Worklog for H&K

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Its Not better, just cos you die quicker(Posted 2006-05-15)
I hate lots of screen size. In the good old days, you would know how big the graphics view was going to be, cos it was hard wired in, nowadays however you have to cater to every man and his wide screen 256 colour dog.
I thought Id start the Most fantastic and brilliantly implemented LOMPC editor by creating a map type. Simple. But thinks I, the map type needs at this stage a 2d view. (Ok so the final game doesn’t need a 2d view, but the mission editor does), so off I trot and knock one together. Works brilliantly (as is to be expected), well ok when I say brilliantly, I mean that it works in 800 by 600 with no problems. When I moved over to the laptop to continue…. Yes well ok so maybe I forgot to allow for mode changes properly. Oh Um.

On this point, why do I always have a global screenwidth, and a global screenHeight ?
I’m not even considering using widescreen so surly ScreenHeight = ScreenWidth * 0.75. It would make changing the screen dimensions whilst in development loads easier, (well ok so I would only have to change one value rather than two). Never do it though, always without fail, just after the strict and framework, Global screenwidth,screenHeight.

Development of LOMPC Brill edition, was halted on Sunday, due to my nephew turning up, wanting yet another tutorial on FPS Creator, ( I bought it him for his 11th birthday). I say tutorial, but mostly in consists of me asking what fun the game is if the first room you go into has twenty Uber baddies in it, and you die straightaway. He thinks its fun anyway.

For everyone who hasn’t heard of FPS Creator, it’s from the dark basic people, it’s written in dark ( I think), and its crap. Oh I don’t mean that it doesn’t do what it says it does on the box, cos it does. Andy (My nephew), is not the brightest smarty in the box, but at 11 he can knock together a passable looking level of a game. What’s rubbish about it is its implementation, (or rather marketing). It’s basically an editor for a game they didn’t produce. Honestly, it looks like someone wrote an fps in dark, realised how crap it was, so just released the MOD creator. AND do they use standard md2 or 3ds models, (let me give you a clue, if they did you wouldn’t need to BUY extra models from them…..).

So all of Sunday spent waiting for FPS to display the minute change we made in the level. I would recommend that you get a demo of it to see, it might give you some ideas, and it is a good way to introduce kids to programming, it is a bit drop and go, but you do need to improve the scripts for everything.

PS Obviously If Blitz have a comparable piece of software, get that instead.

H&K

Statement of Intent(Posted 2006-05-13)
The Only One He Ever Finished.

I have been “messing” with computer programming since before I was bought a ZX Spectrum for Christmas (16K no less). When I would sit at the back of boring (i.e. Most) classes reading Listings in magazines. I would read the listing, and try to imagine what the finished program looked like. (I didn’t actually have a computer remember).
I would scribble down useful looking subroutines (I still think Go sub is a good idea), and change them to do other things. I would go to the shops and get their computers to do “pretty” things. I had been expecting a ZX81, so when for my birthday, (Well I say my Birthday, but it was a joint present for both my sister and I, and we didn’t get a Christmas present that year), I got a lovely new Spectrum I was overjoyed.
For those that remember the first spectrums didn’t come with any software, just a manual with some listings in it. One at least that I remember was a smash through the wall with a ball game, which was fun, but nearly as much fun was trying to figure out why it didn’t work properly, nearly always it was because of typing errors, which is hard to do (type wrong) when all the keywords are written on the keyboard and accessed by single Key presses. It was nearly always because of a variable mistyped, but it was fun to see what your program did, and try to get it to do what the listing said it would do.
My Imagination knew no bounds, space battle games, D&D remakes, Lego simulators etc. Then games started to appear in the shops, and well, you know, a real finished game or one that would take ages and ages (I was only twelve) to finish. So programming went out the window. Oh Um.

Then I bought Lords of Midnight, which was a fantastic game. People talk about wolfenstien as the first “first person” game, (which I could never understand, as surly 3D monster maze was sooner), but LOM was in 3D. Ok admittedly it wasn’t really. For those who cannot remember it, (its one of the fake loading screens in dawinia), a brief description.

LOM

The screen is split into three distinct parts, ( This was quite normal in spectrum games because each screen buffer (haha) was split into three, so that increasing the pointer to the screen by 256 (screenptr +256) would move you down on row of pixels, and by 32 (Screenptr +32) by a whole Char square, Then by 2048 (screenptr +2048) would move down a screen third. (This with the 768 Bytes needed for the colours) was the Spectrum screen. (Remember the spectrum only had 16K, so a 6912Byte screen was quite big). That’s why for anyone who was interested the spectrum loading screens loaded so strangely.
The Top of LOM was (If I can remember correctly) a shield of your current character and his name, and I think the time of day. The Middle Third was a 3d representation of the world in front of you, (you could see about eight map square to the front), with a sprite of the characters in the square to the front. And the bottom was of the people and or monsters who where in the square with you.
The games came with a nice Spectrum overlay that had all the commands in the game. You could look round (North, northwest etc), explore the square you were in, move forward Try to recruit the characters in that square, recruit more men (when in keeps or citadels) etc. Then when night fell, the baddies moved (Cos they are evil and only move at night), and battles happened. You would get rumours of fights in far-flung nations, dawn would break and you would have the chance to move again.
There were two ways to win, get Morkin, (Err Frodo) to get the ice crown to some pool or other thus destroying DoomDarks power. (Tip to all evil supermen DON’T put the main part of your power into a piece of jewellery, no matter how cool it looks). Or take DoomDarks main citadel by force of arms. You could loose by Morkin dieing, and either Luxor (Arigorn) dieing or loosing your main city

Oh the heroics of the game, rushing the wizard, (whose real name I cannot remember so we will call Gandalf), north in the hope of recruiting the northern nations. Lord Blood holding the plains of blood for as long as he could just to buy time, finding the dragon (Farflax I think) with Morkin so that he had help. Oh what memories.

Well anyway after playing the game a million times, (yes I said a Million), I was at a friends house, when I casually commented that if we could load in the save game position, we could give ourselves more troops. Well that was it. The save game position was simply a normal spectrum save without the header file. (i.e. If you had a header of a file the same size, you could play it just before the save game, and the spectrum would load in the save position.
Now For some reason LOM saved the whole map????, not just the position of the armies etc. And the AI instructions for the armies. (Well OK a linked list of where to attack next). What it didn’t do, (which annoys me to this day), is save all the name data for the map, just the name data for the top quarter or so. But It was enough.
An editor was born.
You could change the strength of all 32 of your allies, you could change who could recruit who, change the graphic of the characters (ok only to a pre defined graphic), change where swords, water of dawn, wolfs, dragons, mountains, plains etc where. You could choose how many armies chased the secondary character (Frodo ,err sorry Morkin), What route the baddie armies took, the whole shooting match. Ok so you couldn’t name places, the plains of Blood stayed the plains of Blood, (Or the maintains of Blood, or the Keep of Blood, but always … of Blood), accept for the Northern third.

The game was reborn. Then Doomdarks revenge came out. And it wasn’t as good a game, as the ones being produced by my friends on my editor, so we kept plying them.

Finally at last the editor was finished, (It was written in basic, but compiled with HiSoft Spectrum Compiler). And It was sent off for publication and riches. BUT Mike Singleton had gone and sold ALL the rights to TelecomSoft. (I think he went bankrupt, but not sure). And I don’t think the men at telecom soft even looked at it. I just got a nice letter saying they didn’t sell this sort of thing, but thanking me for bothering them.

And that was it. Never finished a another single thing, (cept A stupid Four player tron game in AMOS, which I had bet my mate could be programmed in less than an hour). I Half wrote an underwater “Elite” style game, a PBM fantasy game, a star craft type thing an absolutely brilliant sequel to rebel star raiders, (Well Before Enemy Unknown, and just as good), Etc. All, in my opinion well presented, and adequately written, and more importantly very playable. Yet none of them finished L
SO, I am going to write LOM in BlitzMaz. It wont be better than LOM, it wont be quicker than LOM, (Its turn based doh). What it will be is a reason for people to use my bloody scenario editor.

Now I don’t want any rubbish about how badly this remake of LOM is, cos the editor is brilliant.

H&K