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Wizard of Wor 2: The Arena


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Works great in Stella! Does that about wrap up the game play part of it?

 

Yes...tho there are a couple of small bugs to fix that I know of (reserve life counter digit not always displaying properly when starting a level, and music cues are sometimes dropped).

 

What's left is to expand the game to 16k so there's plenty of space for speech data, and add those cues to the program (nearly 2 pages left to do that). The 3 upper bits of the speech pointer can be used to trigger what type of speech to play next when the current one has ended (and a short delay has happened). The type would be whether a game was just started, the player was shot, etc (3 bits = up to 8 different types), and then the routine can pick randomly from that specific group. This way, nothing should overlap and cause problems for the VOX player.

 

What should be done with the leftover 4k bank? Put the original (bugfixed) game there which could be selected on powerup? I was originally considering using that bank to flicker between 2 sprite tables (so you have 2 colors per sprite), but the existing flicker routine kinda makes that impractical :(

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What should be done with the leftover 4k bank? Put the original (bugfixed) game there which could be selected on powerup?

 

Great question! The original game is a good idea. Or perhaps the enemies roster?

 

http://www.co-optimus.com/editorial/635/page/2/co-op-classics-wizard-of-wor.html

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5a/Wizard_of_wor_enemies.png

 

All that text might not be feasible, but theoretically you could get away with just the enemy sprite and its score value in a pinch.

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16k w/ current phrase data.

 

Does it talk too much? Does it work at all?

 

Ending phrases question:

Are they supposed to end with $1F & $FF...or just the delimiter $FF?

 

Note:

I've set up 8 "event tables" as described above. Currently, the "event" number never changes and it picks randomly from the first data table of pointers (which holds all of the phrases unsorted). Changing the event type in the future will be done by grabbing the current speech address being played, stripping away the upper 3 bits (which the 6507 does not use), and mixing it with the new event type #. When the current phrase is over (and the framecounter is zero), the bank holding the VOX routine uses this to pick from the new event data group.

WoW16k(unfinished).bin

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Ending phrases question:

Are they supposed to end with $1F & $FF...or just the delimiter $FF?

Only the $FF is strictly needed, but $1F resets the voice parameters (pitch, speed, etc) so it's a best practice sort of thing. Up to you if its leading or trailing.

 

I don't know if you're using this already, but if you want one word to interrupt another instead of playing afterward, you can send the ascii characters "\0RX" (without the quotes, with a literal slash character) before your new word. When the SpeakJet receives that sequence, it stops speaking and clears the buffer.

 

Great work on this guys - glad to see another Vox conversion!

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Here is some gameplay with the AtariVox+ talking.

The multiple mazes and higher resolution graphics are exciting enough, but it talks like the Arcade machine talked!

I love how the "tone" is so close to Arcade Wizard of War!

I hope this link works, it is a large file for Dropbox.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ef7l423v2hv923s/WOW%28speech%29.mov

 

If/When I remove the file from DropBox the above link will no longer work.

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Nice iesposta! Thanks for posting that.

 

The tone does sound spot on! Is that about how often the arcade game spoke too?

:thumbsup:

 

The arcade game spoke less often and never repeated (the same phrase in a row 2, 3, 4 times like this does now). It would repeat phrases, breaking them up as not to be the same back to back.

Also I understand it had "groups" of things depending on what maze and how far you got (for instance, phrases specific to The Arena only play in the Arena - or more like it announces the Arena). I don't really care one way or the other if we get THAT accurate or not. I don't know if that is easy or hard to do.

Also the arcade was hard to understand, and this carries over well. I made the sentences, and I can't tell what exactly it is saying! (Thought that was a funny point.)

The arcade did a lot of the laughing which I never knew was supposed be laughing, "ha, ha, ha, ha." It sounds like Ott Ott Ott Ott

 

There are still about two-thirds more sentences (over 70 total!).

First I just get the words in, then I see where it needs emphasis, faster, slower, higher pitch, lower pitch, trying to match the Arcade speech.

Also playback from Virtual Machine Windows 7 with the speech tool is not the best. It will drop parts of long phrases. For instance Windows may output and it will say "We're off the see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Wor." But the next time you play it you might get "the wonderful Wizard" and garbage.

It is good to hear that the Atari doesn't have any problem with playback. Weird, huh?

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:thumbsup:

 

The arcade game spoke less often and never repeated (the same phrase in a row 2, 3, 4 times like this does now). It would repeat phrases, breaking them up as not to be the same back to back.

Also I understand it had "groups" of things depending on what maze and how far you got (for instance, phrases specific to The Arena only play in the Arena - or more like it announces the Arena). I don't really care one way or the other if we get THAT accurate or not. I don't know if that is easy or hard to do.

 

Very easy. As mentioned, the phrase selection will be event-driven. That is...when a specific event happens (such as visiting the arena, shooting the wizard, etc), it's group number (0-7) is dropped into the pointer (whether or not a phrase is currently in progress). All this takes is a few bytes to store the value...and the program is already set up to deal with it automatically.

 

It's currently ignoring the event selection and going though all the phrases in a non-random way (hence, the constant repeating and such). Certain events will also take priority over others when finished, and not repeat back-to-back. Initial concern was that phrases do not overwrite/corrupt speech in progress ;)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Adding stars...

 

This is a bit of a problem. I originally thought that I didn't have enough cycles to do it along with everything else (single-line resolution, etc), so I used the leftover ball sprite for the door. Here, I undid that part and used the ball sprite for the player shot instead...using missile0 for the stars (so those can be a different color than the maze). However, sprite priority is still a small problem. Sprites must have priority over the playfield so that the upper part of the characters are not clipped. But doing this allows the stars to shine above the maze.

 

Lemme know what ya think.

 

BTW the bugfixed original game is present here, as well. Hold UP on either controller during the powerup sequence to activate.

WoW16k(unfinished).bin

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Wow, nice effect Nukey! I agree with iesposta about the priority "problem".

 

Only thing I can suggest is maybe turn down the brightness on the star colors? They look about the same brightness as the enemies because of the flicker. In the arcade they are a more subtle background element.

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Would it be possible to change the name of this forum thread? Only after it reached five pages did I get curious and discover this is more than just a WoW hack with different mazes. Others might also be ignorant.

 

I'm not sure--I can't see a way to do it at the moment.

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Much improvement, no "repeated phrases."

(Still a bit too chatty for my taste.)

Also, when game over, it says 1 of 2 phrases quickly, each screen change - title screen, maze screen, points screen. (Probably should just taunt player to play another game.)

 

I still can believe you can hack that all in WITHOUT having an AtariVox!!!

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The program still isn't dealing with "events"...this is to make sure that stuff isn't repeated (which will still be valid when events are implemented). Currently, there's not enough speech phrases to make event changes worthwhile. A couple of events only have a single phrase so far.

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