Just load the demo and exit Koenig's quarters and you will see the "energy ball". I really thought it was clear that it was a foe, but obviously it was not... If you have any ideas about how to make this clearer, let me know and I will send you the bitmaps.Twilighte wrote:Ok, i'll lookTwilighte I need fixing this pic!
Other things I noticed that should be fixed:
1- I think character sprites should be at least 1 pixel smaller in heigth (better two), to avoid problems.
2- Have to fix the coordinates at which rooms are changed. There is a bug so trying to walk along the border is impossible.
3- Need to get rid of ROM, which is now used only for producing step sounds and other useful stuff for debugging. As disk access has its own irq routine, we must either join it with the main irq routine (keyboard reading) or switch between them when disk is accessed. As soon as this is done I can start using page 2.
4- Need to save initial state on memory, so you can restart when dying. Maybe page 2 or 4 can be used for this, but also another sector in the disk can be used to store this information. Maybe we can delay this to later stages (when initial data is fully decied)?.
5- Add a way to detect if there is a saved game in disk, as Dbug suggested. Have some ideas about this, but nothing clear.
6- Add confirmations when saving/loading and quitting the game (the latter might be another entry in the Infopost menu).
7- Add more functionality to infopost... there are still some menu items free.. Ideas?
8- Most important. It seems to me that the player will have difficulties identifying those tiles with which he can interact. Infoposts are clear, as inventory games, but how can he know that the alien plant is a given tile (in the room where the robot is, btw), or that he can interact with a given terminal to create the medicine? Obviously those tiles appear several times as just background...
I am thinking about a simple system to identify them... maybe something as simple as making them blink (dissappear/appear) when the character enters the room. Other more complex solutions will be signaling them with a given graphic (a small diamod-Sims style), but this could result in confusion. Making them blink, or making their name appear or something like this when the character is near is possible, but a good waste of CPU.
The last possibility is having special graphics for them, which is a memory (and tile ID) waste.
Any ideas here are appreciated.
Nobody noticed that the overall speed has been increased? That means it was not quite noticeable
I can try another optimization for rooms that do not use all the possible layers (and some other cases), but will only work in a small number of cases, as the upper door jamb is allways on layer 3...
Which reminds me someting curious. I imported the graphics of Knight Lore archs in the past. I test them and they work perfectly as doors... maybe we can create something similar for the outer jamb of our doors and then add the sliding door graphic in the middle. This will remove the need of the upper door jamb, but will have two drawbacks:
- Flats adjacent to doors will allways be the same (the new doorjamb)
- Probably doors will need to be taller (to avoid rendering defects), creating an strange effect on walls.
The main advantages would be having a "thick" frame for doors (which will reduce the strange effect that the char cannot reach empty spaces in some cases) and removing the need of a tile 3 layers above the door, resulting in complete doors over platforms (notice now they are not possible) and probably more speed (if the optimization I have in mind works).
What do you think?