Mord's Blog - More coding babble.

RSS Bot · November 10, 2009

I fixed the glitch mentioned in the last post soon after the update. Not entirely sure what was going on but the bug was caused by good old copy pasta. It was testing one condition then setting a totally different one based on it and voila. Key-to-Heart glitch.

Anyway, I likely won't do the next part today as I'm a bit busy with other chores, but the next task will be expanding the drop-item code so that it can detect when an object is out of bounds when dropped - and if dropped while out of bounds, it will be dropped in the proper room. If the exit is dead or wrap-around to the same room, the drop code will simply drop the object to the other side. (Currently I believe if I dropped an object out of bounds, it would become unavailable in the game!)

This will work for the vast majority of rooms but it brings a little snag into play. what if you push the key outside of a castle? Right now for when the player exits, a special routine will run to move them in front of the gate. (Generally the Gate's own AI will do the check by looking for the character's position on the screen.) I think I can take care of this with a similar routine in the room loader. Dropping the object outside of a castle (or dungeon really, etc) will cause it to drop to the side of the screen in a place where the player would normally set off some AI to reposition them. Since it doesn't really matter where the object is in the room until the player enters it, we can do a similar trick in the room bank itself.

That'll be the next trick AFTER the initial drop code modification. After that I'll consider "version 0.019" done. However I won't be calling it that. After reading over a thread that touched on WIP filenames, I've decided to change the format to a "title-year-mm-dd.bin" format. That way all the WIP roms will line themselves up.

I'll post the old version 0.018 (renamed) and the new version at the same time for people who want to do comparisons without digging through the blog archive for the old one or going to my website to get it.

Oh, I also think I have an idea for the life bar which will be redone in the following version. It'll be changed to a power bar instead and might implement a similar "powers" system to that used in E.T. In that your position on the screen will enable you to activate different powers. The powers that will be available, how the power bar is used, and how it will be notified to the player however won't be anything like it. I'm thinking of a bunch of ideas that would go well with this kind of setup and how to implement them in the game, but right now I'm too tired to actually write them down. I'm sure I'll remember them.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=blog&blogid=129&showentry=6587