Game with text based graphics
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@ITzTravelInTime Why can't you just synch everything to Update()?
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@Nisse5 I am doing this because i want the game to run at the maximum framerate and the controls to be at the same speed reguardless of the framerate, and so keeping all this stuff into the game cycle will mean that the player moovement will depend on framerate and so it can suffer from speed or syncronization issues and in this way it will be also hard to time correctly, that's why i want with this route, it's simple to keep everything timed correctly while having the best performance
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And i found a bug with timers, which causes FUZE to crash, i created a thread into the bug reports if you are interested
https://fuzearena.com/forum/topic/165/timers-produce-wired-errors-and-also-some-fuze-crashes
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Interesting.
Regarding switching from 'char' to tiles, that fundamentally if you go far enough back in history, these are the same thing.Tile based graphics is an offshoot of text based stuff. The only thing that changed is that you can redefine the character set. (later a few other things showed up like parallax scrolling, but at heart it's still just a fancy text based mode.)
If you were to look at something like the Atari 800 (or the more well known C64) you'd see that they talk about using 'character mode' displays, and by default these are the system's text modes.
But in reality what's happening is this is a tile based graphics mode where the computer has a 'default' tileset that just so happens to be the letters that make up a text mode display.
That's really all there is to it on the really old 8 and 16 bit systems.
Tiles and text mode are the same thing! XDStill looks like a fun project though. Good luck with it.
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@KuraIthys Not so mutch, in fact more sophysticated systems allows for features like smooth scrolling for graphics tiles (like the nes and the snes) while making this not possible on character based modes even with redefined character sets. The tile based graphics modes are essentially heavily modded graphics modes on streosids if that's your point.
Regurding my project i am coding it like i am doing for my other text based game for dos, so plotting characters at some coordinates of a characters grid on the screen.
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@ITzTravelInTime indeed, that IS my point, but I'd like to point out that for those early 8 bit systems they DID have smooth scrolling capabilities in their text mode, and their text modes and tilemap based modes are one and the same thing. (in fact in principle on systems that have both the text mode is almost certainly the tilemap mode in disguise)
Even if you're looking at PC graphics, the CGA/EGA/VGA series of cards actually also have smooth scrolling (or rather per pixel fine scrolling)
And it does work in text modes, so these things have been functionally equivalent for a really long time.Sure, as the technology expanded, the tilemap systems intended specifically for graphics got a whole bunch of extra features; Multilayer parallax scrolling; much larger character sets (no text rendering system from back then would need 1000+ characters), the ability to flip individual tiles horizontally and vertically independently of one another, and way more colours (again, there's not many pure text displays that would need 256 colours per character, or even 16 simultaneous colours)
But fundamentally these are still the same concept. And so many of the earliest systems that are 'pure' text displays (eg no character set customisation) still had smooth scrolling and a bunch of other things anyway.
You'd be surprised.The Atari 800 and C64 don't have text modes at all if you treat them as having tilemap modes. Or alternatively, they have text modes with smooth scrolling and customisable character set support if you don't consider these tilemap modes.
I guess it's rather in how you look at it...
But to the hardware itself it's all very similar.And yes, even the hardware underlying a DOS text mode can do smooth scrolling. (and plotting characters onscreen by reference to a coordinate grid is equivalent to manipulating the tilemap in realtime. In fact it's what I do in basic on Atari when using tilemap based graphics, since the map itself is treated the same as the pixels in a bitmap mode as far as the system is concern.)
Still, that's very much a matter of technicalities.
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Game development update: I found a way to have the timer reset a few times without crashing the game (2 days of fight against this timer bug), so i decided to give to the timer the maximum ammount of repetitions as i can so in theaory you should be able to avoid the crash because of the timer for at least a few hours of gameplay without interruptions, so i tihink for now it's good enought, and i added also multi tile structures as well, say hello to my little test village:
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Hey this is coming along really nicely - is it possible at this point to move out of the area?
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@Jonboy Yes, the map is [retty big, but i am experimenting a bit with the appearence of other tiles and sections of map, at the time being now the map includes the forrset with the village, a river and a desert on the other side of the river
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Now i am working on some new models and to polish the controls, i'd like to add some npcs and subareas (like the inside of the houses) next.
Here it is the model i worked on tonight, the castle model, it features a modular design, some alligators and an exclusive bridge tile.
And i have accidentally flooded the whole map while filling the moat around the castle, but that's details.
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If you want to try the game i am sharing some early prototypoe builds, now it's just an explorable map, but in the future it will became more of an rpg game
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I forgot to share the friend code, here it is, enjoy: 6620-3252-4535
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Dude I can't believe you did the castle! Fantastic!
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@Dave Feel free to add me to your friends and try it out, i think you should keep a consumer switch at the fuze office just to play with people's programs, this is the friend code: 6620-3252-4535
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@Dave And also as i said the castle is modular, because with my code i can draw some pre-made groups of characters on the map, i can implement things like the house using a single group of characters written more times to the map and also having separated group of cracters written to the map multiples times to form the the castle, the only limitation i have for now is with color, because tiles (characters + their attributes on the map, like color and player interaction) are saved in an array and so i can't have that big of an array to store all the possile tiles for those multi-tiled drawings, so for now those are in black and wite, maybe i can just implement custom tiles just for what i need and try to reuse them but for for now that's doing it just fine and also i want the memory free for other features, so for now buildings and such are going to stay in black and white, not a big deal for now.
So long story short, there are many things going on in the program as now and i have to keep it simple and to not waste memory, those structures are just one of those features, and there a lot more of those to implement.
Reguarding all of the other people
So, which features do i also need to have for a kind of an rpg or adventure game?
For now i am getting some inspiration from games like planet x3 and the first zelda and also some doom or duke nukem, the ideas are many for example having a simple rpg like thing and have some story or just having the opposite thing, so just throw the player somehwere and having it to go troughout all the obstacles of the game to beat it, some sort of 2D medievial doom or something like that, just having the player to game without some annoyng story and have it facing a lot of enemyes in a funny and satisfying game with some challenge.
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I came up with a story for the game, it will be about a guy rescuring a girl from an evil and unexpected villain, it will have an initial kind of plot twist from whitch the story starts out.
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Ah, the classic storyline! Looking forward to seeing your twist on it. I'm sure the protagonist will be quite the... character ;)
Will be downloading this and having a go at some point today!
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@Dave note that it's in a pretty early stage of development and the controls are really bad at the moment and also the collision system has a bug in a specific case, this bug allows you to clip inside some objects.
Reguarding the story:
The characters and their world including the villan are all elements which came from a word processor program, and everything takes place inside the world processor, the main character has the ability of going inside the worlds narrated by the storyes written inside the world processor, and all the storyes are like the kingdomes in super mario odissey, the protagonist has to fix the story to progress to the next one, at the end he will face the villan who messed up all the storyes and kidnapped his crush. My idea for the storyes's worlds is to have a main storyline which is rpg like with occasional shut em up missions (with a top down prospective rather than a side view) and with sidequests inlucing some text recreation of simple arcade games.
It's all still in an early stage and i am still working on the story but i have a clear idea about what i want inside of it as the main elements of the story. Now i have to think about the small storyes and characters and also all the quests and missions to accomplish to fix a story.
This is the idea for the pc game, for the switch game i don't think i will put this mutch stuff in it, maybe just a single story to fix and then the final boss, with all the simple arcade games recreations.
One of the other ideas was to have the combact system in the rpg fights and the weapons switching in the shoot em up sections to work using the features of the world processor, for example you can change the font of a text enemy to make it weaker or using features such as copy and pase to defeat an enemy.
Ideas are many and my dream is to develop a fully featured game for pc and mac (and dos) and sell it on steam and on the app store, and also to have something like a reduced shareware version as a demo on fuze.
For now fuze is great to prototype and experiment because i don't have to worry about memory management and optimizing ram usage as mutch
That because my main development target for pc now is dos, i managed to fit enought things inside the conventional memory and in fact i am treating the switch version as a port of the dos version, so you can see where i am kind of with the dos version for now, the only thing it does better at the moment is having a larger map since i am limited by the segmentation on dos, so the swsitch version has a map twice as large for now, the dos version is limited at 256 * 256 tiles while the switch version for now is set to 512 * 256 tiles, each tile is represented into the map as a 16 bit integer and in fuze is just a large integers array, in dos it's splitted into 2 memory segments and to draw a character on screen i need to use some assembly into the c code to make it fast enought.
