[WIP] CROSSDOCK

[Arenafoot]

On 8/9/2020 at 9:03 AM, KevKelley said:

It has been a really busy month so I had barely had time to work on anything.  My work had experienced its annual inventory process so that was time consuming (maybe inspirational for another game? lol). 

Same here.... ours was scheduled for August 6th then got cancelled the Saturday before.

[KevKelley]

I usually work on the games on my lunch but recently there have been restrictions on number of people in offices or breakrooms so it is harder for me to set up my laptop for an hour or so. 

[chewy]

16 hours ago, KevKelley said:

The regular game is through the yellow door on the first screen. Does it not work for you? I tested it on my phone using Emu2600 and it worked.

its workin- 

[KevKelley]

I was working on changing some of the values.  My observations with moving slower when collision with the pallet jack seemed to get things closer to where I was aiming.  I still have only tested using my computer but I have found that by the time the bonus round becomes accessible, the timer is pretty low so if you do not go into the bonus round, you would run the risk of losing a life.  I may improve the amount of time awarded if it seems you will eventually lose a life no matter what. My goal is to get it to where if you keep moving, grabbing boxes and filling bays, it would be a delicate balance but it is almost there.

 

Plus, if I keep the slow movement from collision with the jack, I can free up about 40 bytes in the first bank, which may open up some options.

[KevKelley]

I updated the binary in the first post.

 

This includes that little fix regarding the missile heights in Trolley Volley when they disappear. 

 

While testing I also came across an issue with the obstacles when leaving the Bonus screen.  I reset the coordinates of missile1 after the bonus but when the obstacles are present in the main game this would effectively push them off screen.  I put in a simple check and found a couple redundancies but it works now.  I may look to see if there is a better way, as the bonus reset was in two banks and I have to check to see if I did this for any particular reason or just a result of forgetting.

 

I am still looking at alterations to the speed of Dock Boy.  I did have it speed up momentarily over 1000 points but saw it stopped shortly after.  I think I accidentally screwed up on the range, as I originally wanted it to speed up after 1000 points and remain.

 

I have another issue regarding the bonus screen that I may or may not try to hammer out, as space is very limited, and from some testing I found the pacing getting closer to what I think is good.  The walking slower when touching the jack helps a lot.

 

I also saw the scanlines jump by one or two.  It seems to only happen when moving down and not as often as it once had, but I noticed it was occurring more when I had the conveyor belt speed up. I haven't looked at what @CapitanClassic mentioned a couple posts back but that may help.  I just haven't had a chance to look to deeply into things just yet, hence minor fixes and test playing.

[CapitanClassic]

Just noticed in Andrew Davie's thread regarding the timeslicing used in Boulderdash, that the traditional synchronous way of handling game logic over multiple frames, is to hand-pick what to do on certain frames. There isnt anything new under the sun, any problems you encounter have likely been encountered and solved by others. 

 

 

[KevKelley]

Thanks! I have been looking at ways to break up the logic by frame should that be the issue. I had kind of played around with that a while back but haven't had a solid amount of time to delve deeper. I have been mad at my lack of any major developments but I have a couple vacations approaching where I hope at least a couple days to see if I can hammer out the rest of the game and be ready for final play testing. 

 

As it is now, it is probably 95% complete as I play looking for bugs, tweak values for balance, and work on that one intermittent over cycle issue. 

 

As the issue I have only seems to occur when moving downward, I think I can probably root out the problem by toying with the movement code or possibly consolidating some things or eliminating redundant code if some exists. Since I have been short on time, what I really need to do is print out the code and bring it with me to work so I can mark it up whenever the opportunity arises. It'll bring back memories of middle school. Lol

[KevKelley]

I apologize for the lack of updates in the last couple months, as work and home had been crazy!  I had been quietly looking at things and did have one little side project to distract me but with a couple vacations before Christmas I was hoping to get some good work done.

I loaded up Crossdock to see if there were any issues to fix and had two-

 

For some reason the Missile1 was spawning in the top during the maingame and in the Carts minigame the walls were not appearing during the difficulty progression.

 

The first problem stemmed from me changing the resetting of some variables and coordinates at the beginning of the game.  I believe this stemmed from when I attempted to consolidate code in a previous build.  I had 2 resets - one moving into the main game and one for all the minigames.  I have the minigame reset go to where the main game reset goes but not all things were to be reset the same so I had broken them up but it appears that I made a mistake with that one.

 

As for the Carts issue, after you score a certain amount of points walls will appear to obstruct the path of the player and the cart.  I had originally set this to start after 30 points but for some reason when I tested it they did not appear.  I changed the value to 2 and it worked so I changed the value to 20 but had not checked it yet to see if it works (my battery is dying).  I plan on looking at this a little more closely once I charge my laptop. 

[KevKelley]

With the issues corrected from November, I had been testing the game to see if it would go over 262 cycles.  As I had posted in the past, it would appear to only go over a cycle or two in Stella but I would never experience any kind of screen jumping on real hardware.  After testing I only seemed to experience this issue whenever I was moving downward.  After numerous tweaks the issue seemed to occur less and less.  My assumption is that this would happen because of some conflict with some of my various if/then statements involving joy0down, or movement in general.  

 

So far I haven't experienced any overcycle issues during testing, granted my testing sessions haven't been that prolonged.

 

So with this issue considered "fixed," I just have some minor things to work on here or there and Crossdock will be done.

 

I plan to now check the minigames for any issues, as I have found a couple minor ones that need correcting.

 

Updated .bin on first page.  

[KevKelley]

Just updated the .bin on the first page.

 

I tried to fix up some of the code in the minigames, mainly Carts and Trolley Volley being that Dock Boy is pretty much the maingame bonus screen.

 

This update focused mainly on Carts.  I reworked the movement and collision detection by basically using the code from the maingame with some gosubs.  So far it seems to work well and I was able to free up a little space.

 

My next goal is to fix up Trolley Volley.  

 

Since my last main edit, something happened with the audio, to where the sound gets stuck on once gameplay begins which is very obnoxious.  I will have to check to see if one of my Carts modifications interfere with that minigame.  I also want to tweak how the score is kept.  Currently I use a graphical error to divide the two scores but I may try something else to make it look more uniform.  For the most part that minigame is also done, but since I lack a reliable 2nd player it is the least tested of the games.  

Edited March 24, 2021 by KevKelley

[KevKelley]

Just updated the .bin on the first page.

 

Since the last update I had worked on Trolley Volley.  I addressed the issue with the score and used a different font giving me the space.  I also played around with the capture and firing of the cart back and forth to change up the angles a bit.  

I made a couple tweaks here and there and I haven't had any overcycle issues. I feel that the gameplay seems to move well where the timer is refreshed at a decent pace but when things pick up the bonus screen is necessary otherwise time will run out. I had been toying with changing the obstacles, which currently cycles from pusher to moving pusher to pest, and then back (but the pusher stays where the pest leaves off). 

 

I had also looked into saving the bay door info between screens.  Currently, if you go into the bonus screen, the bay doors are reset.  This is because I just redraw the playfield.  I am considering just changing the impacted playfield variables instead of redrawing the entire screen and then trying to use the playfield variables to save the doors.  Then when the bonus screen is over I would just copy them back to the variable used for the bay doors (like var25=e). I think it would work. Plus it would give an appearance that different stuff is in the truck each time you are on the screen. The only problem is that I have about 1 byte and 40 bytes to work with in the associated banks to make this happen so I had been looking at some code to simplify. 

 

The only other issue I had come across with was that on occasion, when going back to the main screen from the bonus screen the pusher or pest may come  from off screen, find its place, and resume its normal movement.  Not a huge one though and it doesn't really impact gameplay much at all.  Sadly I haven't had a good block of time to sit and focus on making any big adjustments, hence the tweaks here and there but the game is inching towards completion thanks to all the help from everyone here!

Edited August 10, 2021 by KevKelley

[KevKelley]

I updated .bin in first post.

 

It has been about a year since I really worked on this but I am trying to clean up some of the code and make some room in the various banks.  Most of the changes in this are in the code but did not affect gameplay.  I had eliminated some score-based difficulty progression and fixed the pest coming from off screen.  Hoping to rework obstacle code and try to rework some other parts associated with the timer, replenishment of status bar, and how the individual obstacles work. I may simplify them a little if I can.

[Fort Apocalypse]

This is a fun game! I did run into a problem where I dropped my crate on the left side under the dock and couldn't pick it back up. Also, I'm unsure what the point of the red button thing going back and forth is, because it doesn't seem to affect my crate or lift. It's the right amount of challenging, though. I like it!

[KevKelley]

1 hour ago, Fort Apocalypse said:

This is a fun game! I did run into a problem where I dropped my crate on the left side under the dock and couldn't pick it back up. Also, I'm unsure what the point of the red button thing going back and forth is, because it doesn't seem to affect my crate or lift. It's the right amount of challenging, though. I like it!

If that is in the bonus screen/Dockboy mini game that might be the ant and any hill. If you leave the crate on the floor and the ant touches it the crate will reduce in size. You can also squish the anthill with your forklift. 

I may have to check collisions if it got stuck as that was not a bug I had met yet. Part of me was considering trimming down some of the bonus level. 
 

This game was started over 2 years ago and I had a lot of help in the beginning from everyone on the forums. There was a lot I didn’t understand. I also used Crossdock to learn various things so now I am going back in with a greater understanding. Like I realized that I used two variables for a counter but after further review I realized I did not even use the second variable, or some of the code was overly complicated so I simplified it a bit. 

 

I am hoping this is the final push and I can finish it up as I had with my older projects like Cone Ball and Lineman. This one will be fun as this code was a bit more complicated but I have already freed up a bunch of bytes in a couple of the banks. 

 

Really the main thing I wanted to work on was the difficulty. From testing I had a hard time seeing if the timer moved to quickly or slowly. When you load a bay it replenishes some of the timer but I also had a hard time seeing if that was too much or too little (as I have it charge different amounts based on speed of the conveyor belt). Basically I have a bunch of little tweaks that I wanna hammer out to finish this and hope my understanding has improved to make it happen.