Impossible Mission

Want to talks about games you like, would like to see developed on the Oric, it's here.
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Twilighte
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Impossible Mission

Post by Twilighte »

Another project i am currently working on is Impossible Mission.
Here are a couple of screenshots
Please note these are actual screenshots, not artist impressions :)

Image

The lifts, robots and hero move nicely. But i now need to sort out collisions, falling behaviour and optimised Ethan frames.
14 of 32 rooms have been designed. Script code for robot behaviours have been redone to save a fair few bytes.

Image

The lift works(with glowing blob in room map) and the hero can run and jump. Now need to add the puzzle section.

No planned Demo yet. I intend to get the complete game working (hopefully in 48K) then release to a few testers (Dbug, Jede, Symoon) then release as freeware.

Still a fair amount of work ahead, but gradually getting there :P
A preview was shown at this summers CEO meet and will be reported in the next CEO magazine.
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Chema
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Post by Chema »

Now this look really impressive Twilighte!

I can't wait to see it working!!!

Well done, as usual :)
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ibisum
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Post by ibisum »

I can't express how much joy it gives me to see games being written for the Oric-1 in **2009** .. oh man, when I remember how remote and distant I was, (Australian desert), hacking away on my lonely little Oric-1, looking jealously at all the copied tapes my neighbor was getting for his Speccie from his pals in the UK, while all I had was converted BASIC apps from machines like the TRS-1 and so on, geeze ..

And now, we see things like this. Long live Oric, all hail Twilighte! :)
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Symoon
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Post by Symoon »

Twilighte made us a demo at the CEO meet, and it's amazing.
Talent and energy are all around this forum ;-)
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

Thankyou one and all for your kind words. Compliments make it even more worthwhile.

I have finished coding the second version of the Robot script engine. The first was way inefficient. This next one should work much better and use a whole less memory for each robot behaviour script.
I am a little concerned about the size of some furniture in relation to other furniture and the rooms. I designed them based on a much lower ceiling than in the working version you see today. As such i need to redesign a few to take advantage of the extra height.
The next major part is making Ethan sprites dynamic in size. Currently all Ethan sprites are 3x25 but flicker alot when jumping over robots.
Dynamically sizing each sprite means less flicker and easier to detect collisions. It also means smaller memory footprint for sprites :P
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Post by JamesD »

Looks impressive! Keep up the good work!
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

Compiled and have begun testing new robot (or droid as i call them) code. Some bugs but holding together pretty well.
The new script also handles the sensing of Ethan. The original game could sense Ethan in two ways..
1) By sight so that if ethan was on same level(platform) and facing Droid its behaviour may change.
2) By sound so that the droid would always know where Ethan was regardless if he was not on the same platform.

The latter (2) has not been developed. I prefer the robots should only react on seeing Ethan :wink:
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Silicebit.
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Post by Silicebit. »

Impressive, very impressive!!. A dream comes true. Many hours front the C64 of my brother, playing this game, and now comes to our dear Oric.

Thanks Twi, thank you very much!!.


Silicebit in vacations at Almeria, writing from his laptop connected at only 40Kbps. :shock:

Heat, sun, beach 8) and slow connection!!. :(


Destroy him my robots!!. :D
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

Thanks Silicebit for your kind words of encouragement.
You reminded me too that this game was the first game i ever played on the C64. In a friends basement in Weeze in Germany when i was about 16. I was instantly addicted to the game and the machine though it was some years later that i afforded a C64 :P
Maybe others can recollect when they played this game?

I will continue to log my progress here.

Finally managed to work out Ethan Frames.
The existing animation i had was a direct conversion of the C64 version, shrunk down to size (about 75% original to fit onto Oric screen) and edited alot to emphasize the arms and face more than C64 version :P

Note the legs are precisely designed so that a single stride spans a complete Platform Lift. This permitted stepping across chasms.
The problem was that i seem to have only captured 7 of the 15 frames used because the arms moved twice the speed of the legs and looked very wrong.
So hopefully these new frames will sort him out.

Ethan running is composed of 15 frames for right bitmap, 15 for right mask, 15 for left bitmap and 15 for left mask. Thats quite alot.
Jumping frames were fine except i need to recapture them since jumping frames will be dynamic in height and its nye impossible to isolate the end of the data in the .byt statements.
The original game saved a few bytes by having two sets of frames. Since the legs are black only one stride needed to be captured but the arm movement spanned the complete left/right stride.

I'm also toying with the idea of inversing some of the heroes arms and face. This will make them appear much whiter than currently but could cause some issues with background masking. We shall see.

Also tested most of the new Droid script code today. It crashes when i try to detect Ethan but i will sort that out later :)
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ibisum
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Post by ibisum »

Maybe others can recollect when they played this game?
I must confess that I didn't quite get into it as much as other games on the C64, mostly because I'm a shooter fan and don't have much patience for running around and finding switches to flick ... BUT ... I am a huge fan of emulators (eagerly awaiting the arrival of my OpenPandora console to go with GP2X and WIZ and.. so on..), and my WIFE insists that I load up Impossible Mission whenever she sees me playing with my GP2X .. so there is lots of "Stay a while, stay .. FOREVER!" going on in this house, and as a result, my two year old is getting trained rather heavily in robot-avoidance techniques, something I'm sure he's going to need as a decent skill in the future.

He gets the Oric setup, btw, in a few weeks (once I finish integrating everything into a child-proof box), so I can't wait to load this up for him and see him and my wife competing for time on the ORIC!!! LOL! :)
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

so there is lots of "Stay a while, stay .. FOREVER!" going on in this house, and as a result, my two year old is getting trained rather heavily in robot-avoidance techniques, something I'm sure he's going to need as a decent skill in the future.
haha, excellent! :lol:
He gets the Oric setup, btw, in a few weeks (once I finish integrating everything into a child-proof box), so I can't wait to load this up for him and see him and my wife competing for time on the ORIC!!! LOL!
I can't think of anything more motivating than that. Though you may have to wait a tad longer than a few weeks :P
Thanks Ibisum :D
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Post by Symoon »

Twilighte wrote:Maybe others can recollect when they played this game?
I played on the Atari ST. IIRC, it was called Impossible Mission II.
I only have vague memories of it, I found the game way too hard to be finished in the time allowed and got tired of it after a few tries. Well, maybe I hadn't discovered the best way to play, since I didn't have the instructions with my not-so-original copy :roll:
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

Impossible Mission 2 was a bit like the next generation of IM1 but i could never get into it. The platforms where just too convoluted and the screen looked a mess. I have always preferred IM1 8)

Log..
Just captured all the new running and jumping frames to xa source .byt's. Man it took a long time to do.

I use a special version of HIDE to capture areas of the screen and dump to printer as .byt statements. These i can then directly insert into the source code. It just takes ages to do because the capture code is in good old BASIC so is a bit slow (F4..).

I also finished redesigning some of the furniture both to take advantage of the raised ceiling height and to make them a tad more colourful :)
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Post by Chema »

Twilighte wrote: I also finished redesigning some of the furniture both to take advantage of the raised ceiling height and to make them a tad more colourful :)
Man, your skills with the Oric's screen are impressive. Never seen something like that. I am not sure if managing sprites over such designs is a nightmare or not, but seeing this, it seems that platform games can be a good target for the Oric.

You always surprise me with your work :o
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Twilighte
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Post by Twilighte »

Dude, all these new levels of colourful screens can be originated back to Pulsoids. Its only when working on a test screen for SSM73 (just before i started on IM) that i suddenly realised this technique can lend itself to most other game genres :idea:

The best colour combination is 3/6 since it produces Yellow, White, Black, Blue, Cyan and Red leaving just Green and Magenta absent.
Other colour combinations are feasable like 2/6 which provide all colours apart from Blue and Yellow.

The technique is based on setting the attributes (once) down the leftside of the screen (a bit like RGB screens) with a repeating pattern of Yellow Ink/Cyan Ink. Then the rest of the screen is filled with bitmap and inverse only. This removes the need for any further attributes on the screen thereby allowing sprites to freelly roam 8)

Now overlaying a multicoloured (as in normal and inverse video) sprite (like the Robots) on a multicoloured background requires a bit more work on the part of the plot routine, just to modify the masking technique depending on inverse but when done it really does work extremely well.

And that is it, the graphics always simply come down to designing something (anything) then looking at it and analysing why the blob you've just drawn looks like something that ought to be thrown in the trash. And just keep chiselling away at the design until (eventually) you see something you are happy with :)

Like the sofa (which you see above) now has a nice under belly trim and red rose throw (i kid you not) :P
I'll upload a new screenshot when i get it all working again.
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