Kurt_Woloch

It just occured to me this morning that the physical provisions for tilting are still missing in my code. So I've now amended my version of the code to let the bumpers only deflect the ball actively if there's no tilt. I've set the new variable PB_TILT equal to PB_VERVEL+3, and it's supposed to start out at 0 and increase with each nudge (and maybe decrease with time again). The question is, how much should you be able to nudge until Tilt kicks in? How roughly does that work on the real machine? Also, what happens if there's a Tilt? I guess the bumpers lose power, which I've accounted for now in my version of the code, and the flippers cease working, which I suppose Bob will implement. But what happens to the targets if the ball still hits them? Do they deflect the ball in the same way still? Do they go down or do they stay up? And I guess the hole will just spit out the ball again without scoring and sounding, or does that behavior change as well?

Some things that occured to me here... I don't know if they're included in the "to-do" list yet, but... - The arrows are supposed to light up one by one when a "Tunnel" or "Lights" row gets completed and award an extra baby if completed. - Isn't the tunnel working a bit differently than in the arcade? First you have a short section where you move at normal speed, and then you speed up... I think in the arcade it's sped up all the way through. Also, I don't know if you read it in the code I sent, but the upper ball lays a bit high on its rail. Its proper resting position would actually be, I think, 3 or 4 pixels lower, but I couldn't implement it this way because in the code I have, the upper ball is only supposed to be in the upper zones, so putting it lower cuts it off and even distorts some the tunnel and fruit indicators. However, those have now been moved to the bottom, so would there now be a way to allow the upper ball one zone lower so it could get its proper resting position? The "rail" table and some code would, of couse, have to be changed a bit in order to accoount for this...

Here are my times for this past week (November 26th through December 2nd) on modern systems: Sorry, I didn't play any modern games this week, only classic ones. This was further hampered by an Internet outage I'm having at home since Wednesday morning, actually caused by my provider who first delivered a new modem only on the day I would already have required it to access the changed Internet frequencies, then I didn't know about it until the evening before, and there I didn't look into my mails, so I couldn't tell them in time they could leave it on the doorstep and, thus, had to wait until Thursday to fetch it from a parcel shop, only to find that it didn't work. I finally called them and after at least 15 minutes in the queue got told that a technician will come next Wednesday to fix the problem... seems like the new frequencies are the ones which previously contained the analog cable TV channels, but those were filtered out by a filter since I only subscribed for Internet, and now that filter is blocking the new Internet frequencies. Sadly they didn't find out about this before they switched frequencies... so I'm typing this on my laptop which does have Internet via a WLAN hot spot created by my phone, but I only have a 2 GB / month plan there, so I have to be very cautious about not using up too much data at the moment.

Here are my times for this past week (November 26th through December 2nd) on classic systems: Atari 2600: Chaotic Grill (WIP) - 11 min. Atari 7800: Baby Pac-Man (WIP) - 6 min. I didn't spend much time playing games this week. I played a bit of Baby Pac-Man, where I only consider the maze part as being really playable while I'm working on the pinball part (and Bob is, as well). Then I tried the new update of Chaotic Grill which features notably improved enemy movement logic, but it's still got its flaws. The enemies get stuck if all ways they could go lead away from the player, which should not happen. I left some feedback in the according thread, also with some ideas how a proper movement logic could work. We'll see what happens next... anyway, since Baby Pac-Man already has two enemy AI's to choose from, I wondered what would happen if you implemented the BurgerTime AI as a 3rd choice in that game.

Hmmm... changing everything around? Well, if you think it's more efficient, you can... I've thought about how I would roughly code the enemy movement decision code... I would do the following at each grid point (which doesn't have to be an intersection)... I'd probably use 4 bytes for the possible directions and score the directions by the different priorities, which are: 1. Don't go where you can't go (priority value 8 ) 2. Don't turn around (priority value 4) 3. Follow the player (priority value 2) 4. Take a turn if possible (priority value 1) To do this, I would probably start with a table weighting each available direction for each incoming direction. Continuing the same direction would get a score of 4, the two 90° turns would get 5 each and turning around would get 0 points. This takes care of priorities 2 and 4. Then for each direction you can actually go, I would add a score of 8. Then I would compare the player position to the enemy position. If the player is above the enemy, up would get 2 added, if below, down would get 2 added, if to the left, left would get 2 added and if to the right, right would get 2 added. In the end I would choose the direction with the highest score and let the enemy go there.

Hm... OK. The reason for this forced table is that the calculation of the adress in that table can be as quick as possible since it gets accesed 8 times per frame (on each physics iterations). I'd like to see what you've changed to acess the relocatable version of the table so that I can put that change in my version of the code as well. Remember, mine is not finished yet, I'm still working on cleaning it up and commenting it... right now I'm working on the handlers.

Thank you for the update. I noticed that the enemies still do stop in certain cases. This seems to happen when they reach an intersection or a dead end where no way leads them closer to the player. For instance, they move down a ladder and reach a platform leading to the left, and the ladder doesn't go further down, however, the player is on the lower right of that enemy. The enemy can't take a direction towards the player, so it stops, but it continues on its way as soon as the player moves into a position where the enemy can take a way leading it closer to the player (in this example for this the player has to be either higher than the enemy or to the left of it). The same thing happens on dead ends, for instance, the enemy moves left along a platform, and at the end of the platform there's a dead end, but the player is to the left of the enemy, so it stops, but continues as soon as the player moves to the right of the enemy. The correct decision would be in the first case always to move to the left, no matter where the player is, because that's the only direction where the enemy doesn't turn around. In the case of a dead end, the enemy should turn around no matter what the player does. Also I've sometimes seen Mr. Pickle continue its way down a ladder although there is no ladder in that place, the only way to go would be to the left on a platform. And it sometimes turns around in the middle of a platform although there's no intersection if continuing on its way would lead further away from the player. This mostly happens on screen 5 with its long platforms, and unfortunately it leads to Mr. Pickle never reaching the ladder that would lead through the platform the player is actually on. I've mostly seen all of these glitches on the 5th and 6th screen.

Well, it's fine that you are enthusiastic about your games. As for me, I have several other things on my plate. Yes, I'm looking at well under 100 hours. I'm estimating about 10 to 15 hours to go, but last week I could only spare about 2 hours to continue work on BPM. It's just that if my father is calling, I can't say "I can't visit you in the hospital, I'm working on Baby Pac-Man". So, whoops, some more hours gone and another day where I don't get to continue work on BPM. I don't shoot for a specific release date though, especially given the fact that without my help the game probably wouldn't have seen a release at all (unless someone else would have helped Bob along). As things are going now, I'd be happy if I manage to complete my part by January 6th, which probably leaves some more months for Bob to finish his part, so maybe we're talking about a March or April 2019 release at best, but this is only a rough estimate of mine. It also depends on how deeply Bob needs to look into my code in order to understand everything. The version I gave him, as I found out, still has many rough edges documentation-wise. Especially in the rotation matrix part, the comments don't match up with what's actually happening because I kept the comments as they were in the last version Bob dropped while changing the actual code. However, this is the section I'm just working on, so I think I'll send him another version of the code tomorrow which is a bit farther along. As for the difficulty, one thing that could be easily tuned would be the amount of gravity. But still there's no general difficulty setting in the title screen. There are some settings which somewhat affect difficulty... "Monster AI" and "Rember Energizers"... I think that one also is in the DIP switch settings of the original arcade game. But there is no general difficulty setting. But maybe the game could also poll the difficulty switches for that.

The problem is that this would change the design of the table. Bob designed the table as it is now, and I tried to make it work the way he designed it. A baby bumper isn't part of this design, and I don't even have an idea what it should look like. The only thing I could do is to treat the black rectangle at the bottom (which actually lights up when an extra baby gets earned) as if it was a bumper, or I could have it deflect the ball away from the center, towards the flippers. But that's not the purpose which it was included for...

Unfortunately, I disagree with both of your points... As for 2), I deliberately included the ability to hit the ball "backwards" because a video that was posted here contained some pinball tricks, among them the "Post pass", which works by hitting the ball backwards towards the bumper. It doesn't work here because the bumper is too far receded though, but in order for it to work, it has to be possible to hit the ball backwards. It's also possible in David's Midnight Magic where on the upper stage you can use the left flipper to hit the ball backwards into the multi-ball area. 3) It should be possible though to hit the upper ball... there is a window of about 5 pixels you must hit (your ball should be no more than 2 pixels offset to the position of the upper ball in order to hit it). It's not easy, but it's possible. I don't know if it's maybe a bit easier on the real machine though... Or did I mess up just this binary, and it isn't possible to hit the upper ball there? Has anyone else tested this with the latest binary?

Here are my times for this past week (November 19th through 25th) on modern systems... sorry, I didn't play any modern games this week. I was too busy looking after my ageing father who came out of the hospital on Friday, but was in for a short visit again today, and will be in again next week. But I have an idea for a new game, where you would be an op of a scooter sharing company, and your task is to collect scooters to recharge, bring them into the central warehouse, recharge them there and bring them out again to designated spots... or spots you have to choose on your own, estimated where there would be the most riders needing them. Between driving rounds, you have to care for scooters to repair and replace.

Here are my times for this past week (November 19th through 25th) on classic systems... Atari 2600: Chaotic Grill (WIP) - 10 min. Atari 7800: Not a Pac-Man game (WIP) - 12 min. in 2 sessions UFO!Genesys - 3 min. I replayed Chaotic Grill for a bit since its author, Splendidnut, has posted another update slightly improving the steering part. Not a Pac-Man game is a space game which Baby Blue Azure posted on the Atari 7800 Baby Pac-Man thread, but it's incomplete in that the player can't die. UFO!Genesys is an earlier version of it which also has no sound.

OK, here's my version of the current project status... I'm actually still working on cleaning up the code. I'm currently at 38.1% of the code, however, I only changed code between the 28.3% and 59% mark, the code before and after that mainly belongs to the maze section. So I've updated roughly a third of the code by now. However, Bob requested me to send him what I have early so that he can see if it fits into his confines. But I still continue to clean up the code because I'm afraid Bob still might not understand the part of the code which I haven't cleaned up yet. If all goes well, I will complete the cleanup over the next weeks and then send him the updated version of the code. What I'm doing now is solely for Bob... if I were to finish the game myself, I wouldn't bother cleaning up the code but just continue coding.

OK, I don't quite get it yet... so let's get these things straight: Bob, if you say "I see that on mine as well", do you mean the version you had before I started working on it, or the one I sent to you lately? If it's the former, this means that the error was already in there before I even started working at it, and it doesn't have anything to do with something I've done to it. Your solution for the problem hints to that... So... according to how you fixed it, I suppose the error lies in the transition from maze to pinball part, right? If so, it should be visible immediately on entering the pinball part, without having hit any target. And it probably should only come out if you select the "full game" and then go from the maze to the pinball part, right? To be honest, I didn't test it that way most of the time, instead I went straight to the pinball part because I figured the transition to the maze part wasn't finished yet anyway... However, I tried it that way in MAME 0.169 (which is the version I use for testing), and I don't get that error. Is there any speficic way to reproduce it, or do you just have to be lucky because it only pops up once in so many times?

Did you use the latest binary for this? If so, there is a serious flaw in the pinball part which must have escaped me... it's visible in the left lane starting with "F" where one of the lights is replaced by another character. I know that a previous version had that glitch where the detection of the targets wasn't quite perfect, and if you hit the target area somewhere on the far left or right, instead of clearing a target it turned around another character. It's a bit puzzling to me that this turned-around character isn't even next to the targets, but somewhere else on screen. Well, it looks big, but actually the flippers have a pretty steep angle compared to other machines, so if they go up, they are much closer to each other, with only a few pixels of room for the ball to fall through.

OK... thanks for the update! I didn't feel a great improvement in the player code now since I got used to the old way, but it definitely plays pretty smoothly. As for the spawn points, I didn't realize you had reduced the number of enemies on screen. In this case of course it makes sense to balance this by making other things a bit harder, like the spawn delays. Right now I can't feel the real difficulty of the game because the enemies still have the habit of stopping in their tracks quite often. Also, yes, I see it's true that the squashed enemies are in fact scored, I just didn't realize that this only happens when their score appears, which is a bit after they actually get hit by the burger parts. What definitely isn't being scored yet is the enemies' ride on a burger part.

Here are my times for this past week (November 12th through 18th) on modern games... sorry, I didn't play any modern games this week, only classic ones.

Here are my times for the past week (November 12th through 18th)... Arcade: Jr. Pac-Man - 33 min. in 2 sessions Ms. Pac-Man - 30 min. in 2 sessions Atari 2600: Chaotic Grill - 11 min. Atari 7800: Baby Pac-Man - 17 min. Not a Pac-Man game - 11 min. I played Chaotic Grill for the Atari 2600 for a bit because a new update was issued for it. Then I played various Pac-Man games because of a somewhat strange reason... I'n thinking of an electric scooter charger simulation where you have to drive around and collect electric scooters, then recharge them and serve them at some designated places (those in a city where Lime and/or Bird have deployed their scooters will know what I mean...). This game could take place in the Pac-Man maze where the maze walls are actually the residents' houses, and the monster pen could be the central location where you have to charge the scooters. On Baby Pac-Man, I tried both the normal setting and the setting where the AI matches the other Pac-Man games in the arcade... which isn't that hard to play either, but it's still FAST. Finally, Not a Pac-Man game is actually a space game posted by Baby Blue Azure in the Atari 7800 Baby Pac-Man thread. Since he talked about evolution, I thought about how his game could be merged with mine, but I can't see a good solution because his game is radically different to both parts of Baby Pac-Man.

Thank you for the update! There are (as always) some things that occur to me: - If you squash an enemy, there's now a display how many points you get for this. However it seems that those points aren't actually added to your score - There's something wrong with the enemy spawn points. At least in the 3rd screen, where I usually follow a pattern in the arcade version that I go right and then up from the starting point, reaching the lower right burger. Around that burger is where I usually meet up with the first two enemies, and there's a way to defeat them without using any pepper. However, in your version, I already have my first enemy encounter while still being on the ladder reaching up to the lower right burger. - If you've completed all the rounds, the game starts over, however, in the arcade version it gets harder this time, and Mr. Egg even joins the gang in the repetition of the first round. However, in your version, Mr. Egg is absent in that round. But all in all, good update!

Here are my times for this week (November 5th through 11th) on modern games... Sorry, I didn't play any modern games this week. I crashed with a scared e-scooter (I guess I got into the tram tracks) and had to stay in the hospital for two days, and on Friday my father got taken to a hospital as well because of problems with his bladder, so I had to visit him yesterday. This, sadly, leaves no time for gaming this week. I only managed to continue work on Baby Pac-Man for the Atari 7800 for a bit, where I'm now in the final stretch... all gameplay elements I wanted to include are now finished and tested, I just have to clean up the code... and then give it back to Bob who will continue to work on it.

Here are my times for this week (November 5th through 11th)... I actually didn't play anything this week due to me and my father both being in the hospital during some time this week, but I forgot to add something from last week, so I'll take it over to this week: TI-99: Micro Pinball - 11 min. I didn't play this for too long because I didn't manage to find out how to operate both flippers. I only checked it out to compare it to my WIP pinball part of Baby Pac-Man on the Atari 7800. Other than that, I crashed with a scared e-scooter (I guess I got into the tram tracks) and had to stay in the hospital for two days, and on Friday my father got taken to a hospital as well because of problems with his bladder, so I had to visit him yesterday. This, sadly, leaves no time for gaming this week. I only managed to continue work on Baby Pac-Man for the Atari 7800 for a bit.

In my eyes, the enemies shown in the first post's "fake" screenshot actually look better (closer to the arcade) than the recolored 2600 / 5200 sprites.

Don't worry, I won't push it. I just thought since I came home from hospital relatively early in the afternoon today, I'd complete this change which I've already started over the weekend. We'll see how it goes on, I'm waiting on your feedback now...

Well, there's not that much to do to get better... I just have to avoid actions that hurt in one of the parts that hurt. Also I should avoid sneezing and letting the brace get wet. Anyway... here's a new update where the table bumping is handled differently... the lower ball is mainly only affected by bumping if it's in contact with something, and the upper ball is only affected by bumping up the table, not left or right, and only if the ball sits at one of the edges of the path. Do you think it's more realistic now? By the way, I would like to append a BIN file as well, and the batch script is set to create one, but it does so using a command called DD which is a bit of a mystery to me since it doesn't exist in the XP environment I'm developing on. I'd first have to find out how this works... probably it just skips the first 128 bytes when copying over the file, but I'm not sure about this. BabyPac.A78

Unfortunately, I'm in the hospital right now after having had an accident on a LIME E-scooter yesterday... and it's a bit harder to type with a brace on the left hand since I'm left-handed... so it will take a few more days (I should get released tomorrow) until the next binary. But thank you for your feedback regarding nudging... I'm pretty sure the next version will have it more correctly, but probably the amount will be too big... but we can still tweak it afterwards since I really don't have a good feeling on how much would be right. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that Slamball on the C-64 also had nudging... it even got stronger with each level you advanced.