Sunday, April 20, 2008

Not quite dead yet

Here is little something for you who fear that the project is dead. Not much have changed though:
  • Subgame should now take 10 seconds regardless whether you're playing on C64 or C128. That's still slightly longer than original, but way better than 12 seconds.

  • Game should finally be Drean 64 compatible. I thought I put the code for this into the game 18 months ago, but apparently I didn't. Well, who's going to send me a Drean 64/128 so I can actually test it?

  • Most likely there are some other changes too, it was six weeks ago when I last touched the source. The only reason I did it now was to fix the download link.
Note: if you for some reason want to archive every single release, then do yourself a favor. Don't use build number as filename part! It was never meant for that. Instead, parse it as BB-DDMMYY where BB is daily build count, DD is day of month, MM is month and YY is year. Then reorder these as YYMMDDBB and when using that as part of filename you get chronologically sorted list.

Edit: Drean compatibility is now confirmed, thanks to the_woz. Check out his blog, especially Drean-specific entries.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just discovered this and it sounds like something beyond my wildest dreams...! I will be trying it out asap. I can't tell if it's finished or still ongoing, but if it is the latter then please keep working on it. It sounds like you have done so much already, it would be a real shame not to finish now.

TNT said...

It's still ongoing... slowly.

I just realized that I've used over two years for this!

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear it is still progressing! I've played it a few times already and was initially struck by two things:

(a) How fast it is!
(b) How hard it is!

I can normally get to the 3rd ship of Paradroid without too much effort (5th ship is my best), but I haven't cleared the first ship on Redux yet! :-)

It's great though, I love it - many thanks for all your time and effort on this, and I can't wait to see what the future holds.

TNT said...

Speed adds some to the difficulty level - no more "bullet time" in tricky situations - but there are two other changes which have a larger effect. Radar and droid AI.

The following quotes are from the project page (worth reading, especially strategy hints ;)

Radar for droids equipped with one: all class 7-9 droids except 751.

Class 6-9 droids go towards player, radar equipped droids do that even if player is not visible. Both flee and pursuit behavior are strengthened by alert status.

You may have to slow down your playing style to avoid read alert until you get accustomed to higher speed.

Mike said...

I've just tried to email you on your gmail account, but its getting blocked because of the attachment. Do you have another?