Author Topic: Escheron: Shadow over Ragnoth (Read 180378 times)

Iambian · « **Reply #105 on:** July 01, 2009, 01:47:23 pm »

Though the help was decent, I decided not to use it after all. His scheme seems to work a bit better for a(n) horizontally-aligned buffer and... I decided that this should be a project that would work better on them 15MHz calcs.

The result? I have attached to this post an animated screenshot of the tilemapper in its basic stages. It inherently handles smoothscrolling, but I didn't write any code that would take advantage of it yet. Reason being that I need to verify that all the maps are in place before I add any enhancements like that. That, and doing it by blocks just makes it faster to scan through the map to view any possible defects.

The hardest part was getting the routine to conform to the grayscale interlace method, since I wrote the tilemapper to interact directly with the LCD as though it was its own LCD writing routine. The problem behind that is that it only works well on the 15MHz calcs, for which this routine was designed.

For the moment, the whole thing still functions on the old TI-83 Plus, albeit in poorer quality.

simplethinker · « **Reply #106 on:** July 01, 2009, 01:57:25 pm »

It looks great

Is the buffer still vertically aligned and interleaved?

Iambian · « **Reply #107 on:** July 01, 2009, 02:17:22 pm »

Quote from: simplethinker on July 01, 2009, 01:57:25 pm

It looks great Is the buffer still vertically aligned and interleaved?

Sho enuff, it be.

And when I said it would be of poorer quality on the TI-83 Plus, I base the observation on the difference Wabbitemu produced (the screenshot, with an 83+SE ROM), and PindurTI (needless to say). Wabbitemu looked GREAT while PTI looked like it would suck horribly.

inb4 can't compare two emulators. On PTI, the title screen, which used just the LCD writing routine to simulate grayscale, it looked PERFECT on that, too. The comparison is valid when both emus are capable of making perfect grayscale when the only thing that has changed was the tilemapper.

SolusIpse · « **Reply #108 on:** July 01, 2009, 07:14:41 pm »

CoBB stopped PTI dev a long time ago didn't he because there was an inherent bug?

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #109 on:** July 01, 2009, 07:28:17 pm »

I don't remember why. I think it was because of the bug causing files with the Archive flag turned ON to give transmission error

Iambian · « **Reply #110 on:** July 02, 2009, 04:06:36 pm »

So, I ripped a few hairs out while doing this stunt. Spent time relocating the loaded to another page of the app, where the tiles and the tilemap will reside. Had a few problems formatting CalcGS output to the scheme I'm using (which almost drove me insane), and a less annoying alignment bug that was squashed faster than any of the failed interleave cycles I did trying to get the mess to work.

Result? See in the screenshot. Zera, with whom I remain in contact for the project, couldn't be happier with the result.

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #111 on:** July 02, 2009, 04:33:20 pm »

darn, so friggin nice looking. Nice job so far Iambian (and Zera)

noahbaby94 · « **Reply #112 on:** July 02, 2009, 05:01:32 pm »

Wow that's quite impressive.

Eeems · « **Reply #113 on:** July 02, 2009, 05:54:15 pm »

oh wow! that's really cool!

simplethinker · « **Reply #114 on:** July 03, 2009, 11:16:11 am »

It looks awesome! Have you finally finished with the tilemapper?

Raylin · « **Reply #115 on:** July 04, 2009, 05:17:30 pm »

JESUS! What kind of epic magic have you cast now?
The screenshot's spell... IT COMPELS ME!

Iambian · « **Reply #116 on:** July 05, 2009, 08:33:15 am »

Zera has notified me that there appears to be problems with regards to rotated tiles. While in some cases, this didn't affect much, there was a subtle aesthetic problem that should be remedied in a few. This was revealed after I gave him a binary of the project thus far. So, I've asked him to recompose the maps given the extra data needed.

On another note, the number of maps and the data with them is HUEG. After a day of this, I grew tired of manually compressing each map, knowing that it wasn't exactly perfect. I owed it to myself to somehow automate the process. Hello, mIRC scripting

Still, I'm not sure it would be enough without some cross-page magick. 13 maps down eating up 4K and another 20 or so maps to go with 3K left. Maybe? I'll let ya all know about it later.

As far as what these maps look like? I decline to say much more at the moment, as we're fearful of releasing too many "spoilers". By the time the next screenshot is released, it'll has smoothscrolling and some decent collision detection. Show you a town or two.

---
On a related note, now that I've bound the movement to direct keypad reads instead of the simulated getkey routine, I've noted that the tilemap's speed is too fast to comfortably sit through while testing. Sooner or later, I'm gonna have to write code to take advantage of the routine's scroller. Well. It'll make it better by enough to sit through it without having to tap my keyboard. It went from tapping the keyboard to increase the speed to tapping the keyboard to slow it down. Strange, eh?

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #117 on:** July 05, 2009, 09:55:40 am »

mhmm nice idea (the mirc script)

, for Illusiat 13, when making maps (ASCII in my case), I often run into the issue of having to fill an entire map with mostly a character that takes a long while to access (usually CATALOG then scrolling down a lot after pressing Z or up after pressing A). What I did is that I made a small program where I select the char I want (stored in a string when program starts) then either press 2nd or ALPHA. If I press 2nd then it does "For(Z,1,7:Ans+Ans:End" to create a 128 char long string, else it just create a string of 1 character. This speeds up the process of creating maps considerably.

As for the maps themselves, if Zera didn't change anything to the original Lost Legend 2 content, then I am afraid some of them are alerady avaliable to the public for those who know the URL of the old Omnimaga images folder

(back in 2007, he posted a bunch of them on the old board). The same place where I found that ROL4ever screenshot

Silver Shadow · « **Reply #118 on:** July 05, 2009, 02:26:37 pm »

PLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZPLZ I'm begging you, PLZ make it compatible with the slower 83+! PLZ!

DJ Omnimaga · « **Reply #119 on:** July 05, 2009, 05:04:21 pm »

from what I can guess, it will be, but I think with much slower framerate or much crappier grayscale. Personally, given that some people are alerady used to slow framerate in RPGs (since most are written in BASIC), I don't think they should mind if a RPG in ASM had 3 frames per second when walking if it has a lot of offer and is grayscale. This is no to mention that it's just a calculator, after all.

Also 3 fps means that when walking around you move 3 tiles per seconds. In most RPGs from the late '80s and early '90s, you walk at like 2.5 tiles a second. Basically, you would still walk around at the same speed, if not faster than a real Gameboy RPG, you would just have no smooth scrolling

Author Topic: Escheron: Shadow over Ragnoth (Read 180378 times)

Iambian

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simplethinker

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Iambian

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SolusIpse

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DJ Omnimaga

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Iambian

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DJ Omnimaga

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noahbaby94

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Eeems

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simplethinker

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Raylin

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Iambian

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DJ Omnimaga

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Silver Shadow

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DJ Omnimaga

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