Author Topic: DOA  (Read 72830 times)

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Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #105 on: January 07, 2012, 07:04:58 pm »
Thanks! If you're really itching to try it, you could alpha test for me, if you don't mind telling me in detail about things that go wrong or things you like/dislike that could use more work.

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #106 on: January 09, 2012, 01:55:30 am »
Progress report reposted from revsoft:

I spent about 5 or 6 hours (maybe more, I wasn't keeping strict track of time, but I worked at least 5 hours total in two long sessions today) first rewriting a pretty important section of code for speed reasons, then tracking down and fixing the stuff I had broken in the process. I have successfully sped the game up a little more. I'm having slight issues still with a couple of things speed wise, nothing that is strictly problematic, but it bugs the crap out of me because I want this thing to be smooth as butter.

Speaking of how crazy this thing makes me sometimes, I am now triple backing up my progress, and I'm considering backing it up in a few more places! lol I'd be pretty upset if I ever lost anything in this process. With nearly 4 years of development and god knows how many hours of work I've put into it, I'd just about lose my mind if I lost this project. Actually... I decided to back it up to my ftp hosting on TIFreakware while I'm at it. :p

Lol the complexity is kind of getting away from me, I'm having to search through my code before writing new code so I don't reinvent the wheel. Them's the brakes with a project like this. I can't imagine what it would be like to program it in assembly. My brains would probably melt out of my ears.

Anyways, DOA's coming along nicely. I'll try and post recent screenshots as soon as I get some working screenshot software! lol I'm having issues with that and Windows 7. (dang non-backwards-compatibility horse-crap. Win 7 has irritated me mucho less than vista ever did (what a joke there, btw nested parentheses ftw) but it's still quite the irritant for sure.)

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: DOA
« Reply #107 on: January 09, 2012, 11:26:58 am »
Screenies would be nice. Hopefully you can get something working. :D

Offline flyingfisch

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Re: DOA
« Reply #108 on: January 09, 2012, 11:32:21 am »
@Aaron you may need to ask in the help section and give info on what version and which screenshot making software you are using and which emu/version. Hopefully someone can help there.

Also keep up the good work :)

@flyingfisch blame TI's monopoly on schools. Teachers are sold out to Texas Instruments so students are almost forced to get a TI calc instead of a Casio. :( Also they aren't as documented as z80 and 68K calcs yet due to the much smaller community. Actually the TI-89 is facing the same problem now: Almost nobody program for them anymore, since TI is slowly phasing them out in favor of the TI-Nspire series. AaroneusTheGreat is probably one of, if not the only 68K ASM/C programmer remaining in the TI community right now.
ahh.

LOL, im probably the only active american programmer for Casio FX-9860! Just realized that.
« Last Edit: January 09, 2012, 11:32:34 am by flyingfisch »



Quote from: my dad
"welcome to the world of computers, where everything seems to be based on random number generators"



The Game V. 2.0

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #109 on: January 12, 2012, 09:54:53 am »
So I just finished a major rewrite of the animation code for DOA, I shaved off 2.5kb of program size and saved probably hundreds, maybe as much as thousands of clock cycles (no way of knowing, but the speed increase is very noticeable). The code I wrote allows me to handle every animation the same way with a gigantic array of pointers to arrays which contain pointers (my brain hurts) to the images, and it doesn't matter how many frames the sprites animations have, or where they are, because they all follow the same pattern.

Despite how diabolical and huge the array is, it actually saves me a bunch of resources because the animation code no longer has to sort out which type of sprite it's animating. On top of that, everything is in one place, so the system only has to organize it once when the game starts, not every animation frame, saving a bunch of time.  

There are a few more glitches I'm working out, but I know what's causing them, and they don't cause the game to crash, and since I'm tired of programming for the moment, they'll have to wait. I've been working since 6:30AM this morning, I woke up and I didn't have anything to do for hours so I ended up tying up those loose ends in the rewrite. I'll let you know what's happening as I fix things and trim down my code to get some more efficiency out of this.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2012, 10:30:03 am by AaroneusTheGreat »

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: DOA
« Reply #110 on: January 12, 2012, 10:30:04 am »
Awesome! Wow, you're really hitting this thing hard now huh? =)

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #111 on: January 12, 2012, 10:37:51 am »
I'm glad that you seem excited about the progress!

I was getting really tired of letting it sit around not being worked on, and because my life is back in order now, I'm able to focus on it much better than I had before. I think in the last week I've probably spent about 30 hours or more working on this thing. I know I had at least 3 days where I worked on it for 6 hours total that day (about 3 hours, then a break, then another 3, that kind of thing).

I also have gotten a lot of motivation from all of the people that are following this project. And at my school I've been overhearing stuff about Doom89, and how lot's of people seem to like it there. That kind of thing really makes me want to get this project done so I can really give people a quality game. DOA is so far ahead of Doom89 in implementation and detail, I think people are really going to like it. I mean DOA even has clocks on the wall in the game that change with the system time in the calculator. It will show you the correct time in the game if you set your clock in the calc's system to the correct time.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2012, 10:38:58 am by AaroneusTheGreat »

Offline shmibs

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Re: DOA
« Reply #112 on: January 12, 2012, 10:46:39 am »
this game has more style than wolfenstein ever did =D
i always loved this project and am glad to see you're working on it again =)

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: DOA
« Reply #113 on: January 12, 2012, 11:28:27 am »
That reminds me... I should try Doom 89 since I have a voyage 200 now. I don't know if you remember, but I could never get it to work on my old TI-89 for some reason... x.x I can't remember exactly what the issue was either.

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #114 on: January 12, 2012, 11:18:48 pm »
Art_Of_Camelot: that's very odd. It could have just been too old to support it honestly. I think I was using code that was HW2 and up. I seem to remember something about that. And if/when you do try out Doom89, let me know what you think! I'm always open to feedback even though that project's been completed for years now lol.

Shmibs: That's a very kind thing of you to say! I've always envied the ID software team, they made so many popular and groundbreaking games. I even got in contact with them about the content of Doom89 before starting work to make sure I wasn't breaking any laws that I could get punished for. They told me that they couldn't give me permission to use the imagery and such, but they wouldn't do anything to me for doing so. That's the major reason Doom89 went anywhere past the fooling around stages. It kind of became a go ahead of sorts anyways. I thought some of them might actually check it out if I did well enough with it too, which would be a real honor. So far I haven't heard anything from them since then though. lol

I hope DOA doesn't let you down! Expectations seem to be very high these days!

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: DOA
« Reply #115 on: January 13, 2012, 11:20:06 am »
Hmm... well if there were some differences in code from hw2 and up then that could explain things. My TI-89 is a HW1 model. I'll let you know what I think about Doom when I have a chance to try it. ;)

I don't think you should be too concerned about disappointing people with DOA. It's looking great! ;D

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #116 on: January 16, 2012, 02:37:46 am »
Thanks for the encouragement. :) And I hope you like Doom89.

PROGRESS UPDATE:

I just finished fixing the proximity mines system. I broke it when I rewrote the animation code. The good news is because I decided to go with a complete rewrite of the system, I managed to save quite a few cycles and bytes. I don't know exactly how many I saved, but more good news on top of this, with the new code I wrote for the proximity mines, I'll be able to more quickly rewrite the code for the energy cannon, which incidentally also was broken when I started this major rewrite.

All of this rewriting has a major purpose, that being saving cycles and bytes, but also, i was beginning to get very close to the 65k executable limit. I had to do something. I could no longer let some things get handled in a clean, but not as efficient manner, I'm just running too much now. Fortunately, I planned very well from the beginning, so the code ended up being very adaptable.

I actually didn't realize all the implications of how I planned everything out. So far, when you save/load the game, due to good planning, if the game has already booted up once, it will still work! The only problem is if you save, exit the game, boot it back up and load, it fails. Luckily I know the problem, I just have to go in and fix it when I'm done with my other more important rewrite tasks.  I've still got a fairly daunting (to me) list of things I want to retool with my new techniques. They are getting checked off at a pace I'm happy with. More to come soon!

Offline TIfanx1999

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Re: DOA
« Reply #117 on: January 16, 2012, 06:12:30 am »
Awesome work! :D Keep it up! :)

Offline jsj795

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Re: DOA
« Reply #118 on: January 16, 2012, 09:03:33 am »
Great! I've also realized that when coding, the planning stage is really important.

Hopefully the save problem will be fixed easily :)


Spoiler For funny life mathematics:
1. ROMANCE MATHEMATICS
Smart man + smart woman = romance
Smart man + dumb woman = affair
Dumb man + smart woman = marriage
Dumb man + dumb woman = pregnancy
2. OFFICE ARITHMETIC
Smart boss + smart employee = profit
Smart boss + dumb employee = production
Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion
Dumb boss + dumb employee = overtime
3. SHOPPING MATH
A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need.
4. GENERAL EQUATIONS & STATISTICS
A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.
A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
5. HAPPINESS
To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
6. LONGEVITY
Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more willing to die.
7. PROPENSITY TO CHANGE
A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.
8. DISCUSSION TECHNIQUE
A woman has the last word in any argument.
Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

Girls = Time * Money (Girls are a combination of time and money)
Time = Money (Time is money)
Girls = Money squared (So, girls are money squared)
Money = sqrt(Evil) (Money is also the root of all evil)
Girls = sqrt(Evil) squared (So, girls are the root of all evil squared)
Girls = Evil (Thus, girls are evil)
*Girls=Evil credit goes to Compynerd255*

Offline AaroneusTheGreat

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Re: DOA
« Reply #119 on: January 17, 2012, 10:37:09 am »
Thanks guys!

PROGRESS UPDATE:

As of last night, the energy cannon has been fixed. All the weapons now work correctly again. I'm still working on a few bugs dealing with the enemies. Some of their animations are getting set wrong, I know what the issue is, I just have to hunt down where the incorrect values are getting set. I already fixed two animation bugs dealing with two different characters. It's turning out to be rather easy, just very tedious. I'll let you know when I've got everything squared away. Once I do I plan on fixing the save/load feature and picking through a few more things that need rewriting.

We'll see what happens. I need to have some space opened up so that I can start writing in some new tasks for the player to complete. The game needs more to do in it. Running around and mindlessly killing enemies is not what I'm going for with this. I want it to be in depth and interesting as well as exciting.