Dundee "smart" city.

This is a funny one.... Dundee has been named as one of the smartest citys on the planet by some of the worlds leading experts. (HERE). I find this really funny coz it names as one of the reasons the ever growing computer games comunity there, which by definition makes me really smart - and if thats not enough to make you laugh, then nothing is.

The other odd thing is that it seems to try and suggest it was planned.

"It said the city had "continued to transform a former shipbuilding community that suffered severe economic shocks into a national powerhouse and leader in game design and sciences"."

Now.... I find it odd - being one of the founders of this "game design" comunity, that they think it a planned thing since anyone actually IN computer games, knows it was simply because DMA brought in heaps of folk, who then splintered off and formed their own companies. Now, Dundee does have a huge number of games companies per head of population, but non of this is because of the planning of Dundee City Council.

However, all that aside it's good to see I guess as it might help to upgrade peoples opinion of Dundee and let them consider it a place to live. We struggle a lot to hire folk, and lots of folk dont want to move here because its got a bad name, so I guess in that respect its good; funny....but good.

Im still here!!!!

I know....its been a while. I'm still actually recovering from my trip believe it or not. I got back just over a week ago and I'm still not sleeping as well as I was, and this means I have no energy at night to do anything else....bit of a bugger really. I am start to think about things again though, and hope to get stuck in soon, although Im not sure if that'll be XeO3 or my MMC add on - time will tell.

Of course...I didnt make a diagram of the MMC thing, so now I have to reverse engineer what I've already done! doh!!

Mode DMA videos and pictures.

So, another day... another stack of pictures and videos uploaded to my flickr and YouTube accounts. I'm starting to run dry now, most of the video I have has been uploaded, and although I do still have a stack of level building graphics for games, I have very little "pictures" left. Which is good I guess, as it means folk can now see everything.

Anyways...back to XeO3. I think I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and put some code in the level loading when done, however it will mean I lose my 1k I've been holding onto in an attempt to keep the character sprite system, but it just appears theres no real space left for them. I need to add code to draw them, spawn them and move them - not to mention the actual graphics themselves.... Luca's gonna kill me....

XeO3: Possible solutions....

While I was talking to Luca last night, I thought of a possible solution to our background animations. The problem is that its code driven, and then tables that drive them which allows cycling frames of animation to be played. This however isn't good for every level as on level 2 (for example) Luca would like to change the sequence and even speed of animations. To this end, I think it might be possible to move the animation code into the level data, and if I do that it would get loaded with each level. Its unusual to load code in this way, and I've never needed to do it, but it might work fine here.

I'll give it a try soon and I hope this will allow Luca to allow do the animations the way he wants.....

Unseen Tanktics video.

This little gem was never used, much to my frustration at the time. When it was made I tried for months to get it included in some Animation festivals as it really was right up there with the likes of Pixar at the time. Created by John Harrison its a great little video.

Anyway - enjoy!

DMA Design stuff....

I've been trying to look out some Uniracers pictures for an upcoming article, and while doing so I've been admiring all the old images I have from those times. The idea originally was to use my DMA Website to show them all, but its just taking too long to put together, I just don't have the time at the moment. Theres also WAAAAAY too much to put up. So, what I thought I'd do is start uploading them to Flickr! That way everyone gets to see them now, AND I don't have to worry about bandwidth costs etc.

I have hit a slight snag however.... I logged out of my flickr account, and now can't log back in! Oh well.... I've emailed the support team so I hope to get it resolved soon. In the meantime, you can see the images I have already uploaded here: www.flickr.com/photos/mikedailly/

I have also decided to upload all the DMA Videos I've been holding back to my youtube account. Im not sure what the longest video you can post there is, but I have some toppers!

Xeo3: Taking stock...

So, Ive been cleaning my desk a little and getting things back in a usable state, and while doing this I reconnected my Plus/4 and had a quick play of XeO3 using my new Joystick adapter. It nice being able to use a normal joystick, but it feels a little un-plus/4-ish for some reason.

While playing I spotted another bug this time in the new weapons system. Once I've powered up enough to get larger and faster bullets I dont always seem to be able to shoot turrets/mines. This must be due to the extra character hitting the turret and not detecting it properly, so I'll have to look into that next.

I need to copy the latest source from the laptop onto my main machine at some point so I can carry on. I think I'm actually fairly close to doing a beta release with a test level so we can staty to guage difficulty for everyone. After all this time it would be nice to let you guys have a play with it.

Blood Money

So Ive been looking at the code to Blood Money whilst I've been writing this post-mortem, and its not quite the work of art I thought it was; which I guess is no surprise. I was only 19 at the time and I hope I've improved a lot since then! However one thing I did get totally wrong was the way the paths were created.

In XeO3 I have 10 paths, one for each baddie and another which acts as the master path. This is how I remembered I'd done Blood Money, but it turns out I was wrong. In Blood Money, I'd a special format for the master path, one that didn't look at all like the rest of the system.

Path_Address:
Sc0:
 db  End_of_Screen
 db 5|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 7|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 9|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 10|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 11|Sprite,$58,100,14|Sig,<path2,>path2,<Header2,>Header2
 db 12|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 14|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 16|Sprite,$58,150,3|Sig,<path1,>path1,<Header2,>Header2
 db 18|Gun,$27,17,Player2 | Gup
 db 24|Gun,$27,1,player1 | Gdown
 db 35|Sprite,$58,150,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header4,>Header4
 db 35|Sprite,$58+24,150,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header5,>Header5
 db 35|Sprite,$58,150+21,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header6,>Header6
 db 35|Sprite,$58+24,150+21,14|Sig,<path4,>path4,<Header7,>Header7

This is the 1st screen from Level 1(I think) on Blood Money, and its pretty ugly. The 1st byte is the character to start the sprite on followed by the X,Y, Path and object header. It was also able to spawn turrets and character sprites but still - it was pretty nasty.

In XeO3 I use the path engine as the master path, that way I can use loops and pause whenever I need to, and then use standard StartSprite commands. I did a couple of Shoot-em-ups for mobile phones, and I used the XeO3 way then, so I must have just gotten confused. Still I guess its good to know that I do still improve, even with the most basic of game.

Post-Mortems

I've gotten really carried away with the idea of doing an 8-bit (or retro) post-mortem site, I think theres still lots to be learnt from hearing what others did in the past, and it might even inspire others to do more in the future! Who knows! I've also registered post-mortems.com although it just points here just now.

So to this end, I've started doing a Blood Money post-mortem, although unlike modern ones its not really a what went right or what went wrong document, but more a what did I do and why presentation. I do give public presentations every now and then so speaking through this on my own at home is gonna be really weird. I might see if anyone at work wants to listen to it just so I can get an audience and someone to speak at!

These things usually last an hour, but I think I'll be lucky if its lasts 15-20 min, but thats probably okay.

Another oddity is that your used to getting some questions, but at home you won't get any! The more I think about it the more I really want to have someone -anyone! to speak at.

.............Anyone able to travel to Dundee? :)

RETROspective...

Russ sent me a link to an interesting talk (HERE) about a PSone game where he talks about how he did the physics in the game. Now, this struck me as a great idea, doing post-mortems on old retro games like Blood Money or Shadow of the Beast (I did the PC Engine one) or whatever would be really interesting for lots of folk. I wonder how possible this kind of thing would be; I guess you wouldn't need to hire a hall or anything, but do a powerpoint thing and talk through it, and then post it somewhere. This could be pretty cool to start building up these for people to watch. YouTube (or google video) would work really well for these.

What do you think? A site that has post-mortems of various retro games? I don't know about you guys, but I'd love to see some of them.