Upgrade Time: Encounter

Want to talks about games you like, would like to see developed on the Oric, it's here.
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ibisum
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by ibisum »

Wow, this is really polished and looking very smooth. I really like the 'concurrency' feeling, the app feels as if it is alive and moving along in time with the player. It's also an impressive UI paradigm, not just as a text adventure, but a front-end to any kind of process .. great work as always, and thanks for sharing. I'd love to see the sources some day ..
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by coolman66 »

Great News , MAGIC !
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Dbug
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

iss wrote: Tue Jan 04, 2022 7:35 pm 2. the IRQ hooking routine assumes only Atmos compatibility, imho it's easy and worth to support Oric-1 ROM too.
3. in the YT video description "miniserve" link is invalid.
As I said, the code is not committed because it's quickly hacked around stuff, just to see if it would work.
The description is basically copy pasted from the previous video, so I guess I'll have to check these as well.

Thanks :)
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

So, for the ones wondering what the status of the game was, I've started again a few weeks ago.

The previous-previous video was an attempt with Floppy Builder...
The previous video was a "course correction" attempting to continue the Sedoric + BASIC version but with some assembler module.

The system to import assembler modules was actually published in OSDK 1.20 around January, but I've gave up on that system for Encounter, because ultimately it works but it still stayed a 100% BASIC game which was quite limiting, really a case of "putting lipstick on a pig".

So I moved back to the Floppy Builder idea, which I had abandoned because I did not have proper code for a lot of things like keyboard handling for example.

But since then I had done some OSDK articles on keyboard handling, and I managed to upgrade the small Floppy Builder prototype to get something with actual keyboard inputs.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I do have a version of the game with the intro, all the locations, all the fancy graphical improvements, transitions between scenes, items and containers logic, and the base of a simple scripting system I can use to reimplement the game logic.

I'll not make any video until the game is actually playable at the same level at the BASIC version was, simply because making these videos take a hell of time, and time is in short supply.

If you want to follow the updates, I'm doing that on Twitter these days, mostly because that's a way to get the interest of people who don't really know the Oric.

Here is a typical example of the type of updates I'm doing:



Some of the posts are relatively detailed, but that's as close as a "developer diary" as I could came up with.



Another difference is that now I commit most of my changes the day or the next day, and all in the same location, no more "part 17"...

There's been quite a few commits :)

https://osdn.net/projects/oricsdk/scm/svn/commits

Anyway, that's my update regarding the project, it's not forgotten.
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Chema
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Chema »

It is nice to hear you are still working on this... and how you are improving this game is incredible!

I am glad you are also experimenting with the Twilighte mask idea... I guess it works much better for big graphics, or does it also do a fair job for small sprites?
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

Chema wrote: Sun Apr 16, 2023 9:17 pm I am glad you are also experimenting with the Twilighte mask idea... I guess it works much better for big graphics, or does it also do a fair job for small sprites?
The jury is still out on that one, I think the idea is usable if you plan in avance when making the graphics, it's much more complicated to retrofit in some existing set of sprites.
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by iss »

@Dbug: Can you check the library.ndx ?
It "indexes" a file 'disk.s" which is missing in the lib/ directory. (It's obviously the same as 'loader_api.s' ... ;))
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

iss wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 3:10 pm @Dbug: Can you check the library.ndx ?
It "indexes" a file 'disk.s" which is missing in the lib/ directory. (It's obviously the same as 'loader_api.s' ... ;))
If you remove that entry, does everything else works fine?
It was an attempt at integrating the FloppyBuilder loader directly in the SDK, but it did not work quite as well as I wished, so I never committed the rest.
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iss
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by iss »

Dbug wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 4:57 pm If you remove that entry, does everything else works fine?
Yes, when removed link65 works fine.
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

Ok, I committed the removal of disk.h, and while I was at it committed a tiny fix to tail.s
And I'm going to move these messages to the OSDK thread because that has nothing to do with Encounter really :)
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

So, small update, I now have the scene dynamically show the items or not depending of if they are present there or not.

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iss
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by iss »

Great progress, Dbug!
I've played quickly with the width of 'space' (i.e. display.s line #1286) here is the result:
space.jpg
Of course you know about this and it's just matter of taste ;).
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Dbug
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

The font system is not finished, and among other things I will:
- truncate the lower part of the lower case "f" because it's looking weird on many places
- implement a complete system for accents, not as individual letters but as ^¨´` etc... that can be added to any other character

This will have an impact on all that is displayed, so the current bubble will not be displayed exactly as they are, and at that point I'll tweak things like the spaces, which indeed were narrower on my original "hand made" graphics.
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Chema
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Chema »

This is getting most impressive...

I like the fade routine... are you loading the graphics directly from disk (with unpacking, etc.)? I wonder if it could be speed up a bit (just curious :D)
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Re: Upgrade Time: Encounter

Post by Dbug »

Chema wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 5:30 pm I like the fade routine... are you loading the graphics directly from disk (with unpacking, etc.)? I wonder if it could be speed up a bit (just curious :D)
The image is loaded in a buffer, and then the whole 240x128 image is cross-faded using a 6x6 dithering pattern over multiple frames.

You can see the code here:


It may be possible to optimize it, but right now I'm all out of ideas (at least ideas that leave some free memory!) :)
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