Saturday, July 14, 2007

It's playtime!

Grab the new beta and have some fun.

Changes since the last release:


  • Decks have separate start position, you no longer start new ship on one of the waypoints.

  • Several waypoints near lifts have been excluded from available droid positions, making it safer to enter some decks.

  • Deck sections are completely separate from each other.

    • Droids stay in the correct deck section between visits and if teleported away.

    • Power off condition is now done for each section separately.

    • Bonus is still awarded only when the whole deck is cleared.


  • Some twinky stars added to background. Needs more work, especially for NTSC.

  • Droids aren't completely predictable under red alert any more.

  • Player droid damage calculation modified slighly, now higher class droids can take couple more hits under player influence.

  • Fixed character animation, ended up rewriting it completely.

  • Improved Game Over TV static.

  • F7/F8 selects starting ship, assumed you've cleared one or more ship.




There may still be a problem with the subgame, but I completed the first ship without shooting a single shot (pacifistic takeover?) without seeing the bug so at least it isn't too frequent. It might have gone away when I added some more temporary buffer clearing.

4 comments:

Grue said...

I tested this version briefly yesterday and bounced into problem, sometimes game failed to show sprites correctly. Ammunition sprites didnt show up, and sometimes even own sprite failed to show up. Usually after dying and when starting new game.

I dont know if it matters that my c64 doesnt have paddle caps to I need to start game fire button pressed down before title screen.

TNT said...

You bastard! You killed Sid! I cut it's POT pins and now my second button doesn't work!

Not really, I used a chip socket with those pins removed. While that caused the game start with 2-button mode and almost constant transfer mode unless I keep fire button pressed to start the game, I couldn't reproduce your problem. If you get weapon sounds you should definitely get sprites as well. Only thing that could prevent sprites from showing is the delayed VIC-II write routine and that one sorts itself out of any problem in two frames.

Do you have any non-modified C64 left? ;)

Anonymous said...

In this version's subgame, some boxes sometimes turn black without any apparent reason. Happened to me a couple of times.

Not that much twinking when the lights are out. Perhaps blinking some of the brightest colours would liven them up? And maybe more than one combination if possible.

TNT said...

I've noticed the subgame bug too, haven't found it yet. There's also another bug where player fire sometimes stops dead when enemy droid explodes. You need to scroll it out of view (or hide behind it so enemy fire explodes it ;) to be able to fire again.

Stars flicker on NTSC, is that enough twinking? Well, they don't flicker any more as I modified the play area draw routine to do everything in two parts. Current implementation is just testing to see if I end up keeping them or not. If they stay then I will add randomizer and colors.