Mord
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Posts posted by Mord
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The gamer has spoken. Digital is in. No one wants the hassle of cartridges or other physical media anymore.
It's a future every single gamer wants and embraces wholeheartedly. Demands even I dare say. Because they CONTINUE TO PURCHASE un-ownable digital games in record numbers. Utterly and completely impossible to argue with 44 billion in yearly sales. I won't even try..
I'd recommend you do try. 44 billion may sound like a lot, but that's thanks to dlc, microtransactions, loot boxes, online subscriptions, in addition to actual game sales being lumped together.
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Entire inventory of Gamestop chain? I'LL GIVE A $12
Well that beats my buck fifty.
I'm surprised though. I thought they sold out long ago.
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What you could also do if you want a more even distribution and have the bytes to spare would be to use a lookup table of pre-randomised numbers.
I don't have many random elements in my dungeon crawler but I'm considering using a 256 byte table of all values from 0 to 255 in an order generated using random.org. That way by reading from the table in sequence and letting it loop I can tweak the appearance of the randomness to remove any runs of high or low numbers that might be frustrating to the player.
I would still need to pick an arbitrary starting point to avoid having the same series of events when the game starts.
Best thing to do for that is to have a random number generated (And discarded) every frame while sitting at the title screen. That way just idling will ensure a different potential starting number. Could spice it up so that every time a key is pressed on the controller, another random number is generated, etc.
What's more, if you support the save key for instance, when a game is started, you can save the current random number to it so when the next time you start up the console it'll be able to start on that number instead of the same value originally stored in the rom/etc. (But that's only if you're already using the save key/atarivox. Would be a waste to use it just for that.
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Also look at the Star Wars Games. Its all about monthly binding of the customers which make the profit and there are now these "loot boxes" where the Gaming companies suck the money from their Gamers.It is a very intelligent way to get a lot of money for things that the Gamers didnt even wanted to buy but in hope to get a special item they spend more money = more income for the companies.
You misspelled predatory.
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This also means that most enemies will just be palette swaps
This is the 7800. A mid-80's machine. Palette swaps should be perfectly fine for anyone's realistic expectation, so long as the enemies are "different" otherwise. Different stats, maybe behaviors/skills if that kinda thing is in the game. (ie: don't worry about it that much.)
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I've hit a bit of a stumbling block, and I'm trying to come up with a good way to resolve it.
The project I'm working on requires that I generate 28 random numbers that are not only unique but also have to fall with a range of 0-223. (Actually, now that I think of it, I might need to reduce it to 0 to 208, but still...the logic would be the same.)
I've tried several different things. First off, I've found a pretty sane way to seed the random number generator so that it's not the same exact numbers every time.
1) I was able to use nested for/next loops to make sure that the numbers are unique.
2) I was able to use nested for/next loops to make sure that the numbers are less than the high end of the range.
Problem is...I can't figure out how to do (1) and (2).
Any 7800basic programmers fallen into the same situation?? How did you solve it??
I'd have to actually try to use for loops I think. I use to have horrible luck with getting them to work in the earlier days (likely due to my own stupidity!) and at some point I ended up just writing my own conditional loops that pretended to be a for loop.
Anyway, I doubt I'd use a for loop in what you're talking about.
Instead I'd probably:
-1. Define an array for holding the 28 values you want, so they're next to each other.
0. Define and set an index to 0.
1. generate a number randomly.
2. Do a test comparison. If it's over 208, do some calculations to adjust it and test again. (Even subtracting the amount over 208 would at least make sure it's under 208)
3. Compare that value to all the values you've already placed in your array to make sure it's unique. If not, go back to 1.
4. If it's a unique value from 0-208, place it in the first unused slot of the array. (perhaps fill the array with 255's to indicate unused slots.)
5. Test the loop to see if all values are filled. If so the loop is done.
If you're concerned about spending too much time in one frame setting up these values, you can add an extra loop terminating check to make sure it won't go over a certain number runs through the loop without terminating. However if you do that you'll need to make sure the program knows it'll need to go back into this loop on the next frame to continue. (perhaps have it's own little gameloop that doesn't technically end but will handle the clearscreen/drawscreen stuff?)
It's important to note however that my coding style makes others screen in terror.
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Fine vertical scrolling is in the works. I'll be implenting it in the traditional way, as Mord did. I just need to overhaul the interrupt routines to support this, without breaking anything the process.
Allowing character maps that can plot at any Y means that maria needs to do twice as much character dma. This would mean your 160a mode screen would only be able to display 1 or 2 sprites in a zone. Other, more dma intensive modes wouldn't work at all. Doesn't seem worth the effort.
Oh, just thought of something. When the vertical scrolling goes live, or even before
, would it be possible to adjust plotmapfile so it can display a portion of a larger map the same way plotmap does? Been thinking of trying to write an assembly program to do that myself but I'm having a hard time figuring out how the mapfile is stored in the rom. -
If you could put a CPU in a 7800 cartridge that runs the game, while the 6502 handles MARIA and other I/O, then the 7800 would definitely be more competitive with the NES.Pretty sure that's one of the reasons why the clock line goes out to the cartridge - so a cpu or other chip go on there. Of course, being able to do something, and being able to do something economically are two entirely different beasts.
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According to Sony leadership as reported here and elsewhere:
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/ps4-is-in-final-stage-of-life-cycle-playstation-boss-1855579
Interesting considering the console has been on the market for only 5 years.
I thought with the PS4 Pro the PS4 has a long life ahead of it, another 5 years at least!
I'm sure the PS4 and Pro have at least 5 years of life left in it either way. Even if Sony has an actual release of a PS5 in 3 years time (That might just be the official announcement of the next console for all we know) in all likelihood we'll continue to see new games come out on the PS4 for several years after any PS5 release. The same way the PS2 and PS3 hung on.
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My main concern is that i'm really cheap and will not/refuse to pay for an online monthly subscription service for online gaming. How much functionality does the PS4 have if you don't pay to be a member of PSN Gold or whatever it is? I play one player games or local multiplayer with friends, I really have no interest in online gaming. Even for free on the Wii U I pretty much never use it. Also, the PS4 seems to have taken a step back from the PS3 in multi media capability (Still enjoying my 1st gen PS3 fat.) Does it play 3D blu rays? Can you still stream media from a USB stick? What about always online requirement games? I have my gaming room in my basement and it will be Wifi only. Will that create lag and problems if I am trying to play one player games that are required to be online. Can I take a PS4 game to a friends house to play it, or is that no longer a thing?
I am interested in the PS4 mainly for it's VR capabilities, which I view to be the first real progress in gaming in a long time over just "slightly sharper graphics" each generation. But if the hassles are too big forget it, don't really want to deal with most of the pratfalls of modern gaming (pay for online, updates, dlc, always online, in game purchases, pay to win, etc. etc. etc.). Of the two modern consoles the PS4 seems less cumbersome in this regard than the Xbone and that's why i'm asking. Thanks!
If you're not into online gaming then it should be fine. You do need a plus membership for online multiplayer on the PS4 but I highly doubt that would affect any local multiplayer. (Assuming you can find any games that still do local multiplayer of course.)
Not sure about multimedia stuff for the PS4, as I have a bluray player for bluray/dvd (don't have any 3d blurays since I don't have a tv that supports it, but would like to get one - of course those are getting rare.)
Not sure which games are online only for single player. If such a thing is disclosed properly I'd have never bought it in the first place. Hard for me to verify without actually going ahead and disconnecting the PS4's wires to my router.
I think people recommend getting a Pro unit for using the VR gear, although I don't have the PSVR yet so can't confirm how it plays on a base model. Thinking of getting a Pro at some point anyway which drives the costs of VR up pretty high (new console + vr set)
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Trying to play through several games, although the most recent is Iconoclasts. Was susprised when I bought it on psn this weekend that it's apparently a cross-buy for PS4 and Vita.
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I guess your only protection is (as always) to buy from legitimate sources....and maybe open your games just to make sure.
Because we all know game stores would be above resealing used games.
You can say all those exact same things about a painting or a sculpture.
As at least one museum in France recently discovered.
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320 mode sprites are moved about the sprite the same way as a 160 mode sprite. Consider the pixel pairs in a 320 sprite to be full pixels. So 0-159 moves the sprite around the screen the same as before, with 160+ being drawn off the screen.
Yeah, movement isn't done as 320 pixels although you can fake it if you had two identical sprites, each off by 1 pixel. The player in Graze Suit Alpha is done that way. I use to do it with the enemies as well but it was eating up a lot of sprites.
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This has been brought up before and it was a false rumor. Let's see if this one is real.
Did the previous false rumors give specific dates? Seems legit to me. Given how hard it is to find a physical vita game in stores as it is, especially one that isn't just a shovelware title to begin with, I can see them finally axing it. Although they do explicitly say it's just for physical cards. If anyone happens to still have space on their tiny memory cards, digital releases will still be coming out afterwards. (Although glimpsing amazon, looks like the prices for the tiny memory cards hasn't come down an inch in all these years.)
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The Sony deal was for marketing the game only, not fund the game-- they did not want to give up creative control. So this got them on the stage at E3 which was huge. But the team was too small and underfunded to really deliver on everything in that time period.
In retrospect it was not the best decision. But creative control was really important to Sean at the time.
So they screwed themselves over every which way imaginable then. Great. Doesn't really earn sympathy points though.
Now mind you, I may end up picking up the game myself at some point. Ebgames/Gamestop is currently having it on sale for apparently 14.99 during their current sale. Whether or not I bother with it might end up on whether I actually find a copy on display since apparently based on yesterday at the store I don't care enough about the game to even ask the store clerks if they have any behind the shelf. At 14.99, I'd almost consider it worth the cost. However it's important to note that I've had the chance to buy at that price tag before and left it.
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Are you still having trouble displaying the blue portion of that 320B sprite above? You'll notice that the C1 color has conditions on being displayed in 320B, in that it must be paired with either a C2 or C3 pixel in the same pixel-pair, otherwise it doesn't get displayed. (ie: it'll take the background color for itself.)
I ran into that issue early in Graze Suit Alpha. Note that prosystem will incorrectly show C1 all the time, but Mame and real hardware will display C1 pixels using the rule above.
Also, 320B only uses palettes 0, and 4. Attempts to use palettes 1-3 will default to palette 0, and uses of palette 5-7 will use palette 4. ie: it only looks at the top palette bit in the display lists to determine palette.
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Sony was marketing the game, Early access on steam was out of the question.
Death threats and all?
They probably shouldn't have teamed up with Sony in that case. If they were running out of money as you say then obviously Sony wasn't actually paying them so I'd have to wonder why they had to work with them at all. Either way, their fault for allowing themselves to get in that position if it was the result of some bad contract.
As for the death threats, obviously not. I highly doubt even a fraction of the majority pissed off with the game were threatening bodily harm to the developers though.
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Oh yeah. I have never, in all my years of gaming, been so impressed by a company patching features into a game. And there's another big one inbound. The game now vs. when it launched is so much more complex and interesting it's almost a whole different game.
Base building, balancing, completely re-written planetary algorithms, crashed ships, quests, freighters (miles long) you can buy and trade, way better dogfighting and huge battles, portals, more ships, all kinds of stuff.
This was a case of the publisher rushing the little developer to release a year before they were ready. Unlike most studios, they said 'no we are not giving up', and they didn't. Major respect for that.
Well, given that their only recourse would have been the unemployment line otherwise it's not surprising they didn't give up after selling so many copies on the hype train they themselves created. All that stuff you list is basically the stuff they were promising either way, so great the game is finally starting to show some promise. (Seriously, do you think they would have had any future in video games if they simply dropped No Man's Sky after the horrible response it got at launch?)
But that wasn't my actual question - I'd have hoped that that after all those major patches they'd have included some of that.
My question was did they add anything about the center of the galaxy that was "Amazing" rather than that lame pull-out they threw in there after telling everyone there would be something awesome.
In other words, does anything else happen now when you get to the center of a galaxy or does it still just pull you out and throw you into a new one to start the whole grind over again.
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Their problem was Sean would do these interviews and people would ask about features and Sean would give a lot of speculative answers like "yeah we might see that" or "that could happen". He was thinking like a developer with all these ideas of what he could do with this platform they created.
Again, sorry that's not how it went as well. He wasn't going "yeah we might see that" or "that could happen" in the speculative sense - certainly not all the time. I saw him giving definitive answers of "yes.". On one response to being able to grief other players he did say "yes that could happen." but followed up with "But it would be so unlikely to even meet another player due to the size of the galaxy". Then we see gameplay footage of things being shown off that were not in the game. Sky monsters, planetary portals, massive armada battles, etc.
Running out of money is not a reason to release a game these days when there are so many options available to secure additional funding, or simply releasing it into "early access" on steam for instance so you can start collecting that money without trying to pretend "ok we got the game ready!" Anyone buying it in an early access model know full well they're not getting the final product and can expect game freezing bugs (which were a BIG problem on the PS4's disc release until several patches were put out.).
So sorry, no, I still believe they're fully deserving of the backlash.
BTW, since I've yet to actually pick up the game on the PS4 over how shoddy it was released (And at this point have completely lost interest in ever getting it unless I find a used copy for 10 bucks or less - I've already seen it for 15 bucks used and felt it wasn't worth picking up.) could those who have played it tell me something?
Have they ever actually added "something amazing" at the center of the galaxy like promised, or does it still just do the sudden pullout/rewind once you get there? And I'm serious that they outright said there would be "Something amazing" once players get there in interviews. And in the interview I'm looking at he wasn't prompted by the interviewer with "Is there something amazing at the center of the galaxy when players get there?" type of question, but he confirmed that "we've already said that there would be something amazing at the center" rather than a fade to black like someone was joking would happen.
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Dont listen to the negative reviews for the PlayStation/PC release. Its a niche game that was hyped up for the masses. It got a lot of hate it didnt deserve.
Sorry, I'll disagree with you on that. If the devs themselves weren't the ones creating the hype I could understand your point of view. The devs did this to themselves and deserve the response they got at launch. If the game's finally got the content that was promised, fine, give it a chance if you feel it's still worth the asking price. But when devs screw up as badly as they did you're not doing them or actual gamers a favor by trying to smooth things over because then the dev will think it's ok to ship with less than a beta release and it'll become the norm not just for that dev but every other dev that looks at the situation and realizes they can do it too. (You know, like how every bad practice has proliferated in the gaming industry like loot boxes.)
To be clear, if the devs didn't explicitly tell players what to expect in the game at launch I would be right there with you defending them from the backlash. But a lot of us have seen the actual interviews with the devs where they kept saying "yes yes yes yes yes" to what you'll be able to do in the game.
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As for the article, that was a developer telling people essentially that they want single player games to die, mentioning EA in their argument for why they're not the only ones that think that way. If those developers had their way I'm sure single players would have died right on schedule simply because there wouldn't be any new single player games being made. But at that point they would have realized they're going broke simply because all the remaining players that didn't quit modern gaming to play their single player backlogs were off playing some other game they didn't make all because it was slightly flashier than their own turd.
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Except for "Ataribox." They should listen to the haters, because the fans are unlikely to show up with $200 when the time comes.
To be fair, in many cases that's because they're not telling anyone, fans or not, WHAT the Ataribox actually is.
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Latin can be a treasure trove of names for potions, spells, and monsters. It's a dead language that few still speak, very easy to translate generic sounding words and simple phrases into awesome royalty free names.
No kidding. You can imagine a person's let down when they realize the Brassica Volumine their character used to recover health was a cabbage roll.
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Eh... the memory card thing definitely didn't help, but I haven't even come close to maxing out my 16GB card in my Vita, and I doubt I will ever even halfway fill up the 64GB card in my Switch. Downloaded games on proprietary consoles don't interest me, because they're basically rentals that can be taken away at any time. (Look at what Nintendo is doing to WiiWare games on the Wii U - they've already stated that they will take away the ability to re-download them "at some point".) The only games I care about are physical games. That goes for Switch as well as PS Vita.
I'd argue that the cost of having to re-buy all the games you filled up your memory card with "at some point" probably far outweighs the cost of any memory card itself.
And in this case, it probably means you're not getting all that much out of your Vita anyway given that the vast majority of titles on the system are digital only. I'm resistant to getting digital only myself on these systems, but I'll buy up things on sale so long as it's pretty cheap and I still have room to comfortably load it on the system. When you get into a flash sale and you're able to pick up a bunch of older titles you either liked on the PS1, or PSP and would like to pick it up again for (in some cases literally) a dollar, I'm down with that. I do try to get physical copies where possible still, although I do have a few games on the Vita that I own both digitally and physically. The physical copy so I know I'll have it around if I ever need to get a new Vita after Sony axes off total support for it, but the digital copy I picked up for cheap in a flash sale for convenience.
Anyone getting into digital downloads on locked down consoles should at least understand that eventually you're not going to be able to redownload the things anymore eventually. (And I'm sure there are some people still today that believe that will never happen on some consoles.) I know I do, and that's why I buy things at prices that reflect that reality. And incidentally that's why I'm buying extremely little on the PS4 digitally this generation - as even with flash sales, the prices are WAY above anything I'd be tempted to consider.
Also, when it comes to the Vita in particular, there's not going to be any "rebuying all these games" to worry about since they just aren't available on physical media in many cases.
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Would You Like a Return to a Type of Cartridge?
in Modern Console Discussion
Posted
Looking at the state of AAA games these days, I'd say we're already there. Buy a pretty game that hopefully doesn't crash, spend shitloads of money on it with DLC/microtransactions/etc then dump it when the next pretty bobble comes along that does mostly the same thing. Rinse/Repeat.
Still, it's not like you HAVE to accept a download-only game era just because the industry's stopped innovating in any meaningful way. For me, when we get to that truly download-only era I'll just not be picking up any new console. Will I still game on steam? Probably, but good luck on the publishers getting more than 20 bucks out of me on there. Luckily I got a lot of games on cart to go back and play (So in a small sense perhaps I'm hoping for this era to start.
) although to be honest this year my gaming has been maybe 80% playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms 3 on the genesis. I think I'll get along just fine ignoring modern gaming eventually.