Slow progress....

Well, after listening to the Scotland v Italy match on the Radio I'm wondering if I'll ever speak to luca again!! Oh well, its our own fault - as usual. We should have beat Georgia. Everyone was complaining about the refereeing, but I think it swings both ways. Never mind....We've improved loads and had a great campain - Well done Scotland! Ya done us proud!

Oh well, after that how have I been doing...... slowly. Not had a lot of chance to do much, but I hope to do some more paths tonight. I really hate doing them, but Luca (SPIT!) is still learning the script so I'll be doing these one, but I hope he can start doing some for the actual game.

I was also thinking about the MMC card stuff. I really screwed up here. By not doing a schematic first, I have no idea where all the wires are going, so now I either need to start again, or revese engineer what I had started. Im also thinking I need to do a Plus4 user port version so that I can test out code and allow SID usage. A userport card would be much easier, and if I supplied a ROM (or ROM image) then it could still boot properly.
It does mean this version wouldn't have the clockport so couldnt' do the ethernet/serial addon's. Im still trying to get a milling machine what would let me make real boards, and if this was possible then I could make the card here....Oh well... Still lots to do first.


Oh, and theres a new POLL. The results of the old one were pretty predictable with no one really interested in an external RAM expansion.

XeO3: Demo level progression.

I'm slowly progressing with the alien waves for the demo level and I think it's going okay. If I play without wanting to power up, you can more or less run through without getting hit (so far). But if I get greedy and want all the coins, then it starts to get tricky; which is the idea.

I've mapped out about one third of the level, although I've extended the start a little to make the introduction a little simpler - mainly so theres no backgrounds while you get used to moving around.

I also fixed the 2nd bug in my list from yesterday, where the collision radius wasn't being used.

So.... the demo is progressing slowly. Slow but steady! which is of course better than it has been; stopped and dead.

XeO3: Demo level....

I managed to get Luca to send the test level again, so I've now put that in and have started making new alien wave's. Heres the current plan for the demo.

1. Have the front end as is
2. Only have 1 weapon type but allow you to power it up.
3. Have the full weapon power up/down sequence


4. Only a couple of baddie types.
5. fix all current bugs before release.

Speaking of bugs, I've found another couple.

1. If you shoot a "group" of sprites too quickly, its possible to get multiple pickups. A group is only supposed to leave 1 item.
2. The baddie radius isn't used! This means all baddies have a fixed bullet collision area
3. If you collect a weapon pickup you appear to lose a bullet.
4. 2 character wide bullets don't always appear to hit baddies.

I've fixed the 1st and I'm about to fix the radius one, but I'll fix the rest later. I want to try and get some paths going.

XeO3: Demo level

I've been hunting around trying to find the demo level Luca built, and unable to find it, I went back to Luca's web page to see what it looked like. I was somewhat shocked to discover that he actually made it just over a YEAR ago!! So much for 2007 being the year of XeO3! I've done even less this year than last year! bugger.

XeO3: Here we go again.....

I've not done nearly as much as I'd hoped on XeO3 this year. I was convinced THIS was going to be it's year. A few things got in the way, my new found electronics hobby - which should still prove interesting to others once I start to finish things, and the fact I HATE makeing levels. Always have. Hate it! Hate it! Hate it!

But I think at the VERY least, I need to get the test level done so we can at least make some progress. For those that don't know, the plan is it make a 1 level demo with simple graphics but the game playing. This lets us (Luca and I) test the game mechanics out and at the same time, make sure we're not aiming to high (or low) on the difficulty side.

So...... to this end, I've decided to try and force myself to produce a new 1 level playable demo, and to release it AT THE VERY LATEST for Christmas. I really hope it'll be WAY sooner than that (a couple of weeks would be better), but Christmas at the latest.

Then once I get some feedback from everyone that's played it, we can both start to try and put the final game together.

..........well, thats the theory. So hands up if you believe one word of it?

limiTED: Hard core fun!

I've been having great fun making some real hardcore demos for a new demo comp - my 1st demo comp in fact! limiTED was started and managed by Luca and has 3 catagorys: 64bytes, 128bytes and 1k. 64 bytes is about as hardcore as you get and is pretty hard to even start a program properly never mind do anything constructive, while 128 bytes you can just about do something nice. 1k is quite a lot, so your back into real demos which have to look nice as well as do something. The demos have to be anonymous for now so I cant say much more except its getting me back into 6502 fun land! So much so I hope to start back on XeO3 real soon... as soon as I've run out of demos to try and enter. I've never been much for doing cool demos, I've always been able to optimise and do stuff, but never come up with wierd shit that works well in a demo. So if I manage to do something, I'll be interested to see if everyone else thinks they're pooh or not.

Plodding on....

I'm still slowly progressing with wiring up the prototype, and I thought I was getting on well until I decided to finish one of them off - just to see how much more I had to do, and it turns out; LOADS! Oh well.... Onwards and upwards and all that.

I've been coding up a demo for Luca's new competition, and Im struggling a bit to fit it in. The original size was supposed to be 64 bytes(!) so I started working on that only to find out they had increased it to 128! DOH! Oh well.... Its nothing special, but I do prefer these smaller demos to the larger ones as you dont have to do very much, and it doesnt have to look too pretty.

I've also been speaking to Luca about the level2 on XeO3, so I may pick that up again soon. But once again, I've left it in a horrible state! Its got a pretty serious bug in there somewhere (probably the new sprite cache) which causes the whole thing o slowly get corrupted and crash. Bugger.

XeO3 teaser....

Okay, so I've spoken to Luca, and we've both decided a teaser would be better as we don't want to give too much away, but we do both want to show the progress we're making. I think part of the reason for the demo is that people have to "see" it to believe that its not just all fiction, and to see that that we're not exaggerating on the website as to how good its looking.
So I've spent this evening putting in a TEASER assembley option so I can enable this whenever I want to. After 6 years, it'll be nice to get peoples reaction once they actually see it run!

Doing this also showed that the Plus4 would actually be capable of a simultaneous 2 player game! This would be amazing! 2 players on screen at once blasting away! But I'll leave that as a lesson for the reader.. :)

This demo has also showed up a bug in the sprite system, it wasn't setting the first frame of the sprite correctly, so thats now fixed.