forum.defence-force.org

This is really exciting .. when does it look like we might be able to play it?

Not for a while dudes. I want to get the rest of the rooms done, iron out all the movement bugs, add lots more Robot behaviour scripts, link Rooms to Liftshaft, organise map properly, add some sfx.. ok so the list is quite long still but every step takes me ever closer

Log
Some more rooms done. Now 20 of 32 done
Incidentally the room design is similar to the original rooms from the C64 version except there is no top platform. In the original the top platform allowed Ethan to dissappear off the top of the screen. This is not so easily done on the Oric and could waste alot of spare memory if not clipped (Clipping requires more code).
Whilst the physical width of each room is the same Oric Lifts are 4 bytes wide but C64 lifts are 3.

Good progress today. 32 of 32 rooms now done with the last room being my own design.
The reason for using the existing designs is not so they are accurate to the original but because they are tried and tested already

Anyway i have now designed the Security terminal screen and am halfway through creating the objects and map for it

Ok, again good progress last night though forum was down last night so unable to post log.

This is my design for room 31.


The picture will be raised once i code the exception.

Log.
I managed to complete the Security Terminal screen (It is composed of individual and repeated objects to save space (like The Hobbit)) which will display a menu in green (Old green monitor).



I am now working on linking Rooms to liftshaft and the shutter style transitions.

Looks better and better.

Was thinking about something, perhaps you could do a special room that shows a number of tricky situations (hard jumps, hard to avoid robots, synchronized lifts, etc...) and release that as a beta testing demo for getting feedback from people here about how easy/playable it is.

This way you get a teaser for people, some feedback about how they feel the game is, without giving away anything about the game structure itself.

My 0.2 euro cents

Hi

Here's Dennis Caswell answer to your question :

"In answer to your question, my memory is hazy after more than 25 years, but I can tell you that the puzzle pieces were hand-drawn and not computer generated. I’m pretty sure that their orientations were randomized, but I don’t remember about the colors."

kml

Twilighte wrote:Hi kamelito, that is great and i may need his help at some time in the future but for now i am quite ok with all of it. I believe i have figured out how to rise the hero when he's jumping onto a half platform or lift.
To me that is pretty much most of the difficult bit.
I have made the changes in the code of all the above stuff (including mirroring) and have compiled the code successfully but now i'll need to test it all and watch all those nasty bugs suddenly appear again

I guess one question that does spring to mind at the moment is if the Puzzles were drawn at new game by the computer or just flipped/coloured randomly?

Twilighte wrote:"Another visitor, stay a while. Stay forever.."
"Destroy him my robots."

It would also be cool to do French translations of these sentences too.

I always found the evil doctor speaks with a foreign accent, not sure from which country. Thus while it is relatively easy for someone to imitate the original speech, I wonder if a translated version should be spoken by someone who doesn't have that language as their mother tongue. Compare to e.g. 'Allo 'Allo, where Ze Germans and the English speak French (well, English but it is supposed to be French) with varying accents.

"Good mourning! I have a massage from Michelle!" etc.

I've only heard the "Stay a while" line before so I can't be sure on the accent. But it sounded a lot like the voice in the song "Monster Mash" to me. LOL
I think they were going for evil mad scientist.

Oh, for those who have a recent copy of the High Voltage SID Collection installed, you can listen both to Impossible Mission, Beach Head II and Cave of the Word Wizard (see GAMES/A-F for the latter). I think all those and many more use the same speech technology.

Actually I've been playing with the idea to replace the evil mad scientist with an evil mad preschool teacher (Kindergarten Cop?) and the robots are of course obnoxious children which you sometimes have to put to sleep for a while. Wouldn't that be an interesting variation on IM?

-"Destroy him, my children!"

Dbug wrote:Was thinking about something, perhaps you could do a special room that shows a number of tricky situations (hard jumps, hard to avoid robots, synchronized lifts, etc...) and release that as a beta testing demo for getting feedback from people here about how easy/playable it is.

Look guys, that is a great idea but only once i am personally happy with the way the guy moves. Currently he is far from perfect and half the time messes up.

carlsson wrote:Oh, for those who have a recent copy of the High Voltage SID Collection installed, you can listen both to Impossible Mission

Well actually kamelito posted a better link a little further back in this forum thread, a site where you can play all the Voices.

http://www.the-commodore-zone.com/artic ... Page2.html

ESS was a company (that still exist today) that produced the voice synthesis for IM and many games including the ones you mentioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Speech_Systems

Thanks kamelito for raising the question to the original Author. It was great to get confirmation of what i thought.

JamesD wrote:I've only heard the "Stay a while" line before so I can't be sure on the accent. But it sounded a lot like the voice in the song "Monster Mash" to me. LOL

I loved that pop song. Thanks for the memories JamesD.

Log..
Compiled the text for the security terminal and rewrote the text engine (was too limited and didn't have the text characters required for terminal screen).
Tried the lift shaft and Ethan fell through the floor! forgot i needed to generate the collision map!
Decided how to do the puzzle section. This won't be exactly like original because that used a massive glove to select things. Instead i'll use highlighted buttons, etc.

Log..
Some progress last night. about 20% code done for pocket computer and some additional graphics (highlighted and un-highlighted buttons) captured.
The Pocket computer is actually quite a big section.
It consists of the 9 buttons on the right, 3 buttons on the left, puzzle memory list and work area.

The pocket computer allows the manipulation of the puzzle pieces to eventually form 7 punchcards (each one providing a passcode letter).
The computer is also used to control sound and joystick options in the game and Game Pause.

Unlike the original game i won't use a hand graphic to select the buttons and manipulate the puzzle pieces.

Instead i am using a simpler(i hope) cursor driven system. When entering the pocket computer the last button (or puzzle piece) is highlighted. You can then navigate all the buttons and puzzle pieces with the cursor keys (or joystick).
You'll be able to do all the operations from the original game. However only two puzzle pieces can be played with at a time.
The puzzle memory is a list of all the puzzle pieces accrued during the game (up to 28 ) and displays 3 of them with a push-scroll method to reveal more.
Also due to a limitation of the colour scheme chosen all puzzle pieces will always be captured in one colour. The colour of the punchcard only comes into play once all the 4 parts have been merged into one.

On every new game all puzzle pieces will be randomly mirrored and flipped and the required colour will be set randomly.

Another productive day yesterday and this morning.
Got the navigation control working and the puzzle memory push scroll.
I now have to figure out how to hold the work area pieces. Visibly this is very simple but behind the scenes i have to allow each placeholder to potentially hold 2,3 or even 4 merged puzzle pieces.
Sometimes talking about it helps, and just writing it above makes me think how to do it

And another productive night tonight. Got the SFX engine running although at early debugging stage only

On running through the game i found around 26 individual SFX's. However on further examination (and to keep things simple) i need only 16
Things like the simple confirmation and failure beeps on the pocket computer can also be used for the simon computer.

Some of you may remember the Simon computer from the game, 2 rooms in the original game had a massive chequerboard computer screen and Ethan may walk up to it and switch it on. The computer will then play 3 random notes, each one assigned to a specific cell on the board(which will turn on when playing). The player(Ethan) must then select the same cells but in order of ascending notes. On getting each sequence correct one more note is added to the sequence and either a Lift reset or Robot snooze is awarded to Ethan.

If i get time i may also add a difficulty level whereby instead of the chequerboard cells turning on, the momentarily flick on raising the difficulty since then you'd have to remember where the cells where

The only complexity in the SFX engine is that some SFX use more than one channel. I am using a new scripting language for all of this leaving it to the script itself to select the channels it uses

I'm pretty sure i can create most of the SFX easily. However the robot Plasma sound from the C64 is especially cool and difficult to reproduce with the AY. However i have some ideas up my sleave (using 1 channel + the Envelope generator in bistable mode)

Just a quick update, just debugged enough to hear my first sfx from this Engine. Ok so its just a beep but its a good strong beep

Good progress tonight as well. Went back to the room arena and it promptly crashed. an hour later found that a common define had set JUMP for the sfx script to one value which was overriding the JUMP for the Droid script. Easily solved. Now the rooms are very noisy

So some bugs still to solve.
1) When you move up infront of furniture in a room it sets off the search sequence, which moves Ethan into searching the furniture for puzzle pieces. The progress is presented as a search bar above Ethan. As you keep pressing up so the search bar advances. Let go, run away, return and the search bar will continue where you left off. You can also run to any furniture and do this so the code must be intelligent enough to record the search progress of every piece of furniture in the room. Once the search finishes it reports if something is found and deletes the furniture item from the screen.
So quite alot of processing going on there. And a few problems atm

2) Ethan can move up and down lifts in the room but some lifts are currently only moving up and down a certain amount and not the full range. Also the lifts currently stop every half platform height whereas the original game moved to the next visible platform.

3) Ethan can jump ontop of a half platform but if he runs off it he won't fall until he stops. Should be easy enough to fix

4) Sometimes when Ethan somersaults he'll land back on the ground but he'll then not be able to run passed pieces of Furniture.

5) When in the lift shaft Ethan currently falls to the bottom of the shaft because no collision map has yet been auto-generated for this section.

Anyway back to achievements..


This is the "work in progress" puzzle screen with new menu options.
Notice that it is currently missing the "work area" puzzle pieces. This is still to be done.
I also thought u might like to see the green screen terminal menu