After a few weeks of generally enjoying the summer hols - and a little recreational maths , I have set my somewhat rested braincells to my little piece of this grand effort once again.
All the levels for this game are going to have to be pre-designed, unlike the randomly generated ones in my prototype, since there just isn't the space within a Beeb for all the storage required to check for 'doability'.(My apologies to my colleagues in the English dept. for making up words again.)
To this end, I have written a level designer which runs on my pc and so far have 5 levels of increasing difficulty set up.
The next task was coming up with a way to store them in the Beeb.
Since each 'cell' can be either empty or 1 of 4 colours, I have used 4 bits for each one, compressing each level to 120 bytes. Not too bad. I tried more complex compression techniques to try to bring this down but almost always the overheads involved left me with bigger chunks of data. For now I shall stick with it as it is.
Depending on how relatively complex I can make each level, I may resort to making them of different sizes, but this will also depend on how much space I have once the alpha version is up and running.
The obstacle which I now have to climb over is one of designing the graphics.
My initial idea was to have each 'box' in the van labelled with a company logo, (Acorn,CBM &c.) and then found that there are surprisingly few which come nicely squeezable into an 8x16 Mode 2 square. I have also tried recreating a Beeb,a Speccy &c into a character, and using game characters, but it always ends up a little hard to see where everything is compared to the 'joined-up' look of the prototype.
I shall experiment a little more then I shall probably post some pics to garner opinion on the matter.

All of this I shall try to squeeze around trying to get my head around using DFS from ASM for my MazezaM level designer -(and trying to come up with a set of supremely evil set of levels to hopefully challenge even Michael, although trying to do this for someone who is better at it than I am is proving somewhat challenging) - and having 'one last go' on Tom's wonderful Linux version of Atomulator . . . again!

Kian

You could do what Elite did - have a random generator, but have a list of interesting seeds - checked for on the PC.

I put a simple random number generator on the site which could easily be extanded to 16 bit+ and used on the PC.

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Random_number_generator_%28very_fast_-_very_basic%29

Hand crafted is usually much better, but random can give you ideas for mechanics.

Richard

I'm doing something like this for a project. You can make some very interesting maps if you use a technique like this, with features that are often surprising!

Thanks for the update, Kian. Top stuff! Sounds like you have everything in hand?

Hi all,
As Replay draws disturbingly close I am putting in a last ditch effort to get my little contribution ready for the world at large.

Thanks to Samwise for suggesting a few changes which I have now made but I'm stuck on a couple of wee things if anyone could offer a guiding hand.

Firstly, the solitary sound effect that is currently in there at the mo really needs to sound a bit more like a 'pop' than the generic beepy sound that I have now.(I took the 'slide' sound out of Mazezam and stopped it using the noise channel)
I have never really got to grips with all that envelope stuff so if anyone has something ready-rolled or can at least steer me in the right direction then I would be most grateful.
This is the code as it is now:


Secondly, I would like to add joystick support but from the cursory glance through various docs and the stardot forum I haven't yet found anything which I can make sense of.
Again, all pointers in the right direction received with humble thanks.
If it's not too big a job then at least I still have 2 days.

Kian

For joystick you want OSBYTE $80. X=0 returns fire buttons in X. X=1 and X=2 return ADC conversion in X/Y (Y is most significant byte) - think 1 is horizontal and 2 is vertical. The result is unsigned, so Y = 128 is centre.

Thanks Tom.
That looks simple enough.
That should be one more I can tick off on the list.

Cheers,
Kian

After much last-minute scrambling about and bug-fixing, I was just about ready to go in time for Replay.
After a few sage suggestions from Samwise I tinkered a bit, added the joystick support - (thanks again Tom) - and emailed off the final-ish version on Friday.
Nothing like cutting it fine
I haven't as yet managed to sort out the sound.
After a good deal of reading I managed to get a decent 'popping' sound going in BB4W, but when I ran the same code through the Beeb it just wasn't the same.
I still need to add in some sort of fanfare for the end of each level and something for when all 8 levels have been completed.
As mentioned at the start of this topic, I'm still not entirely happy with the 'box' graphic and am continuing, through a largely trial-and-error process to come up with something better.
I'm disappointed that I couldn't get to Replay but the call of the Bonfire was much too great, although its great to see Jon's game here for all to play.
Anyhow, its there to be grabbed if you so wish from the Eventureland WIP page:http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Eventureland
and I'm looking forward to seeing Jason & GroovyBee's contributions soon.
Now its back to Gimp and assorted Beeb manuals to finish off the last few niggles.
Kian

I've just realised that the version which I uploaded is a slightly old one with a bug in the scoring mechanism when you run out of possible moves.
I'll sort this out when I get home.
(Honestly, I am working really hard)
Kian

Done!

I have updated the download to v1.1
Still unhappy with the box graphics I have made them more 'box-like'.
If anyone has any opinions on this matter then I would be only too pleased to hear them.
The level select screen has also been updated so that once a level has been completed the venue door is closed. The level can still be attempted again, but the status of the door will not change.(I really don't want a bit of over-zealous button pressing to wipe out anyone's hard work.)

Kian
(Still trying to make a popping sound)

The ever-vigilant Samwise pointed out to me a few days ago that there was a problem with the joystick support in 'AtticBug'. The first was that it didn't actually tell you that the support was there (fixed) and that it only really worked if you used Beeb-Em and only if you were using a digital stick (also fixed).
Now that I know that it does what it says on the tin, it should be a relatively simple task to squeeze j/s support into MazezaM.

Kian

Me again.
Although it had not caused any problems in 'AtticBug' I have changed the keyboard reading routine to match the updated one for MazezaM.
A bit of 'just-in-case' coding.
I also changed the sound effect when removing boxes to what I think is something a little more satisfying.

Kian