Blogs

2011-Jan-24 by MrTAToad in Spots

The Archimedies version  of Spots (of which I am basing my version on) and a very efficient way of storing the levels, whereby each tile had a value of 0 (no tile), 1 (a tile) and something like 2 and 3 for the different players.

Up until recently (ie last week), my level designs were taken from Spots V2 that I released last year or so.  Unfortunately the level format was extremely inefficient, with each tile taking up 2 bytes and, for the arcade levels, requiring two layers - not exactly an efficient use of data, especially, as I would like to, run the program on machines with limited disk/storage space.

So, I had to write a program to convert my levels (which were originally created in Mappy) to the more efficient data system.

I have added a few extra things to the format, namely the default tile is now installed, whether the level can be used with 0 jumps and an 8 byte header.

This change also meant I had to change the Spots level loading code (the program wont look for any user-created content now) to a much simpler routine.

The display routine will now alternate between light and dark tiles (like in the original version), to give a more interesting display.

I now need to make sure the border is displayed correctly, put back the hiscore display, add a menu option to allow levels with holes in to be ignored, and write the instructions.

The levels data also needs to be updated to make sure that if 0 jumps are selected, the level can be ignored (or not).

After  this the game will have all the features in it, and just needs extensive bug testing

2011-Jan-16 by Hatonastick in News

In 55 minutes I turn... Um... Old.  Ok technically I really turn old in 23 hours and 50 minutes as I was born at 11pm at night on the 17th of January, but that's besides the point.  And well rather difficult to organise birthday parties for...  Where was I?

Ah yes.  Well as many of you know, or maybe I didn't tell you, plus some of you may have forgotten, last year, ie. 2010 the year of the toilet, was not a particularly good year.  Not for a lot of people as far as I can tell actually.  For me it was a sudden descent from almost stepping out of the shadow of 10 years of chronic illness, to one of the worst bouts of illness I've ever had.  In fact it's no exaggeration that I almost died back in March, 2010, thanks to a high grade (so high I was being interviewed by members of the Infectious Diseases mob pretty much every day as they couldn't accept I didn't know where I got it from) 'Golden Staph' infection that somehow got into my blood, and I'm still recovering from that whole annoying drama.  However, things are finally starting to pick up again and I'm thinking, using those little grey cells that I sometimes like to pretend I have... Well assuming that they are in fact grey.  They might not be.  Ahem.  Where was I?   Oh yes, I'm thinking that maybe this year I will actually get to use those little (or not) grey cells to actually make a game.  In GLBasic.  Yes, yes!  I know!  Who would have thought!  Well, not I obviously as my little grey (or not) cells haven't been doing that much thinking for so long now.  They might not work anymore.  Really.  In fact after a whole year of sleeping sitting up (I still can't lay down), staring at walls, staring at TV's, staring at computer games and generally maiming people online in "Mount & Blade Warband" may have in fact taken their toll on those little grey (or not) cells.  Yes, it's true.  All of it.

So now, gradually, day by day I sit staring at my 10kg stack of paper that contains ideas and notes from the past 5-10 years and think about entering them so they may join their relatives stored in the many gigabytes of files I have hidden, without actually being hidden, more sort of ninja without the stealthy-leaping-out-and-killing-people-with-a-big-sword-thing, on my ultra-secret-unencrypted-with encryption-cryptical-stealthed (it's black!) memory stick thing.  Yes, yes it's true!  I almost think about doing it.  Seriously, who would have thought?  Not me of course, because of those little grey (or not) cells.

With much gladness and frovility-filled-joyness I can almost happily report that things are going somewhere, at some speed -- which may or may not be at great speed, certainly not at the speed of thought thanks to those little grey (or not) cells.  Yay!  Yes, yes it's all true.  Thank you.



My little grey (or not) cells thank you too.

2011-Jan-15 by MrTAToad in Spots

Finally got an efficient way of checking for an end of round.

2011-Jan-13 by MrTAToad in Spots

The code for detecting the game end still isn't correct

I'm also trying to think of what background to add for the title too...

2011-Jan-11 by MrTAToad in Spots

One thing I've just found out when trying to recover my Acorn emulator (so I can create more arcade levels) is that the drive it was on was an IDE and not SATA one - which means I can't use my external drive...