Digital when it's as expensive or at times more expensive than the physical option. (One of the big promises of digital was that it was going to make it cheaper - I guess the companies forgot to mention that it was going to make it cheaper for them and they weren't planning on passing on the savings.) In the end I do tend to buy physical anyway although hearing about a game with massive bugs prior to me picking it up will certainly make me ignore the game entirely. If I buy digital, it's only because of a flash sale where it actually became cheap enough to justify. (under 20 bucks usually.) And I see that happen a LOT less than it use to, much like I predicted it would. Streaming however is something I don't think I'll ever get behind. Even forgetting the likely way and amount they'll try to charge you for it, bandwidth is most certainly a BIG issue that needs to be dealt with before this becomes a viable alternative for the masses.

The only freezing I've noticed myself on the PS4 version occur if you quickly kill enemies and they drop loot right after entering a new area. Usually after the first freeze due to this you won't see it again until you switch areas- and again it's just if you manage to rush in and kill things quickly after entering an area. Only other common glitch occurs when an enemy dies in a ledge and tries to drop a bag. The bag can get stuck in it's animation and sit there. And even if you can touch it, it won't open for you. They seemed to address this issue by auto-opening any bags on the screen if they haven't been picked up after 10 seconds or so. Not an ideal solution given you have to sit and wait, but if it's something you're trying to farm for it's better than nothing I guess. Only glitch I've seen beyond that happened to me one time when I got hit by an enemy and thrown out an exit into a new map. When the new map showed up it seemed to detect me somewhere in the floor - I couldn't see myself although I could hear me walking/running/attacking somewhat. Couldn't leave the screen more even get the screen to scroll anywhere so I was certainly stuck somewhere. I tried using a waystone to teleport back to base - figured that would at least reset my position, etc. But unfortunately when I got back to base I was again stuck under the floor somewhere between the two shops. Ended up having to reload a save. Given that only happened once and the loot issue is a bit benign, I can't say the bugs have been a big issue for me on the PS4. Would have preferred if they finished the game prior to release all the same. "Free DLC after launch" is just codespeak for "We'll finish it later." as far as I'm concerned.

I didn't back the kickstarter but I still got a physical disc for PS4 thanks to ebgames/gamestop having copies available. About 60% map completion at present, had various stupid moments that had me running all over the explored map looking for ways to continue only to come back to a particular place and go "oh... shit.. yeah, that."

I'm told games that are released in one week continue to exist the following week. Perhaps pick it up then when the must-haves are obtained? There's a chance I might pick it up for Switch despite already having completed it on the PS3. I guess it'll depend on the price tag as it isn't a must-buy-again title. I really should try to get back to Ni no Kuni 2 to be honest. Or start it over from scratch since it's been so long I've pretty much forgotten what was going on.

Are you finding that the garbled scores are generally the last things in the code that get plotted? Does it only garble during specific cases, such as during specific difficulty levels/etc? Haven't worked with highscore cart stuff in 7800basic yet so I'm not entirely sure what can be changed with it. I'm assuming it's essentially doing plotchars in the background for everything though which can cause some issues if you have too many on the go.

Not sure if I'll ever get an actual game made out of this, although I'm still picking at it here and there. The purpose of releasing the code is in case it helps anyone else trying to do similar things.

Most people generally feel that way during the Embrace stage.

Ok I've fixed up the code and updated the attachments in the first post. I've left the original zip there for people to see what it was originally like - no harm in it. The new version using a 128k rom structure is in rpg7800-fixed.zip. The bin and a78 files are the updated fixed versions. If someone really wants to see the old versions they're in the zip file. I tested using a7800 this time so shouldn't be any issues! The basis of the corrupted graphics appears to stem from trying to use a bank changing gosub out of a permanent bank. I originally tried to move the stuff that was in the permanent bank at $4000 to the top bank in the fixed version and the corrupted graphics remained. I added a third room going down from the first room to test the vertical scrolling - there were two careless bugs in the vertical scrolling in the original version, so a good thing I did this test! The first was not specifying the width of the extended map in the vertical direction. I didn't bother since I was going to plot the entire width of 20 anyway. That caused it to only display the first line of graphics for the entire scroll. After that was fixed I noticed my setup in the scroll data was reversed. Placed the rooms in the wrong halves of the map for the intended scrolling direction.

Ok I can pretty much confirm it's a bankswitching issue that's causing the graphics corruption. It's something I spoke with Rev about in the earlier incarnation of this test a while back. Looks like the fix I was able to do for prosystem doesn't work on hardware/mame/a7800. I did a quick change over to a more standard rom type - those without 16k rom sitting at $4000 - and it worked as intended. I'll do a bit of cleanup and add an extra room of sample graphics to show the up/down scrolling then post updated roms/zips. I won't have time to post it today but should have it posted early Saturday morning before most people wake up.

Hm. looking at the video the tiles are still corrupting during the actual scroll - they should be showing the new screen moving onto the screen. I'll try looking into it this weekend as well as getting use to using A7800 again.

Hm. Admittedly I haven't tried this on mame either. I find mame/a7800 a bit finicky to use so I don't know if it erroring right now is because of the rom or because I don't know what I'm doing with it. Could someone comfortable with mame try checking it out to make sure it fails and give me the error if it does? This rom does use an extra 16k at $4000, which isn't something I normally use.

Ok since I've been letting yet another side project rot away for too long and I really don't know if/when I'll get back to it, here's another little demo as I fiddle with scrolling. In a nutshell the program uses plotmapfile to display full screens in 160A and the player can move about in 4 directions, going 1 full tile at a time. When you reach the edge of the screen that is connected to a different map, it will scroll that map in black and white to the new screen then flash the color back. There are only two screens in this program. The screen you start in, and the screen to the left of it. Any other screen edges you can reach are "dead" and won't trigger a change. There's a "template" tmx file included that's got the embedded tiles, etc all set up for adding new screens for playing around with. Additionally this demo includes collision detection between the player and the map tiles. Changing around the order of tiles in the tmx files would obviously mess around with the collision code so keep that in mind. Compiling instructions in a command/dos window are listed in the bank0c.bas file. As mentioned in that file feel free to use anything in the code in your own projects. And yes, I suck at drawing hero sprites. rpg7800.zip rpg.bas.a78 rpg.bas.bin rpg7800-fixed.zip

When you're using plotmap, you're plotting things with the indirect method for drawing sprites. That method doesn't have the ability to offset it's graphics off of a zone the same way a direct plotting like with plotsprite does. As a result you'll see the graphics jump a full zone up or down when you inc/dec the starting Y position. This is why you have to play tricks with changing the size of the top and bottom zones to make it look like everything's scrolling smoothly. Normally changing the Display List List isn't possible with 7800Basic although if you know what you're doing and where the display list list is stored in memory, you can use assembly to edit them. I did that in at least one of the rpgtile demos. Not easy to accomplish and it required making some edits to 7800Basic's interrupt - which I didn't do a great job with so wasn't able to get a perfect pixel scroll. Likewise if you plan things properly and know how the display lists are stored you can edit the lists directly to get faster results. For example, when you see the walls moving in Graze Suit Alpha, that's done by me knowing where the sprites for the walls are in the display lists and editing their X-coordinate entries. A lot faster than re-plotting them every time I move them. Assuming I ever get back to the game I'll be able to update the walls with animations in a similar way.

I tend to get distracted easily so I haven't actually completed a full game yet. On the 7800 I've mostly worked on Graze Suit Alpha although I've done a bunch of various demos, most of them involving attempts at scrolling in 7800basic. Use to tinker with the 2600 in assembly long before that but again never actually finished anything.

Probably best to try to avoid actively plotting too much off the screen if it's not needed - you'll just be wasting time that could be used for other things since maria will attempt to plot off the screen in vain if ordered to do so. If you're using plotmap, you can instead plot a portion of that larger map on the screen. That way there's little to no waste in cpu cycles. Plotmapfile is is harder to work with for this since you can't specify a portion of a plotmapfile in the same way. Plotmapfiles are certainly better for static backgrounds.

Currently there's no way to have multi-line if-then-else structures. Most you can do is have the commands that need to be done separated with colons on the same line. sometimes I've done blocks of code intended for an if statement as it's own subroutine and just plugged that in. Not the most efficient but certainly more legible. Other times I've set up the IF statement so that it'll look for a skip condition. So if I wanted a bunch of commands to activate when A < 10, I'd instead write the if statement to be if A >= 10 then goto skiplabel. That way if it doesn't jump ahead to that label, it means the condition I really wanted is true, and I can safely execute a block of code between the if statement and the skiplabel.

When you created your tiled map in Tiled, did you make sure the tile sets used by the map were embedded when you added them? Can't remember if the errors you're getting are the same ones I had originally when trying to work with Tiled.