Goodness guys. This is already looking of awesomeness. I'm seriously starting to consider postponing E:SoR to rework the CaDan engine. You know, so it'll be easier to work with.

Them backgrounds are looking quite awesome. Keep up the good work.

And thanks for taking interest in a deranged programmer's creation

Choosing to play the game in B/W will take a fair bit more work than what I've already shown. Going that route would require me to write a separate tile mapper for that option, but it shouldn't be too hard, since doing B/W will be much simpler and I wouldn't have to worry about grayscale quality at that point. It won't be purely B/W, since some of the layering effects would call for grayscale layering effects, which will be evident when they happen (also see the flashing effect in the "B/W" screenshot far above).

I just don't think the game would be very enjoyable in B/W, but I do respect that sort of option, now that I've got a proof of concept showing that it's indeed possible to do just that.

EDIT: When I get the 4LVGS Escheron: Shadow over Ragnoth done, I might just work on a B/W version that is compatible with the good ol' fashioned TI-83+ calculators. It shouldn't be *too* hard since all that would really call for is a reworking of the graphical assets. Since I have the source, all it would be is time consuming.

EDIT2: Urk. Now I realized something. I'd have to rework much of RAM to make it *really* compatible. Gotta have all your RAM free for this to work. That shouldn't be too hard if that's the case. Just collapse the rest of RAM into the $8000-$BFFF area and keep treating that stick of RAM that I have free'd up as the "extra page". See? I'm already thinking about how this is going to be made possible

EDIT3: And now... back to the inventory system. While I'm thinking about that, doing menus using a simple B/W overlay wouldn't take too much away from that.

Heheh. I'll be bouncing around between this topic and the new topic, I suppose.

With that, I'm announcing that the progress is ... well. Slow? I hadn't realized how complicated I made the inventory menu, but I'm sticking with that complexity because it was "good." I'm also making sure it makes more sense. So no being able to scroll through tons of empty space, not knowing exactly where you are. That omission in design is being fixed. Once I get the thing up and going the way I want to, I'll also consider adding in additional graphical niceness. What I'm thinking is moving the menu items in half-character increments to show a better "scroll".

That transition, btw, was pretty easy to make. Takes advantage of the buffer's vertical-alignedness.

I'm still working on those menus. Having a bunch of numbers from the old code to back up the reference images greatly help.

In E:SoR, enemies are encountered based on the number of tiles you walk across. This amount is based off of an encounter rate that varies depending on the area, and a small random variance that helps keep things not so consistent.

I suppose I'll keep using the old topic for updates that aren't related to the overall progress of E:SoR...

I was playing around with some of the screen effects. This one is what happens when I hold the screen inverse for two cycles instead of one (lightning effect):

I was also playing around with an almost constant monochrome filter. The results of that experiment is here:

All of these images are best viewed in Firefox or Opera, since they're high-framerate .gif files.

Got the title screen up and running again. The task ahead of me is putting together the tilemapper again, and then restructuring all the data that goes along with it and goes alongside it. Almost overwhelming, this task is.

Also, I'm using "cleaner" effects to hide some of the grayscale imperfections during long loading. Improvements need to be made for the real calc, but I'll get to doing that later.

EDIT: So in this screenshot, for the first time ever, you get to see what was originally planned for the title sequence. The flashing effect, that is. Might want to improve it.