Always such a fun phase.

After spending a while thinking of how to do what I wanted to do, then another week writing and rewriting and doublechecking what was written, I finally started pasting the new code for holdable objects into the rom. And for the first time sinc... ok for probably the first time, the game didn't need any tweaking just to display the kernel properly on first assembly!

However the key wasn't responding to the collision routines.

That was a quick fix. I just forgot to copy/paste in the new Black Key AI routine. And since the way detecting for held-ness is changed, naturally nothing would appear to work.

So I changed it and reassembled.

It ain't working proper. But is working a bit. The positional offset for the Y direction seems to not work at all. I'll have to look into it. The X direction seemed reversed. Instead of the key moving to position itself in front of you, it was trying to be dragged. (I could probably use this info to allow some items to be dragged of course) I swapped them over and they look like they work now.

Another part of the Y direction is that I'm moving up, the key disappears! Until I stop. At which point it reappears where it normally would right below me. It should be right above tho, but as I said the offset is totally failing to increment. Those are the basic bugs for me to iron out, hopefully today.

A last part is that I have to add an extra check on the object's X position. Trying to set the object when it's X is out of range causes an extra line to be generated. I avoid this normally by checking for it and temporarily pushing the object's Y coordinate high enough to signal to the object manager not to display it. Since the object is held when this happens, we can overwrite the Y coordinate safely - it'll get recalculated again in the next frame based on the player position anyway.

That is, until I add in the drop code. But the drop code will have to look for that condition and set new X/Y/Room coordinates. may cause an issue with dead exits that don't lead anywhere. But I think it might be sufficient to tell the routine "If exit dead, use current room but continue setting X/Y". Meaning if you tried to drop it through the left side of the screen, but there was no room beyond that, the dropped object would appear on the other side of the screen in the same room when dropped.

Ah well, we'll see how far I get by tonight.

*update*

Wow. Those bugs were easy to fix. I was corrupting X in the Up test without realizing it wasn't fixed in time to position the object. I just swapped the X references to Y references. Modified the Offset range a bit so that the held object would be further away from you on all sides, just a bit. One left and up, it was almost touching the player which was a bit closer than I wanted. I may set it up to move a little further away yet.

Not quite ready to release it it as the actual version 0.017. As I had planned on having the drop button work in this version as well. Here's a rom for how it stands as is tho, minus the fire button functionality.