urborg Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Nice to hear it. It seems that project is coming in the right direction Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urborg Posted July 19, 2007 Share Posted July 19, 2007 (edited) Hi Heaven I have some comments about handling weapons, armors etc. in Beyond Evil. In Diablo there were eight items categories that hero can wear. It was: weapons, armors, shields, helmets, boots, gloves, rings and necklaces. In your game there are 3 I think most important categories: weapons, armors and shields. In Diablo all items that you pick were stored in inventory. So you can carry for example three different armors, change them any time you want or sell in the village. I think it would be good if in Beyond Evil also all items comes to inventory, so there will be weapons as well as armors and shields. Now you can use only one weapon. When in inventory 3 categories of items would be available, you can simply (I think its simple, I may be wrong ) make a rule that hero can use one item from each category. So, one weapon, one shield and one armor. You have to change than also the way of dropping an item, maybe hitting space and than a letter of an item you want to drop. If you decide to change a way of working of an inventory menu to one I describe, you can probably easily add new types of items that hero can wear, if it is possible. Edited July 19, 2007 by urborg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted July 19, 2007 Author Share Posted July 19, 2007 urborg... its on my to do list... but it will be more like that: - armor-class (armor, shields,helmets) - weapon-class (clubs,axe,swords) - other-class (potions,rings,...) in the inventory screen you will be change the "class" by switching via TAB. its more like on consoles where the items are grouped together (champions of norath, baldurs gate PS2/GBA f.e.). so the dropping procedere will remain the same. each weapon has 2 flags not used right now...one could be used for duration and one could be used for weight. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urborg Posted July 19, 2007 Share Posted July 19, 2007 OK, I think your solution is even better Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted July 22, 2007 Author Share Posted July 22, 2007 ok. here is the latest debug build. please check out if everything works ok for you as there could be max. 10 monsters per room, while 4 are only displayed and moved max per room. there are still glitches in the panel and pm gfx but i have concentrated more on the monster state engine last week. beyond1.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted July 31, 2007 Author Share Posted July 31, 2007 just in case you think that the game can not get hard...check out the debug build "expert"..... i really have difficulties.... and in this build each monster can have different drop rates of rare items... (good for end bosses...) they are all set to 70%+...but can not see any weapon drop? but i have no time to double check... can some of you have a look? cheers, hve beyond1.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 6, 2007 Author Share Posted August 6, 2007 its sad... but is it just me or is the drop item/inventory broken? with my revision system i can go back but not to v1 as it was introduced with version 15... grrr i can only pickup 2 weapons (dagger + 1 weapon)? i havent touched the code for weeks of these modules so i can not see what the hell is happening... i am considering a major rewrite of the whole code so i can clear up the code and rewrite parts of it... i think that's a good idea to do so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 9, 2007 Author Share Posted August 9, 2007 ok...as i will do a complete rewrite of the code (well...maybe more like a rearrange of the code) i am investigating to implement smooth soft sprite routines instead of the charmoves at the moment... last night i was thinking about my zone ranger investigations and thought about "Gremlins"-engine. the game http://atari.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=1977 is really cool as i can not remember any slowdown and it moves more objects smooth than my engine (but of course has not the complexity behind)... what do you think? should i try the "antic e"-approach? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Philsan Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 (edited) ok...as i will do a complete rewrite of the code (well...maybe more like a rearrange of the code) i am investigating to implement smooth soft sprite routines instead of the charmoves at the moment... I was just going to write a post asking you to change the movement "character" routine. I think the high level of your game, including graphics, deserve a movement like the one found in Gremlins and in other games. Edited August 9, 2007 by Philsan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 11, 2007 Author Share Posted August 11, 2007 ok. found the stuff in the gremlins code...first of all i thought that its highly optimised like in zoneranger but nope...thats why it took little time to find the small piece of code which puts all kind of sprites on screen. you can find it $789d ff. (in the 5200 Glenn Version for XL) it uses even a loop!!! so it puts 4 bytes into screen ram and then runs a loop for the next scanline... for such a code the game engine is really fast... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 11, 2007 Author Share Posted August 11, 2007 (edited) $20,$21 are the sprite position vars plus $20 is sprite no. $30,$31 pointer to screen ram $32,$33 pointer to the gfx data $8bef+$8c37 tables for the sprite data so no rocket science here... Edited August 11, 2007 by Heaven/TQA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted August 13, 2007 Author Share Posted August 13, 2007 i have first draft of a potential sprite engine... now i have to think about how i treat ckecking for picking up etc... maybe the antic e is only the "window" to the player but internally i am converting all player movements back to char pos and check the stuff... that sounds good... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted September 6, 2007 Author Share Posted September 6, 2007 just to let you know that i am still working on the sprite engine. i was bussy with the games convention and the ifa show so i guess that now i have little bit more time for coding... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pseudografx Posted September 6, 2007 Share Posted September 6, 2007 just to let you know that i am still working on the sprite engine. i was bussy with the games convention and the ifa show so i guess that now i have little bit more time for coding... That's a good news I hope we can expect another alpha (or beta) soon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted October 9, 2007 Author Share Posted October 9, 2007 esp. for gauntman... tsss... havent played it for months... i have already implemented no overlapping... and when i am playing the posted game... it still looks kind of good... keeps me motivated... so actually i need to get the smooth moving into it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 8, 2007 Author Share Posted November 8, 2007 i just implemented following code into latest Beyond Evil engine so i get the RAM below the OS for tables and the softsprite routines. the interesting part is that due to the keyboard OS routine and the print routine I am using i have copied the OS into the RAM. everything works fine here. but when I am pressing a key the game crashes. so i thought it's my code. so I wrote a small test routine with only coping the OS into RAM and implementing the new NMI. this small program crashed as well by pressing the keyboard. as far as i remember does hitting the key cause a NMI? so is it possible that the Taquart "Mini-OS" does have a bug? here is the small NMI routine in XASM/MADS format. switch_off_os_rom sei;stop interrups mva #0 ^4e;stop all interrupts mva #$fe ^31 mwa #nmi $fffa mwa #nmi $fffe mva #$c0 ^4e rts ; NMI routine ; ^4f==#$5f if VBLKI ; ^4f==#$9f if DLI nmi bit ^4f bpl sys_vbl ; DLI routine, e.g. ; pha jmp (dliv) ; pla ; rti ; VBL routine, e.g. sys_vbl pha txa:pha tya:pha dec 20 lda $d300;prepare joystick and #$0f sta stick0 jsr vbl pla:tay pla:tax pla rti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted November 8, 2007 Share Posted November 8, 2007 (edited) Keypresses generate an IRQ (POKEY). Only ANTIC or System Reset (400/800 only) can generate NMIs. You could always just read the keypress manually in a VBI with key IRQs disabled. You'd have to have a debounce algorithm too though. Additional: the XL/XE OS key routine also plays with PORTB. Unsure if you need the F1-F4 keycodes from the 1200XL to be processed to cause that, but might be worth a look. Also, I think you might need the OS key translation table in place, else you might get unpredictable results. Finally, with POKEY IRQs, you have to reset them, else they'll just re-interrupt the 6502, giving an endless loop of IRQs which will lockup the machine. Edited November 8, 2007 by Rybags Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaPa Posted November 8, 2007 Share Posted November 8, 2007 I think you set up IRQ interrupt vector to the same point as NMI interrupt vector and you are just testing if it was DLI or not and jump to their routines. So IMHO everytime you press a key you jump to the routine of last NMI occured.... ie. if you press a key and the last NMI was DLI then after pressing the key the DLI routine is executed... or VBI if it was last NMI. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted November 8, 2007 Share Posted November 8, 2007 (edited) I should have mentioned that too. Also, you have to store to NMIRES to stop VBI from recurring. The ANTIC doco is a bit dodgy in that regard - DLIs reset themselves automatically, it might be the case that VBIs do as well (I've never bothered to test that theory). Edited November 8, 2007 by Rybags Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 8, 2007 Author Share Posted November 8, 2007 aha... that sounds logical... and explains the effects i got in my test routine as it was doing colour changes every VBL but when hitting a key it looked like nearly every scanline an interrupt appeared. is there anybody here who can fix above code for keyboard handling as i have no internet at home and no atari documentation there... i am traveling back on weekends... so my access to information is limited... thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted November 8, 2007 Share Posted November 8, 2007 (edited) If you've just copied the OS to RAM... leave the IRQ vector as it was. Disable all IRQs via $D20E and $10, except for the keyboard (store $40 there, or $C0 to also allow BREAK) In your VBI, put a store to $D40F to reset the NMI status Edited November 8, 2007 by Rybags Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaPa Posted November 8, 2007 Share Posted November 8, 2007 Just download some info and bring it home on flash or CD etc. I think Memory Map from Mapping the Atari should be enough. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 8, 2007 Author Share Posted November 8, 2007 i am just digging the internet for a reference guide as TXT or PDF... but still haven't found one yet... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 8, 2007 Author Share Posted November 8, 2007 Rybags...the goal is to get complete independend from OS...if my interrupt handler works i will rewrite the input and the print routine... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 8, 2007 Author Share Posted November 8, 2007 just printed out the programming reference cards from de re atari...but haven't found a complete guide as txt yet... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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