CafÃ©man's Blog - Obligatory AdvII XE update

RSS Bot · July 11, 2016

The fact has not escaped my attention that Adventure II XE is *still* not completed and released. I get a few weeks' worth of time working on it, then I let it sit for months. It's a time issue, and a perfectionist issue too. I could just release it, but some of the newer features aren't 100% bug proof yet. So I figure, better to wait a bit more and work on the project when I am fresh, when I am actually interested in it, than throw away years of work on a game that still has unfinished/untweaked aspects. Right?

This is my first update for 2016. Last thing I did was in 12/15 and 1/16, engine tests. I think that burnt me out, at the time.

I have code that I can activate that used COLBK, the background color register, to track how much time my main code , various routines, and VBI are taking up. Porting the game from 5200 to A8 has made the VBI portion a little bit less efficient. The results in more frequent occurrences where you'll try to pick up a item, but a higher-on-screen item is mistakenly picked up. It happened in the 5200 version but I felt I had controlled it enough that I wasn't going to worry about it. The cause is that I run out of VBI time, and it eats into the on-screen time . Thus if Square is at the bottom, no problem. But if Square is near the top of the screen, depending on how many items are being drawn, the size of the items, and even if there are VBI color-changes on that screen ... it can mess up.

So I spent most of my December and January '16 time fooling with this, and didn't really come up with any solutions. That's what I will revisit now this week. Then I will put in the final touches like a few sounds tweaks, new rankings (still didn't enter them into code yet), and some thorough final testing. Then the project will be complete.

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