The Upward Spiral - Dissatisfaction Report

[RSS Bot]

Haven't had time to really fix this up. There's an infinite loop inside the sprite handler, apparently incurred as a side effect of moving that subroutine into its own memory bank.

 

The revised layout goes something like this: Banks 0 to 5 are map screens (game play screens); bank 6 contains sprite judgement/drawing-list creation, the interleaved (every third scanline) map venetian blinds code, and sprite graphics; bank 7 contains the Ursa interpreter, scripts, Ursa-injected bitmaps, text-drawing, and the status screen. I fully expect to shift that around a bit, such that bank 6 ends up being bank 7 most likely, and banks 0 .. n are map screens while n+1 .. 6 are Ursa banks.

 

The Ursa interpreter, thank God, is flawless, but it's only running with the barest essential functionality, which (as it turns out) is sufficient for theoretically doing the main menu, simple NPC interactions, and NPC (monster) control sequences of the usual sorts, e.g. "walk toward the player without walking through walls." I'm working on a slightly more intelligent NPC script to implement a "right-hand rule" but really want to see the sprites actually functioning before messing with that any further.

 

Besides which, the ursac rewrite was put on hold to get sprites done. The new parser is a bit more LALR and a bit more flexible in its string injestion, which is the more important part.

 

String display is still basic 48px 12-column display; I toyed with 24-column and such and decided to KISS; there wasn't any real need for any of the game displays. Note that letters M, N, Q, and some punctuation are still double-column-width characters because I wanted legibility ...

 

On the personal side, while I'm still ardently hoping to get this project released in a fully playable form in less than a month, the toll of having been beat up pretty good while breaking up an attempted murder two weeks ago, and the discovery yesterday that a friend of mine is on hospice care and not expected to be around many days more, along with all the usual madness of trying to juggle 3 jobs and an hobby like this, are making it sadly likely that a playable demo level might be all that's ready in time for the 30th anniversary :-( Nonetheless, I'm still rather proud of the architecture of the engine and hope that by year's end the Skyline game, at least, will be fully finished and polished. Regardless, I'm aiming to have "as much as possible" working perfectly in time for the 21st, and the release party will go on in whatever form the game ends up.

 

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