Misc programming discussion (from pms).

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Oops, forgot that that Glad you like it

Yes, I like it.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Anyway, I've also found two small optimizations for your ham renderer (read the comments I've added):
(...)

This will save four cycles in in the three r/g/b cases, and about twelve (I think) in the palette case. I never thought I'd think of a way to optimize this baby further

Unfortunately it's not as good as it looks.

First, by not and'ing the values to FC before using them you'll make imprecisions which, though not really affecting overall visual quality, will defeat the fringing reduction method which require exact comparisons.
The 12-bit method isn't affected but the rest will be.

Second, -(a6) will be one cycle slower than (a6)+, which is the same as (a6), and as a result you'll in fact lose 2 cycles in the general case.
As fixed pixels are not great part of the image, the gain here is not enough to compensate.

Sorry for the cold shower

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yup, just like on a tv with colors set to max, but without the color bleeding.

I still don't see...

Originally Posted by Thorham

In terms of bass reproduction it is. I find while watching movies with headphones, I can hear more sounds clearly. There's a difference that goes both ways.

So you're telling me that headphones are better than a hi-fi system ???
Wow. Your stereo system must be very bad, your're a really strange guy

Originally Posted by Thorham

The Final Fantasy games all use a tracked format, but they sound just like cd tracks, especially the PS2 games.

And how do you know they use a tracked format ?
Perhaps you also know the name of the tracker that's used ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, I have, but I'm just unfamiliar with the abbreviation you used.

Well, it is OCSS, like MED was Musical EDitor.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Would've been cool though...

This already exists for SNES and is slow enough...

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's not likely to happen, because I don't have that much music.

And you don't plan on getting more ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Only five? Hmm, that is fast... Could you post your startup-sequence please?

Lean-and-mean :

patchrom quiet
setpatch quiet
makedir ram:env ram:env/sys
assign env: ram:env
assign env: sys:prefs/config add
assign envarc: sys:prefs/p
assign envarc: sys:prefs/config add
assign s: sys:prefs/config
assign s: sys:s add
assign l: sys:prefs/config
assign l: sys:l add
assign t: ram:
assign clips: t:
assign keymaps: sys:prefs/p
assign libs: sys:classes add
assign locale: sys:locale
copy >nil: prefs/p/sys/#? env:sys
iprefs
conclip
path ram: sys:utils c:
loadwb
endcli

But startup-sequence isn't the only thing.
FFS gets mounted MUCH FASTER than SFS, hence is good for boot partition, on which files that are used at boot time were copied first.
And WBStartup only contains Multi-CX.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Dopus heavy? Wait, you mean Dopus 5+, the Dopus that can be used as a Workbench replacement. I don't use that, I use Dopus 4.16, the open source version: Directory Opus 4 Research Project. This does not replace Workbench, but is a stand alone program.

I don't really need it anyway...

Originally Posted by Thorham

3D view can be old-school, just look at Wolfstein 3D, that's as old-school as it can get.

I still don't see what you call old-school (see below).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Magical maps or character skills are the best.

IMO magical map spells can be good, too. DM2 (and late versions of CSB) even has both.

Originally Posted by Thorham

What? You don't like Diablo 2? Sacrilege

And blasphemy, yes
But for me it's much more arcade than RPG.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Make menus appear over the map screen, or even replace it. If this proves to be a pain, it can be changed.

Inventories always appear over the main view, but the problem is to actually call them, especially if you have lots of characters in the team (which I DO want to make possible). Same for magical spells.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Pang is an example of an old-school game (and a very good one at that, they just don't make them like that anymore ). A game like Hired Guns is more modern than Pang (hate the inventory screen, though).

Pang and Hired guns aren't the same type of game so the comparison doesn't seem very relevant to me.
Sorry, but I still don't get it.

Or maybe... the game will be classified as old school because you decide it is. This way I understand, of course ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

I never train much, and I always go solo with Halk. I just gain a few Ninja levels, and gain a few magic class levels (when the first wand and bottles are found). The rest of the game is often played just with that basis. You don't really need to train a lot.

And at CSB you go solo with whom ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Perhaps One thing I like is the Hired Guns splitscreen view, and a full 3D environment. This 3D environment can be implemented like in Hired Guns. The game's internals are based around a basic 3D system, while the graphics are hand drawn/pre-rendered. It's a start

Hired Guns splitscreen view is a pain in the ass when several characters are attacked simultaneously. Believe me, I finished the game.
But its 3D view is more realistic than DM, especially for stairs (monsters can climb them).

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's fine, mate.

So, now that you have it, what will you do with it ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Exactly. The layout isn't human made, but what's on top is. Should work for a game.

Yes, but the top level is the most difficult to do in vast amounts.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, the game engine is the most important. I think I have some good ideas about that. They have to be worked out a bit, but I can post them later.

I'm waiting.

Originally Posted by Thorham

In true big company style

It was not to let bad games to come out, or something like that. A bad excuse, probably ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

See my posts in that thread for some comments

Hey, now, I have returned, check my comments

Checked. You've gone far this time. And my poor swamp slime didn't stop you

Originally Posted by Thorham

Can you show an example of what you like?

No, I can't
However it's not exactly to suit my own tastes but the average visitor's.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Cool So, how fast is it?

As an emulator is...

Originally Posted by Thorham

You want me to dig this up? Oh boy, that's going to take some serious code reading... It's just like I described, and it doesn't happen often at all. When it does, it's just a little annoying, nothing more. It's the only gripe I have with 68k, and that says it all, I guess.

Yes, I don't see any concrete case where it could have been annoying.
If it were the inability to eor from memory to register, I'd have immediately understood ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

I think I have something useful, I can post it next time when the code is ready.

Next time is there

Originally Posted by Thorham

People are still using Win98 in this day and age, so I don't think it's going to be a problem any time soon.

People still using Win98 actually face lots of problems.

Originally Posted by Thorham

But what is meant to last? They haven't been making stuff like they used to for a long time now. And I don't see my peecee dieing any time soon. There's nothing wrong with it.

You're probably not using it a lot anyway.

Originally Posted by Thorham

My mom does know what else exists, because she uses computers at her job. The point is that just because things are a little slow, it doesn't mean she doesn't get great usability, and it's because she does get good use from the machine, she's happy with it. As said, she doesn't have a lot of money, and if having a little patience saves her a ton of money, that's fine with her.

People who don't have much knowledge can be satisfied with very few, you know.

Originally Posted by Thorham

WinXp handles different screen sizes and allows the user to set a global font size. Works very well. And I'm not trying that horrible program, it sucks badly

Then try to change this global font size, and see how actual applications behave. Try 640x480 and you'll see enormous, unusable windows. It's not what I call "works very well".

Originally Posted by Thorham

You can have different sets of base colors. Again, Windows handles different color modes (true color and indexed) with ease. Not a problem.

Windows handles different color modes but it's one of the factors which make it basically SLOW.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hmm, I want to see that. I just don't think it's a very good idea to do everything in asm.

What's the point in making another OS then ? You'd have no more to offer than the others !

Originally Posted by Thorham

An idea for a modern looking gui option. The gui can simply use the NewIcons palette and use a NewIcons style color remapping routine. Now the gui can look like those WinAmp skins. With a generic interface this should be implementable.

I need to see it. Can't you make a fake WB screen grab with such a gui on it ? (it's the way I started mine)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, but hand coded channel mixing should be a lot faster than Ahi's routines (or so it seems).

DT2's 14-bit routine is much faster than Ahi and provides better quality (not very hard though).

Mixing channels is very easy, but doing it with good quality is something else.

Originally Posted by Thorham

That way is the best. Shared components can go in the system directories, and the rest, including prefs, goes into the software's own directory.

Exactly.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Well, yes, but seeing how slow it is makes me wonder sometimes.

It's probably not meant to run on a PIII ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yup, I drink and I smoke. Baaaaaaad habits, I know

I'm glad I (more often than not) prefer health over politeness.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I know. It's just that the unencoded codecs (bmp,ppm) can be made faster if they do scaling and not just copying. Same for jpeg actually. Say you want to scale to 50%x50% and the jpeg's cbcr component is already half the size of the Y component, then only the Y component needs scaling. After that, the components are combined. Much faster. Now I'm not saying it should be done this way, but it may be something to think about.

It's something I thought, especially for jpegs. But as scaling isn't very useful for my own use, I didn't mobilize many neurons to think more about it.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Use two ham rendering loops. They're less than 256 bytes.

It's not worth. The extra speed wouldn't even be noticeable (ham rendering accounts for much more).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Oh, you meant code size. I thought you were talking about the work space Staying under 30k should be easy enough. My whole bmp viewer is less than seven kb.

If it's easy, then ok.

[Thorham]

As said, here's the locale system idea I've come up with: Locale.zip.

In it's current state, it's only use is to demonstrate the idea. No locale files are generated, and there is no error checking what so ever. Implementing the rest of the features is not a problem, but I want to know what you think first. The pogram can be run from the cli, however, to show that it works.

By the way, if this seems a little simple, then that is because there seems to be very little reason to make it more complex. If you have any additional ideas, let me know, but I think this idea is probably going to be good enough. I really can't think of anything important to add.

For a full reply to your last post, check later today.

[Thorham]

In case you missed my previous post, look above this one to find my locale system idea with some code.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes, I like it.

Thanks. I wish I could come up with stuff like that all the time.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Unfortunately it's not as good as it looks.

First, by not and'ing the values to FC before using them you'll make imprecisions which, though not really affecting overall visual quality, will defeat the fringing reduction method which require exact comparisons.

Yeah, the quality isn't reduced, which is why I thought it was a good idea. After looking at your code again, I think I know why the anti-scroll-fringing breaks. Pity.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Second, -(a6) will be one cycle slower than (a6)+, which is the same as (a6), and as a result you'll in fact lose 2 cycles in the general case.

I didn't know that, but it doesn't matter, because the table can be altered by putting the index before the rgb values. Now (a6)+ can be used again.

Originally Posted by meynaf

As fixed pixels are not great part of the image, the gain here is not enough to compensate.

Yes, I know, it would've just been cool for the sake of completeness. Because the idea breaks the anti-scroll-fringing, there's no point, however.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Sorry for the cold shower.

That's quite alright However, I still think the scrolling belongs in the past, and scaling to fit is more modern

Originally Posted by meynaf

I still don't see...

Peecee equipment just isn't as bad as you think.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So you're telling me that headphones are better than a hi-fi system ???
Wow. Your stereo system must be very bad, your're a really strange guy.

No, I was assuming high-end headphones can be of a very high quality. I don't see a reason why they shouldn't.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And how do you know they use a tracked format ?
Perhaps you also know the name of the tracker that's used ?

The Final Fantasy music is tracked, because of the amount of music versus total music files size. They're not cd tracks. I think they use midi format with custom synth routines.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Well, it is OCSS, like MED was Musical Editor.

Never knew that, either.

Originally Posted by meynaf

This already exists for SNES and is slow enough...

Yes, but how well has it been written. If you're referring to snes9x, than that probably is as slow as it can get. What emulation do you mean?

Originally Posted by meynaf

And you don't plan on getting more ?

I listen to internet radio a lot.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Lean-and-mean :

patchrom quiet
setpatch quiet
makedir ram:env ram:env/sys
assign env: ram:env
assign env: sys:prefs/config add
assign envarc: sys:prefs/p
assign envarc: sys:prefs/config add
assign s: sys:prefs/config
assign s: sys:s add
assign l: sys:prefs/config
assign l: sys:l add
assign t: ram:
assign clips: t:
assign keymaps: sys:prefs/p
assign libs: sys:classes add
assign locale: sys:locale
copy >nil: prefs/p/sys/#? env:sys
iprefs
conclip
path ram: sys:utils c:
loadwb
endcli

Yup, that looks like a fast startup-sequence

Originally Posted by meynaf

But startup-sequence isn't the only thing.
FFS gets mounted MUCH FASTER than SFS, hence is good for boot partition, on which files that are used at boot time were copied first.

Hmm, you're right about that. I use SFS to boot. My only FFS partition is a boot partition backup. Perhaps it would be usefull to change it back.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And WBStartup only contains Multi-CX.

Mine contains more. I think I'll leave everything as it is, and add boot options for a fast programming boot system. I don't want to strip-down my main boot system, but faster booting after ASM coding related crashes would be great.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I don't really need it anyway...

You don't need Dopus? What do you use for file management? Not Workbench I hope...

Originally Posted by meynaf

I still don't see what you call old-school (see below).

Now how am I going to explain this...

Originally Posted by meynaf

IMO magical map spells can be good, too. DM2 (and late versions of CSB) even has both.

Sounds good to me. As long as it's something that makes sense.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And blasphemy, yes.
But for me it's much more arcade than RPG.

Diablo 2 is really an action RPG. The label RPG is probably not even correct in the first place. It's just that the player can develop a character in many different ways. Same goes for games like Jade Empire (awesome).

Originally Posted by meynaf

Inventories always appear over the main view, but the problem is to actually call them, especially if you have lots of characters in the team (which I DO want to make possible). Same for magical spells.

Perhaps it's time to make a mock-up of some sort, to get a better idea of how to organize this.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Pang and Hired guns aren't the same type of game so the comparison doesn't seem very relevant to me.
Sorry, but I still don't get it.

No, they're not the same game type, but Hired Guns is more modern than Pang. This is a little hard to explain, I guess.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Or maybe... the game will be classified as old school because you decide it is. This way I understand, of course ;-)

No, I try to see this a little more objective, or would you call Pang modern?

Originally Posted by meynaf

And at CSB you go solo with whom ?

I haven't really palyed CSB a lot yet. Also, CSB might be too hard solo, DM 1 and 2 are much easier.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Hired Guns splitscreen view is a pain in the ass when several characters are attacked simultaneously. Believe me, I finished the game.

I believe you You're right, this view has that as a back draw. I still like the idea a lot. If we're going for turn based battles, than this may not be a problem.

Originally Posted by meynaf

But its 3D view is more realistic than DM, especially for stairs (monsters can climb them).

Exactly. With that system, the game can be made 3D internally, which would be a welcome change from the usual flat maps.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So, now that you have it, what will you do with it ?

Look at the code to see how it works, for starters. Should be interesting

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes, but the top level is the most difficult to do in vast amounts.

Yeah, you got that right. Making the game content is always the hardest. You can have a super engine, but without good content, it's useless.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm waiting.

Although I do have some ideas, the combination of bulding/adventure/rpg is proving hard. I can't fit the the building in anywhere This may take a while, unless you've figured out how to fit it in.

Originally Posted by meynaf

It was not to let bad games to come out, or something like that. A bad excuse, probably ;-)

Probably, eventhough there's plenty of junk available on the GBA.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Checked. You've gone far this time. And my poor swamp slime didn't stop you

Far? Hah! It's actually quite easy to get there, because monsters stay away from the corridors that lead there.

Originally Posted by meynaf

No, I can't.
However it's not exactly to suit my own tastes but the average visitor's.

Yes, you can Seriously, though, I'm guessing something simple and tidy looking would be best. Can't you show me anything at all?

Originally Posted by meynaf

As an emulator is...

What platform is it for?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes, I don't see any concrete case where it could have been annoying.
If it were the inability to eor from memory to register, I'd have immediately understood ;-)

Ok then, because you want me to. I know just the thing to show you, I'll have it posted in a few days.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Next time is there.

Yes, it is. See post above this one for the idea. As you've probably read that by now, what do you think of the idea it self? I know the implementation is not practically usable, but it's not meant to be. If you like the basic idea, tell me what you might want to see added, and I can make a useful implementation out of it.

Originally Posted by meynaf

People still using Win98 actually face lots of problems.

You're probably right.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You're probably not using it a lot anyway.

I do use my peecee a lot. Only the cpu fan needs replacing. It still works, but it's been getting noisy lately. Need to replace it fast, before it stops working, though. No fan=peecee stays off, no fan+peecee turned on=fried cpu

Originally Posted by meynaf

People who don't have much knowledge can be satisfied with very few, you know.

She does know that things can be a lot faster, it's just that she doesn't mind things being a little slow sometimes, that's all.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Then try to change this global font size, and see how actual applications behave. Try 640x480 and you'll see enormous, unusable windows. It's not what I call "works very well".

Ok, Windows doesn't implement everything perfectly, that doesn't prove it's impossible to do it on a high level.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Windows handles different color modes but it's one of the factors which make it basically SLOW.

I don't think that this is what makes Windows slow. It's probably the whole package, if you ask me. They just didn't care about speed. This is painfully obvious if you look at Windows's history of becoming slower and slower. I don't see how handling different color modes slows everything down that much.

Originally Posted by meynaf

What's the point in making another OS then ? You'd have no more to offer than the others !

To prove what is really possible. It would be great to be able to show the public that they've been driving around in Ferraris with steam engines under the bonnet

Originally Posted by meynaf

I need to see it. Can't you make a fake WB screen grab with such a gui on it ? (it's the way I started mine)

Yes, I can. That's as easy as grabbing the WinAmp gui I've been talking about. Note that this gui has a compact mode which would be perfect, I'm not talking about those large guis. For that, we have Empy I just hope the newicons palette is suitable. It probably is. I'll post it in a few days.

Originally Posted by meynaf

DT2's 14-bit routine is much faster than Ahi and provides better quality (not very hard though).

Mixing channels is very easy, but doing it with good quality is something else.

I can see why. You'd need flexible down sampling routines. With graphics you can get away with using fixed ratios. Usually you'll end up with images that use up most of the screen, but with samples it has to be exact, or it'll sound like crap

Originally Posted by meynaf

It's probably not meant to run on a PIII ;-)

They're a bunch of bloat ware making idiots

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm glad I (more often than not) prefer health over politeness.

Well, I do these things because of addiction, not politeness

Originally Posted by meynaf

It's something I thought, especially for jpegs. But as scaling isn't very useful for my own use, I didn't mobilize many neurons to think more about it.

Scaling is an essential feature these days, because of the increased image size, don't under estimate it. Also, this may be important for other people who want to use you're viewer.

Originally Posted by meynaf

It's not worth. The extra speed wouldn't even be noticeable (ham rendering accounts for much more).

Still, with two render loops, the raw codecs can just send pointers without even bothering with copying, and didn't you mention you want your viewer to work on a plain A1200? The speed boost caused by not copying (chipmem to chipmem!) anything would be significant then, while the code's size would increase very little. Think about it.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If it's easy, then ok.

It should be. The scaling loops use less than the entire cache, so they're really small. Some of the loops are much smaller than the cache in fact. Keeping the code under 30kb shouldn't be a problem. It might be different for pixel perfect down scaling, but I haven't even tried to write that yet, would be much slower anyway, so it might not even be useful.

[Thorham]

As said in my previous post, here is the WinAmp on Workbench mockup. The gui is in compact mode in this image: WorkbenchWinAmpMockup.zip. No resizing was needed!

The Workbench (my WinUae Workbench) uses a 64 color screen with the NewIcons 4 palette, and the result is much better than I expected, it looks almost identical to WinAmp running in 24bit color mode. I've edited the gui a little to get rid of useless buttons, which makes it a little smaller.

If you want to see more, I'll try making a mockup of the full gui to see how it turns out.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

In case you missed my previous post, look above this one to find my locale system idea with some code.

I didn't miss it :-)
See below for the answer.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Thanks. I wish I could come up with stuff like that all the time.

I wish this too ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, the quality isn't reduced, which is why I thought it was a good idea. After looking at your code again, I think I know why the anti-scroll-fringing breaks. Pity.

Never mind. It was a good try anyway.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I didn't know that, but it doesn't matter, because the table can be altered by putting the index before the rgb values. Now (a6)+ can be used again.

I am unsure of this, (an)+ and -(an) tend to behave strangely. It probably has to be checked, however what is a win for 030 may be a loss for 040/060.
Who knows...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, I know, it would've just been cool for the sake of completeness. Because the idea breaks the anti-scroll-fringing, there's no point, however.

There's no point, but you can come back with another idea any time, of course.

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's quite alright However, I still think the scrolling belongs in the past, and scaling to fit is more modern

I guess both should be present...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Peecee equipment just isn't as bad as you think.

Probably. But it's not as good as you think either ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, I was assuming high-end headphones can be of a very high quality. I don't see a reason why they shouldn't.

Of course they can be of high quality, but they won't value a good hi-fi system, that's what I meant.

Originally Posted by Thorham

The Final Fantasy music is tracked, because of the amount of music versus total music files size. They're not cd tracks. I think they use midi format with custom synth routines.

Amount of music vs the files size doesn't prove anything. They could have some good sound compression method.
If there are no vocals (lyrics), you can't say what it is.

What are those files sizes anyway ? For which durations ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Never knew that, either.

I know a few others, but I won't burden you with that

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, but how well has it been written. If you're referring to snes9x, than that probably is as slow as it can get. What emulation do you mean?

I meant snes9x, okay.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I listen to internet radio a lot.

That's a good reason.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yup, that looks like a fast startup-sequence

Yep.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hmm, you're right about that. I use SFS to boot. My only FFS partition is a boot partition backup. Perhaps it would be usefull to change it back.

Yeah, sometimes FFS is faster than SFS. May sound strange, but is true.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Mine contains more. I think I'll leave everything as it is, and add boot options for a fast programming boot system. I don't want to strip-down my main boot system, but faster booting after ASM coding related crashes would be great.

My own startup has such a multi-boot feature, I only gave you the "fast" part of it (I'm not really using the others anyway).

Originally Posted by Thorham

You don't need Dopus? What do you use for file management? Not Workbench I hope...

Well, if it's just running apps and moving things, WB is enough. For more sophisticated operations I use the cli a lot, though.
Then again, I don't have huge file management needs.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Now how am I going to explain this...

I dunno...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Sounds good to me. As long as it's something that makes sense.

Well, for an example of what I like in this area, you can check the automap in the game Evil's doom (there is a demo on Aminet if you can't find the game itself). Here it's a spell.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Diablo 2 is really an action RPG. The label RPG is probably not even correct in the first place. It's just that the player can develop a character in many different ways. Same goes for games like Jade Empire (awesome).

Anyway that's not the game type I like. I would prefer a game which allows, say, 20 adventurers to fight against 100 monsters in a turn-by-turn way

Originally Posted by Thorham

Perhaps it's time to make a mock-up of some sort, to get a better idea of how to organize this.

Good start, if only I had ideas...

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, they're not the same game type, but Hired Guns is more modern than Pang. This is a little hard to explain, I guess.

Because of its 3D nature ? Because it's more recent ? Because of its high-res menu ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, I try to see this a little more objective, or would you call Pang modern?

No, but I wouldn't call Hired guns modern either.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I haven't really palyed CSB a lot yet. Also, CSB might be too hard solo, DM 1 and 2 are much easier.

What I can say is that CSB characters can become dramatically powerful if you reincarnate them and train up to master levels. My old team averaged 800 healh, 999 stamina and 300 mana

Frankly I prefer CSB's dungeon over DM1. Much less linear, and still very logical.

But none of the three games were ever designed to be played solo !

Originally Posted by Thorham

I believe you You're right, this view has that as a back draw. I still like the idea a lot. If we're going for turn based battles, than this may not be a problem.

It's no longer a problem if not realtime, of course, but I'm not sure it's still useful. A "switching" view may be better, because you can have any number of characters you want (just switch from one to another).

Btw, something I don't like in HG is that you can't resurrect/replace the fallen characters and they don't seem to progress at all. Not to mention you can't fix damaged objects.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Exactly. With that system, the game can be made 3D internally, which would be a welcome change from the usual flat maps.

Not very compatible with the 2D view you told about earlier, but I like the idea.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Look at the code to see how it works, for starters. Should be interesting

Hmm, maybe, but it ain't a tutorial

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, you got that right. Making the game content is always the hardest. You can have a super engine, but without good content, it's useless.

For me the content's needs must make the engine's specs. This is how I added a few things to old DM1. I do them when I need them. Often when I badly need them.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Although I do have some ideas, the combination of bulding/adventure/rpg is proving hard. I can't fit the the building in anywhere This may take a while, unless you've figured out how to fit it in.

Instead of just saving people as in the usual heroes' life, why not also helping in rebuilding their destroyed houses ?

If you have lots of travels to make from a dungeon to a city and vice-versa, why not letting part of your group build a road while the others explore ?

Why not allowing them to build a laboratory to research for new magical weapons/spells ? (would give a tech tree)

Also, the game could allow the characters to build up their own cultivations for food.

Just a few ideas of mine...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Probably, eventhough there's plenty of junk available on the GBA.

Well, if the GBA SDK is available for free, that explains...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Far? Hah! It's actually quite easy to get there, because monsters stay away from the corridors that lead there.

Well, what I meant by far was probably "further than others".
Skan has gone relatively far, however (see the other thread). Now you have to beat this ;-)

And, yes, monsters stay away of these corridors. This is by design. But wasn't that single monster you met (and which gave you the first key) quite long to defeat ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, you can
Seriously, though, I'm guessing something simple and tidy looking would be best. Can't you show me anything at all?

You seem to have more ideas than I have, so perhaps it's yours to show me something

Originally Posted by Thorham

What platform is it for?

So far it has run on my Miggy, but also on a friends's Linux peecee. It was made to be portable (it's one of the few non-asm - that is, C++ - progs I did).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok then, because you want me to. I know just the thing to show you, I'll have it posted in a few days.

Ah, good.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, it is. See post above this one for the idea. As you've probably read that by now, what do you think of the idea it self? I know the implementation is not practically usable, but it's not meant to be. If you like the basic idea, tell me what you might want to see added, and I can make a useful implementation out of it.

Your locale_example.s seems broken in some way (binary data before text). I dunno with what you edited that.

Anyway I could have a look at it. The idea looked quite standard to me.

If you want to add new features, here are a few :
- default built-in strings, in case no locale file is found
- string format with parameter order (not all tongues have the same word ordering, e.g. french usually places adjectives after the noun where english places them before, also german tends to place verbs at the end)
- locale date and time format
- number format (decimal point vs comma)

Originally Posted by Thorham

I do use my peecee a lot. Only the cpu fan needs replacing. It still works, but it's been getting noisy lately. Need to replace it fast, before it stops working, though. No fan=peecee stays off, no fan+peecee turned on=fried cpu

You can just fry your cpu, maybe it will taste good once cooked

Originally Posted by Thorham

She does know that things can be a lot faster, it's just that she doesn't mind things being a little slow sometimes, that's all.

If she's like my mom, habits are more important than speed.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, Windows doesn't implement everything perfectly, that doesn't prove it's impossible to do it on a high level.

Yes, but at least it proves it's not as easy as it might look.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I don't think that this is what makes Windows slow. It's probably the whole package, if you ask me. They just didn't care about speed. This is painfully obvious if you look at Windows's history of becoming slower and slower. I don't see how handling different color modes slows everything down that much.

I said it was one of the factors, of course the whole package is responsible.
But you want to know why color handling does slow things down ? Because of the constant color remapping operations the GDI has to do. Color remap isn't a fast operation, you know.

Originally Posted by Thorham

To prove what is really possible. It would be great to be able to show the public that they've been driving around in Ferraris with steam engines under the bonnet

Ferraris with steam engines
Man, I love your comparison.

But I can only encourage you to make your OS. This way you will understand why the steam engine is still there.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, I can. That's as easy as grabbing the WinAmp gui I've been talking about. Note that this gui has a compact mode which would be perfect, I'm not talking about those large guis. For that, we have Empy I just hope the newicons palette is suitable. It probably is. I'll post it in a few days.

Ok. See below for answer.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I can see why. You'd need flexible down sampling routines. With graphics you can get away with using fixed ratios. Usually you'll end up with images that use up most of the screen, but with samples it has to be exact, or it'll sound like crap

Flexible down sampling routines aren't enough, you will also need to upsample.
But resampling to any ratio is very easy.
However, these operations introduce noise. Filtering this isn't easy, and if you do, you may well add some crappy effects (such as treble removal).

I've read that any time you resample a sound, you have to high-pass filter it, but I don't know how to do that.

Originally Posted by Thorham

They're a bunch of bloat ware making idiots

No, they're the best programmers there are. Simply making the bloody thing to work at all on such a stupid architecture was really a feat !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Well, I do these things because of addiction, not politeness

Yes, but you didn't say no at first place !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Scaling is an essential feature these days, because of the increased image size, don't under estimate it. Also, this may be important for other people who want to use you're viewer.

You're right, but originally it was only planned for my own usage.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Still, with two render loops, the raw codecs can just send pointers without even bothering with copying, and didn't you mention you want your viewer to work on a plain A1200? The speed boost caused by not copying (chipmem to chipmem!) anything would be significant then, while the code's size would increase very little. Think about it.

I already send pointers back without copying whereever possible.
Working on a plain A1200 is an important feature, albeit not a high-priority one.

Remember that decoding directly to chipmem (when you have fastmem) will be slower than copying data back, because bytes are decoded, not longs.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It should be. The scaling loops use less than the entire cache, so they're really small. Some of the loops are much smaller than the cache in fact. Keeping the code under 30kb shouldn't be a problem. It might be different for pixel perfect down scaling, but I haven't even tried to write that yet, would be much slower anyway, so it might not even be useful.

Then... Just do it.

Originally Posted by Thorham

As said in my previous post, here is the WinAmp on Workbench mockup. The gui is in compact mode in this image: Attachment 20320. No resizing was needed!

The Workbench (my WinUae Workbench) uses a 64 color screen with the NewIcons 4 palette, and the result is much better than I expected, it looks almost identical to WinAmp running in 24bit color mode. I've edited the gui a little to get rid of useless buttons, which makes it a little smaller.

If you want to see more, I'll try making a mockup of the full gui to see how it turns out.

This is a 64 color screen (more than the average workbench, especially mine which is really ugly ) and is 640x480 (704x544 to be precise), not the usual 640x256.

You may try a mockup of the whole GUI, but keep this screen format in mind.

Btw I've never used Brilliance (yes, I know you used it ), I prefer PPaint.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by meynaf

I wish this too ;-)

Only so much is possible, I'm afraid.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Never mind. It was a good try anyway.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by meynaf

.I am unsure of this, (an)+ and -(an) tend to behave strangely. It probably has to be checked, however what is a win for 030 may be a loss for 040/060.
Who knows...

You can always have different versions for each cpu, only makes then archive larger. As for strange behavior, I've noticed that some instruction can be pipelined during chipmem writes. Seems odd, and I may have looked at it wrong, but this also needs testing.

Originally Posted by meynaf

There's no point, but you can come back with another idea any time, of course.

Hmm, that is going to be very hard.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I guess both should be present...

Indeed. Amiga software needs modern features!

Originally Posted by meynaf

Probably. But it's not as good as you think either ;-)

I don't think it's the best, I just don't think all of it is crap, that's all.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Of course they can be of high quality, but they won't value a good hi-fi system, that's what I meant.

You mean loudspeakers (I assume). Well, it was only a guess

Originally Posted by meynaf

Amount of music vs the files size doesn't prove anything. They could have some good sound compression method.
If there are no vocals (lyrics), you can't say what it is.

What are those files sizes anyway ? For which durations ?

Final Fantasy 9: 24,5 MB for about one to two minutes per song (counting unique data, they're looped). There's 108 songs, averaging at 232 kb per song.
Final Fantasy 10: 42.9 MB for about one to two minutes per song (counting unique data, also looped). There's 93 songs, averaging about at about 472 kb per song.

The playing time per song is a guess, but it's accurate enough, I hope. As you can see, the amount of audio is more than what's possible with just compression, it has to be tracked.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I meant snes9x, okay.

This emulator is very slow. Zsnes, which is not available for the Amiga, is much faster. Actually, snes9x is slow on my peecee! It may be possible to do fast audio chip emulation anyway, especially if there aren't a whole range of exotic features to emulate.

Originally Posted by meynaf

That's a good reason.

Yes, it is. There are some cool house stations I listen to a lot. It's great

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yeah, sometimes FFS is faster than SFS. May sound strange, but is true.

Bah, how annoying I don't really want to use FFS anymore

Originally Posted by meynaf

My own startup has such a multi-boot feature, I only gave you the "fast" part of it (I'm not really using the others anyway).

Ah, only showing the fastest case, are we.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Well, if it's just running apps and moving things, WB is enough. For more sophisticated operations I use the cli a lot, though.
Then again, I don't have huge file management needs.

You use WB and Cli? This can not in any way be compared to the awesome power that is Diro 4.16 How can you stand it? WB drives me nuts, it's so primitive!

Originally Posted by meynaf

Well, for an example of what I like in this area, you can check the automap in the game Evil's doom (there is a demo on Aminet if you can't find the game itself). Here it's a spell.

Anything that makes sense is fine with me

Originally Posted by meynaf

Anyway that's not the game type I like. I would prefer a game which allows, say, 20 adventurers to fight against 100 monsters in a turn-by-turn way.

Sounds cool. But how to do this in a DM style view? Seems to me like the Fire Emblem view is much more suitable for this. In fact, Fire Emblem is quite similar to this concept. Same for Shining Force, if you want to check it out for your self.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Good start, if only I had ideas...

Ok, I've started with the mock-up. I already have some old gfx I made years ago, they should be a good base. I'll post them later, because it can take some time to do this right (you can't just slap things together and expect it to work).

Originally Posted by meynaf

Because of its 3D nature ? Because it's more recent ? Because of its high-res menu ?

Because the concept is more modern than Pang, which is true old-school.

Originally Posted by meynaf

No, but I wouldn't call Hired guns modern either.

It's a lot more modern than Pang.

Originally Posted by meynaf

What I can say is that CSB characters can become dramatically powerful if you reincarnate them and train up to master levels. My old team averaged 800 healh, 999 stamina and 300 mana.

Hmm, that's a powerful party you have there.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Frankly I prefer CSB's dungeon over DM1. Much less linear, and still very logical.

Sounds interesting, I need to give this game a go.

Originally Posted by meynaf

But none of the three games were ever designed to be played solo !

I can't speak for CSB, but DM1 and DM2 are clearly fully playable with one character. The games are designed to be played with any number of chars you want, not just four, but also three, two or one. In fact, my DM2 no skill challenge is probably something the designers took in account as well, because of way too convenient item placing in one case, and the reflector shield which is essential (I may be wrong on that one, though). Sorry meynaf, but I can not agree, DM1 and DM2 are designed to be playable as the player sees fit.

Originally Posted by meynaf

It's no longer a problem if not realtime, of course, but I'm not sure it's still useful. A "switching" view may be better, because you can have any number of characters you want (just switch from one to another).

Ok, it's just that a split screen view can be optional, and allows the player to keep an eye on multiple chars/locations at the same time.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Btw, something I don't like in HG is that you can't resurrect/replace the fallen characters and they don't seem to progress at all. Not to mention you can't fix damaged objects.

Resurecting is something I don't miss. In DM I never use it when playing with more than one character. The lack of progress is a bit of a downer, I agree, and not being able to fix damaged items is, well, part of the game, I guess. I mean, how do you repair a highly advanced electronics based weapon? On the other hand, not being able to fix machine guns, etc, does suck, and should be possible.

But there's more. Food restores hit points, while only med packs and medics should be able to do this (only applies to organic chars ). And of course the inventory system is totally bogus

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not very compatible with the 2D view you told about earlier, but I like the idea.

It is if you use layers.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Hmm, maybe, but it ain't a tutorial.

I've noticed that your gui doesn't handle different WB font sizes very well. Thought you might wanted to know.

Originally Posted by meynaf

For me the content's needs must make the engine's specs. This is how I added a few things to old DM1. I do them when I need them. Often when I badly need them.

It's a way. It's also possible to do it the other way around, though. Come up with a fun game system, and design the game around it. I don't see any problems with that approach.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Instead of just saving people as in the usual heroes' life, why not also helping in rebuilding their destroyed houses ?

If you have lots of travels to make from a dungeon to a city and vice-versa, why not letting part of your group build a road while the others explore ?

Why not allowing them to build a laboratory to research for new magical weapons/spells ? (would give a tech tree)

Could be interesting. However, how do adventurers build roads and buildings? It's still not that easy to fit this concept into such a game seamlessly.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Also, the game could allow the characters to build up their own cultivations for food.

Adventurers aren't farmers, I don't think that's a good idea. As an adventurer I'd much rather just hunt for food, much easier.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Well, if the GBA SDK is available for free, that explains...

There's always a ton of crap and very few gems available for those systems.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Well, what I meant by far was probably "further than others".
Skan has gone relatively far, however (see the other thread). Now you have to beat this ;-)

Yes, I do, don't I.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And, yes, monsters stay away of these corridors. This is by design. But wasn't that single monster you met (and which gave you the first key) quite long to defeat ?

It didn't take that long with just two chars. It's doable.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You seem to have more ideas than I have, so perhaps it's yours to show me something.

Do I? I didn't know that! I've never made a website in my entire life!

Originally Posted by meynaf

So far it has run on my Miggy, but also on a friends's Linux peecee. It was made to be portable (it's one of the few non-asm - that is, C++ - progs I did).

Sounds cool, perhaps I'll try it out for my self.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ah, good.

Ok, here's the code. It's the crude working version of my decompressed png decoder. Now you can see for yourself.

;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Decode_Png_24	;Decodes a decompressed 24bit png image.
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	movem.l	d0-a6,-(sp)

	move.l	#3,_pixelwidth
	move.l	#512,height_c2p

	move.l	_bmpbuffer,a0
	move.l	_picture,a1

	move.l	png_height,d1
	subq.l	#1,d1

	move.l	_picture,temp
	move.l	_bmpbuffer,temp2

	move.l	png_width,d0
	mulu.w	#3,d0
	addq.l	#1,d0
	move.l	d0,a6
.loop_y
	move.l	temp,a1
	move.l	a6,d0
	add.l	d0,temp
	move.l	temp2,a0
	add.l	#1280,temp2

	move.b	(a1)+,d2

	cmp.b	#3,d2
	bgt	.case4
	beq	.case3
	cmp.b	#1,d2
	bgt	.case2
	beq	.case1
.case0
	move.l	png_width,d3
	lsr.l	#2,d3
	subq.l	#1,d3
.case0_loop
	move.l	(a1)+,(a0)+
	move.l	(a1)+,(a0)+
	move.l	(a1)+,(a0)+

	dbra	d3,.case0_loop
	dbra	d1,.loop_y
	bra	.end
.case1
	move.l	png_width,d3
	subq.l	#2,d3

	moveq	#0,d4
	moveq	#0,d5
	moveq	#0,d6

.case1_loop
	add.b	(a1)+,d4
	move.b	d4,(a0)+

	add.b	(a1)+,d5
	move.b	d5,(a0)+

	add.b	(a1)+,d6
	move.b	d6,(a0)+

	dbra	d3,.case1_loop
	dbra	d1,.loop_y
	bra	.end
.case2
	move.l	png_width,d3
	subq.l	#2,d3

	move.l	a0,a2
	sub.l	#1280,a2
.case2_loop
	move.b	(a2)+,d4
	add.b	(a1)+,d4
	move.b	d4,(a0)+

	move.b	(a2)+,d4
	add.b	(a1)+,d4
	move.b	d4,(a0)+

	move.b	(a2)+,d4
	add.b	(a1)+,d4
	move.b	d4,(a0)+

	dbra	d3,.case2_loop
	dbra	d1,.loop_y
	bra	.end
.case3
	move.l	png_width,d3
	subq.l	#2,d3

	move.l	a0,a2
	sub.l	#1280,a2

	moveq	#0,d2
	moveq	#0,d4
	moveq	#0,d5
	moveq	#0,d6
.case3_loop
	move.b	(a2)+,d2
	add.w	d2,d4
	lsr.w	#1,d4
	add.b	(a1)+,d4
	move.b	d4,(a0)+

	move.b	(a2)+,d2
	add.w	d2,d5
	lsr.w	#1,d5
	add.b	(a1)+,d5
	move.b	d5,(a0)+

	move.b	(a2)+,d2
	add.w	d2,d6
	lsr.w	#1,d6
	add.b	(a1)+,d6
	move.b	d6,(a0)+

	dbra	d3,.case3_loop
	dbra	d1,.loop_y
	bra	.end
.case4
	move.l	d1,-(sp)

	moveq	#2,d7

	move.l	a0,a4
	move.l	a1,a5

.case4_loop2
	move.l	a4,a0
	move.l	a5,a1
	move.l	a4,a3

	addq.l	#1,a4
	addq.l	#1,a5

	move.l	png_width,d3
	subq.l	#2,d3

	sub.l	#1280+3,a3

	moveq	#0,d2
	moveq	#0,d4

	move.b	(a3),d2
	addq.l	#3,a3

.case4_loop
	move.l	d2,d0
	move.b	(a3),d2

.case4_peath
	move.l	d4,d1
	add.l	d2,d1
	sub.l	d0,d1

	move.l	d1,d5
	sub.l	d4,d5
	bge	.case4_peath1
	neg.l	d5

.case4_peath1
	move.l	d1,d6
	sub.l	d2,d6
	bge	.case4_peath2
	neg.l	d6

.case4_peath2
	sub.l	d0,d1
	bge	.case4_peath3
	neg.l	d1

.case4_peath3
	cmp.l	d6,d5
	bgt	.case4_peath4
	cmp.l	d1,d5
	bgt	.case4_peath4

	add.b	(a1),d4
	bra	.case4_peati

.case4_peath4
	move.b	(a1),d4

	cmp.l	d1,d6
	bgt	.case4_peath5

	add.b	d2,d4
	bra	.case4_peati

.case4_peath5
	add.b	d0,d4

.case4_peati
	move.b	d4,(a0)

	addq.l	#3,a0
	addq.l	#3,a1
	addq.l	#3,a3

	dbra	d3,.case4_loop
	dbra	d7,.case4_loop2

	move.l	(sp)+,d1
	dbra	d1,.loop_y
	bra	.end
.end
	movem.l	(sp)+,d0-a6
	rts
;-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although I didn't have to post the whole loop for the example, I just thought it was cool

Originally Posted by meynaf

Your locale_example.s seems broken in some way (binary data before text). I dunno with what you edited that.

It's not broken, it's an AsmOne source with book marks saved at the start of the text file. I don't know why they didn't simply use hex numbers on line one instead of this binary format, but hey, what can I do!

Originally Posted by meynaf

Anyway I could have a look at it. The idea looked quite standard to me.

Yes, it is, but why make it over elaborate?

Originally Posted by meynaf

If you want to add new features, here are a few :
- default built-in strings, in case no locale file is found
- string format with parameter order (not all tongues have the same word ordering, e.g. french usually places adjectives after the noun where english places them before, also german tends to place verbs at the end)
- locale date and time format
- number format (decimal point vs comma)

Sounds good. Yes, I think I can handle that.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You can just fry your cpu, maybe it will taste good once cooked.

Crunchy silicon, tastes good

Originally Posted by meynaf

If she's like my mom, habits are more important than speed.

No, she's just not impatient, and it saves her some money, that's why she's happy with the computer.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes, but at least it proves it's not as easy as it might look.

Windows only proves that it's easy to screw things up, nothing more

Originally Posted by meynaf

I said it was one of the factors, of course the whole package is responsible.
But you want to know why color handling does slow things down ? Because of the constant color remapping operations the GDI has to do. Color remap isn't a fast operation, you know.

Color remapping isn't needed all the time, and has to be done only once for each color mode. The fact that the GDI handles this in a slow way, means nothing. Look at NewIcons on the Amiga. This remaps icons on the fly to suit the color mode, and it does so in a fast way.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ferraris with steam engines.
Man, I love your comparison.

So did I, but as it turns out, in 1906 there was a steam powered car that went around 200 kph, not very slow if you ask me

Originally Posted by meynaf

But I can only encourage you to make your OS. This way you will understand why the steam engine is still there.

I still don't see why high level portable code has to be slow with a good compiler/language.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Flexible down sampling routines aren't enough, you will also need to upsample.
But resampling to any ratio is very easy.
However, these operations introduce noise. Filtering this isn't easy, and if you do, you may well add some crappy effects (such as treble removal).

I've read that any time you resample a sound, you have to high-pass filter it, but I don't know how to do that.

Sounds difficult to do in high quality and keep it fast... Not a job I would like to try myself.

Originally Posted by meynaf

No, they're the best programmers there are. Simply making the bloody thing to work at all on such a stupid architecture was really a feat !

They still screwed it up if it's as slow as you say it, especially on fast peecees.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes, but you didn't say no at first place !

No, I didn't, but it wasn't politeness, it was curiousness, and hey, beer just tastes good.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You're right, but originally it was only planned for my own usage.

That's actually what I thought. Would've been a shame if you kept it to yourself of course.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I already send pointers back without copying whereever possible.
Working on a plain A1200 is an important feature, albeit not a high-priority one.

Ok, but do you agree that having two ham render loops is useful for a plain A1200, especially since the code doesn't become much bigger?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Remember that decoding directly to chipmem (when you have fastmem) will be slower than copying data back, because bytes are decoded, not longs.

I meant for a plain A1200, where you have to decode from chip to chip.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Then... Just do it.

Ok, I already have a bunch of plain scaling loops that now need to be integrated into your viewer.

Originally Posted by meynaf

This is a 64 color screen (more than the average workbench, especially mine which is really ugly) and is 640x480 (704x544 to be precise), not the usual 640x256.

I think you'll find that highres interlace with 64+ colors is much more common than you think.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You may try a mockup of the whole GUI, but keep this screen format in mind.

I'm not going to try to get the gui to look good in four colors, that just isn't possible. As for non-lace resolutions, this may be possible, and I'll give it a shot, but I can't promise anything.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Btw I've never used Brilliance (yes, I know you used it ), I prefer Ppaint.

Brilliance 2 is the king. It's very fast, has unlimited undo (unlike Dpaint) and allowes editing of 24 bit images with a ham8 preview. In my opinion, Brilliance is superior

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

You can always have different versions for each cpu, only makes then archive larger. As for strange behavior, I've noticed that some instruction can be pipelined during chipmem writes. Seems odd, and I may have looked at it wrong, but this also needs testing.

Of course I can make different versions for different cpus, but I wouldn't be able to do the 040/060 versions because I have no such cpu on which to test - not to mention I don't have enough knowledge about them.

About chipmem pipelining : you can fit more than 20 cycles (on 50 Mhz 030) of instructions after one single write. Any instruction type will do, provided they don't access memory.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Indeed. Amiga software needs modern features!

But we probably won't agree on what "modern" means :-D

Originally Posted by Thorham

I don't think it's the best, I just don't think all of it is crap, that's all.

The Empire probably isn't all crap, but I prefer to be a rebel anyway

Originally Posted by Thorham

You mean loudspeakers (I assume). Well, it was only a guess

Yeah, big loudspeakers.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Final Fantasy 9: 24,5 MB for about one to two minutes per song (counting unique data, they're looped). There's 108 songs, averaging at 232 kb per song.
Final Fantasy 10: 42.9 MB for about one to two minutes per song (counting unique data, also looped). There's 93 songs, averaging about at about 472 kb per song.

The playing time per song is a guess, but it's accurate enough, I hope. As you can see, the amount of audio is more than what's possible with just compression, it has to be tracked.

That's around 16kbps. Still possible. I guess it's better to have a look at that data to settle things up (maybe there is some ID string in it).

Originally Posted by Thorham

This emulator is very slow. Zsnes, which is not available for the Amiga, is much faster. Actually, snes9x is slow on my peecee! It may be possible to do fast audio chip emulation anyway, especially if there aren't a whole range of exotic features to emulate.

I don't know enough about that to tell more.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, it is. There are some cool house stations I listen to a lot. It's great

So you don't need an MP3 player finally :-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Bah, how annoying I don't really want to use FFS anymore

What's wrong with FFS ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ah, only showing the fastest case, are we.

Sure.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You use WB and Cli? This can not in any way be compared to the awesome power that is Diro 4.16 How can you stand it? WB drives me nuts, it's so primitive!

I'm old school, you know
But what can your Diro4.16 do, that WB/Cli can't ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Anything that makes sense is fine with me

Ok.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Sounds cool. But how to do this in a DM style view? Seems to me like the Fire Emblem view is much more suitable for this. In fact, Fire Emblem is quite similar to this concept. Same for Shining Force, if you want to check it out for your self.

Such big battles can't be made with a DM style view, of course, it has to be 2D tile view.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, I've started with the mock-up. I already have some old gfx I made years ago, they should be a good base. I'll post them later, because it can take some time to do this right (you can't just slap things together and expect it to work).

I'm eager/curious to see something that actually works...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Because the concept is more modern than Pang, which is true old-school.

Pang is the only game of its type, where there are many other 3D dungeon games. So what's old-school, again ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's a lot more modern than Pang.

Same as above. I won't understand unless you can define what you mean by "modern" vs "old-school".

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hmm, that's a powerful party you have there.

Yep

Originally Posted by Thorham

Sounds interesting, I need to give this game a go.

A good idea. It's more "modern" than DM1

Originally Posted by Thorham

I can't speak for CSB, but DM1 and DM2 are clearly fully playable with one character. The games are designed to be played with any number of chars you want, not just four, but also three, two or one. In fact, my DM2 no skill challenge is probably something the designers took in account as well, because of way too convenient item placing in one case, and the reflector shield which is essential (I may be wrong on that one, though). Sorry meynaf, but I can not agree, DM1 and DM2 are designed to be playable as the player sees fit.

They made it possible but they discourage it, as DM2 manual says :
"Although it is possible to venture out with fewer than four, most of the hostile creatures will appear in large numbers, so having a full group will help weigh the odds of survival in your favour."

So this is just an option, not the main way of playing.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, it's just that a split screen view can be optional, and allows the player to keep an eye on multiple chars/locations at the same time.

Optional, yes. But not essential.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Resurecting is something I don't miss. In DM I never use it when playing with more than one character. The lack of progress is a bit of a downer, I agree, and not being able to fix damaged items is, well, part of the game, I guess. I mean, how do you repair a highly advanced electronics based weapon? On the other hand, not being able to fix machine guns, etc, does suck, and should be possible.

There are lots of curious things in HG. So why not something like a "repair inventory psionic-amp" object ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

But there's more. Food restores hit points, while only med packs and medics should be able to do this (only applies to organic chars ). And of course the inventory system is totally bogus

Food would have been useless if it didn't heal, that's why.
Of course the inventory system is bogus, but it's a side-effect of the split screen : not enough room !

Originally Posted by Thorham

It is if you use layers.

You mean layers such as in UFO ?
This is perhaps not good for huge lands, as it multiplies the surface.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I've noticed that your gui doesn't handle different WB font sizes very well. Thought you might wanted to know.

Not really. It is : it doesn't handle different WB font sizes AT ALL.
I didn't pretend it worked well anyway

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's a way. It's also possible to do it the other way around, though. Come up with a fun game system, and design the game around it. I don't see any problems with that approach.

Problem can be : oops I forgot something important in the game system.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Could be interesting. However, how do adventurers build roads and buildings? It's still not that easy to fit this concept into such a game seamlessly.

Where's the problem ? Select your adventurers, then order them to build something, with a menu. They'll be like units of a strategy game.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Adventurers aren't farmers, I don't think that's a good idea. As an adventurer I'd much rather just hunt for food, much easier.

They can do both.

Originally Posted by Thorham

There's always a ton of crap and very few gems available for those systems.

Probably.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, I do, don't I.

So now ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

It didn't take that long with just two chars. It's doable.

Ok. No problem with him then.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Do I? I didn't know that! I've never made a website in my entire life!

So you'll understand that I can't show you anything either...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Sounds cool, perhaps I'll try it out for my self.

Perhaps. But, you know, it's not very impressive despite the lot of work on it.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, here's the code. It's the crude working version of my decompressed png decoder. Now you can see for yourself.

(...)

Although I didn't have to post the whole loop for the example, I just thought it was cool

I'm sorry, but... where is that mem-to-mem add needed ? I don't see !

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's not broken, it's an AsmOne source with book marks saved at the start of the text file. I don't know why they didn't simply use hex numbers on line one instead of this binary format, but hey, what can I do!

I'm not using AsmOne so that was just a bad text to me

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, it is, but why make it over elaborate?

Must be simple and efficient, that's all.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Sounds good. Yes, I think I can handle that.

Ok. That's all I can think of.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Crunchy silicon, tastes good

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, she's just not impatient, and it saves her some money, that's why she's happy with the computer.

So that's just a matter of cost, ok.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Windows only proves that it's easy to screw things up, nothing more

It still surprises me it works at all...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Color remapping isn't needed all the time, and has to be done only once for each color mode. The fact that the GDI handles this in a slow way, means nothing. Look at NewIcons on the Amiga. This remaps icons on the fly to suit the color mode, and it does so in a fast way.

Those icons are small things, you know.

Originally Posted by Thorham

So did I, but as it turns out, in 1906 there was a steam powered car that went around 200 kph, not very slow if you ask me

So be happy with peecees. They're not very slow steam engines

Originally Posted by Thorham

I still don't see why high level portable code has to be slow with a good compiler/language.

Because there is NO good compiler/language (personal opinion).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Sounds difficult to do in high quality and keep it fast... Not a job I would like to try myself.

Still in the todo list for me...

Originally Posted by Thorham

They still screwed it up if it's as slow as you say it, especially on fast peecees.

I think it's more a matter of architecture than anything else (of both machine and language).

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, I didn't, but it wasn't politeness, it was curiousness, and hey, beer just tastes good.

Nope. I don't agree, beer doesn't taste good
It's bitter, and looks like piss (and ends up being it very quickly !).

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's actually what I thought. Would've been a shame if you kept it to yourself of course.

Sure.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, but do you agree that having two ham render loops is useful for a plain A1200, especially since the code doesn't become much bigger?

Not really. Data copying's time will be neglectable as compared with HAM rendering.
Moreover, I don't like duplicating code ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

I meant for a plain A1200, where you have to decode from chip to chip.

But who's still using a plain A1200 anyway ? Is one second gain out of 20 (optimistic guess), specific for that config, really useful ?
And that, for a particular format which it not widely used ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, I already have a bunch of plain scaling loops that now need to be integrated into your viewer.

See the "output" function call. All is there.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I think you'll find that highres interlace with 64+ colors is much more common than you think.

Not on PAL monitors !

Originally Posted by Thorham

I'm not going to try to get the gui to look good in four colors, that just isn't possible. As for non-lace resolutions, this may be possible, and I'll give it a shot, but I can't promise anything.

My basic GUI should look good in four colors, and that's all I need for now.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Brilliance 2 is the king. It's very fast, has unlimited undo (unlike Dpaint) and allowes editing of 24 bit images with a ham8 preview. In my opinion, Brilliance is superior

I didn't test v2, but old Brillance didn't seem good to me.

[Thorham]

First things first, the game menu mockups and scaling loops.

I've made two mockups for the menu system, they take quite a while to make, so I'll post some more later, and I want your input, of course. One is for the stats, the other for the equip screen. Don't worry if some of the stats don't make sense, or don't fit the game, this can all be changed. Furthermore, the sizes of the menus should not be fixed in the game. Here they are: Mockups.zip

As for the scaling loops, I told you I had a bunch, but those are all 24 bit:

2x2 to 1x1
3x3 to 2x2
3x3 to 1x1
4x4 to 3x3
4x4 to 1x1

Because they are of no use for 16bit, 15bit and indexed, I have to make all of those separately. I'm currently finishing all of the indexed loops, but it has taken quite a while. You see, I had to do 8bit, 4bit, 2bit and one bit (7bit, 6bit, 5bit and 3bit should be possible with one of the other indexed loops). Thats a total of 20 loops, plus 16bit and 15 makes for another 10 loops, and you can see that this will take a while, so hold your horses, it's getting done.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Of course I can make different versions for different cpus, but I wouldn't be able to do the 040/060 versions because I have no such cpu on which to test - not to mention I don't have enough knowledge about them.

Oh well, at least code that's fast will be fast on faster cpus, too.

Originally Posted by meynaf

About chipmem pipelining : you can fit more than 20 cycles (on 50 Mhz 030) of instructions after one single write. Any instruction type will do, provided they don't access memory.

Ok, but I've noticed strange behaviors when using different instructions, where some seem to pipeline perfectly, while others don't, really odd. Maybe I need to check this again.

Originally Posted by meynaf

But we probably won't agree on what "modern" means :-D

Yes, we will: Pong is old-school, 'latest peecee title' is new-school (modern).

Originally Posted by meynaf

The Empire probably isn't all crap, but I prefer to be a rebel anyway.

I rather get the good stuff from both sides

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yeah, big loudspeakers.

I have old KEF speakers, man, that bass is deeeeeeeep.

Originally Posted by meynaf

That's around 16kbps. Still possible. I guess it's better to have a look at that data to settle things up (maybe there is some ID string in it).

You know, for the Playstation 2 Final Fantasies you might be right, but all the data seems to be gibberish which means it's probably compressed, so I can't tell.

For the Playstation 1 Final Fantasies it's most definitely tracked, and I guess they do sound just a tad simpler, not much, though.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I don't know enough about that to tell more.

Me neither. But I can tell you that Zsnes works at a constant 50 fps on my old peecee, with vsync on, everything is super smooth, except for the glitches caused by the os (which can't really be helped, not even under AmigaOs). This program probably has all of the important routines written in hand optimized assembler, and is a good example of peecee software that performs very well.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So you don't need an MP3 player finally :-)

Not really. It's just a pitty that I've got to have my peecee on to use net radio, d'oh Guess I need to buy a stand-alone internet radio...

Originally Posted by meynaf

What's wrong with FFS ?

Apart from partition size limits, validating. This single thing is the reason I've always used small partitions, because waiting for two gig to be validated just sucks. With SFS there is no validating, so there's no waiting. Now I know it doesn't happen often, but when it does it just sucks.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm old school, you know.
But what can your Diro4.16 do, that WB/Cli can't ?

Hey, I'm from the old-schoold, too (or I wouldn't still be coding in 68k). Diro is easier to use than WB/CLI. There really is no comparing Diro to those two. If I were you, I'd just install it and try it for yourself. It's doesn't need things in startup-sequence/user-startup/wb-startup, so it won't slow down anything, and it doesn't replace Workbench, so you can easily see for yourself.

Also, because of the large number of files you've got which still need sorting out, Diro will be much better than WB/CLI. Try it now

Originally Posted by meynaf

Such big battles can't be made with a DM style view, of course, it has to be 2D tile view.

Good we agree on this, because I hugely prefer this.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm eager/curious to see something that actually works...

You've seen the pics I've made, so tell me what you think. I can make more of them, but as said, it takes time.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Pang is the only game of its type, where there are many other 3D dungeon games. So what's old-school, again ?

See above.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Same as above. I won't understand unless you can define what you mean by "modern" vs "old-school".

Yes, see above, again

Sorry for that, but I just had to

Originally Posted by meynaf

A good idea. It's more "modern" than DM1.

No comment...

Originally Posted by meynaf

They made it possible but they discourage it, as DM2 manual says :
"Although it is possible to venture out with fewer than four, most of the hostile creatures will appear in large numbers, so having a full group will help weigh the odds of survival in your favour."

Apparently, but what they're writing is really for beginners. Most of DM2 is quite easy with just one character, and the same goes for DM1.

Truth of the matter is that they may have designed it that way, but the implementation doesn't in any way need all chars or even two, one is enough, because your single char will become quite strong, stronger than the individual chars in a party.

So it may not have been intended, but the implementation tells a different story.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So this is just an option, not the main way of playing.

Perhaps an intended option?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Optional, yes. But not essential.

Maybe we could just drop the DM view, and go 2D instead? Just asking

Originally Posted by meynaf

There are lots of curious things in HG. So why not something like a "repair inventory psionic-amp" object ?

Good one. Let's try to avoid weirdness in our game idea. It's still a cool game

Originally Posted by meynaf

Food would have been useless if it didn't heal, that's why.
Of course the inventory system is bogus, but it's a side-effect of the split screen : not enough room !

HG inventory system could've much better if they'd designed it better. One thing is the large item graphics, this isn't needed. Small gfx that only use up 16x16 pixels are much better, and give you much more room to play with. They really didn't think this through.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You mean layers such as in UFO ?
This is perhaps not good for huge lands, as it multiplies the surface.

Not necessarily. Multiple layers only have to be used when they make sense. Take the real world, where you're walking on some grass land. There is only one layer, unless you dig another layer or grow wings But seriously, this can be solved.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not really. It is : it doesn't handle different WB font sizes AT ALL.
I didn't pretend it worked well anyway.

It's still cool, and it's short. Should have potential.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Problem can be : oops I forgot something important in the game system.

Just implement it later, which sucks, though... Yup, things do need to be planned well, or it will become a mess.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Where's the problem ? Select your adventurers, then order them to build something, with a menu. They'll be like units of a strategy game.

Originally Posted by meynaf

They can do both.

Farming warriors and wizards? How about us coders start a farm and see how we do? Or let's build a road... Not that easy to get right, and takes a lot of practice. It's just like a blacksmith, who's certainly strong enough to wear armor and use a sword, rushing off into battle. The end result is going to be a dead blacksmith, because he's got no fighting experience.

My idea:

Have adventurer compatible professions, like warriors, wizards, thieves, etc make up the adventuring party, while there are non-adventurer professions like smiths, farmers, builders, etc who handle building and other settlement related business.

At any point in the game where you want to stay in one place for a while, you can bring in those non-adventuring characters to construct a settlement with farms, etc. Over time this settlement can grow into a city. Such settlements can also have armies of adventure compatible characters (soldiers, knights, archers), and can be used in large scale territorial battles.

Your party can be used to explore and fight in dungeons, etc.

How does that sound?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Probably.

Yes, but the gems are truly shiny.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So now ?

Fix the party setup problem, and you have a winner!

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ok. No problem with him then.

As said, the only problem is with party recruitment.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So you'll understand that I can't show you anything either...

You might be able to show a website whith a layout you like?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Perhaps. But, you know, it's not very impressive despite the lot of work on it.

Yeah, it's just a 68k emu, isn't it. Why did you write it?

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm sorry, but... where is that mem-to-mem add needed ? I don't see !

Erm, well, gee, sorry for that I posted the wrong code, I'll look it up again.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm not using AsmOne so that was just a bad text to me.

You're not to blame anyway, because they should've used a more sensible format.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Must be simple and efficient, that's all.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ok. That's all I can think of.

Ok, but I'm finishing those scaling loops first.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So that's just a matter of cost, ok.

Partially. The fact is that in exchange for a little patience, her computer does everything she wants, and she can do it at home, instead of at work. And besides, Ubuntu 8 isn't that slow on her machine.

Originally Posted by meynaf

It still surprises me it works at all...

Originally Posted by meynaf

Those icons are small things, you know.

I still don't see how everything in a gui needs to be remapped all the time.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So be happy with peecees. They're not very slow steam engines.

Still, 200 kph in 1906 with a steam car... Not bad!

Originally Posted by meynaf

Because there is NO good compiler/language (personal opinion).

Perhaps this is because none have been written

Originally Posted by meynaf

Still in the todo list for me...

No kidding.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I think it's more a matter of architecture than anything else (of both machine and language).

The architecture is irrelevant with todays speeds and even with my old 550mhz P3. It's always the implementation that's at fault.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Nope. I don't agree, beer doesn't taste good.
It's bitter, and looks like piss (and ends up being it very quickly !).

Nonononono, beer is the heavenly brew of the gods

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not really. Data copying's time will be neglectable as compared with HAM rendering.
Moreover, I don't like duplicating code ;-)

Hey, no problem, it's your code

Originally Posted by meynaf

But who's still using a plain A1200 anyway ? Is one second gain out of 20 (optimistic guess), specific for that config, really useful ?
And that, for a particular format which it not widely used ?

Understood

Originally Posted by meynaf

See the "output" function call. All is there.

Oki doki.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not on PAL monitors !

Oh noes, I'll have to scale...

Originally Posted by meynaf

My basic GUI should look good in four colors, and that's all I need for now.

Of course, but a flashy one can use more colors, like Empy, and be optional.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I didn't test v2, but old Brillance didn't seem good to me.

What does it lack what you need?

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

First things first, the game menu mockups and scaling loops.

I've made two mockups for the menu system, they take quite a while to make, so I'll post some more later, and I want your input, of course. One is for the stats, the other for the equip screen. Don't worry if some of the stats don't make sense, or don't fit the game, this can all be changed. Furthermore, the sizes of the menus should not be fixed in the game. Here they are: Attachment 20540

Things here look like if they come from an existing game ;-)

Graphically it's more than good enough for my taste. Only thing I can say is that the inventory should display many more objects (full backpack inventory).

Originally Posted by Thorham

As for the scaling loops, I told you I had a bunch, but those are all 24 bit:

2x2 to 1x1
3x3 to 2x2
3x3 to 1x1
4x4 to 3x3
4x4 to 1x1

Because they are of no use for 16bit, 15bit and indexed, I have to make all of those separately. I'm currently finishing all of the indexed loops, but it has taken quite a while. You see, I had to do 8bit, 4bit, 2bit and one bit (7bit, 6bit, 5bit and 3bit should be possible with one of the other indexed loops). Thats a total of 20 loops, plus 16bit and 15 makes for another 10 loops, and you can see that this will take a while, so hold your horses, it's getting done.

15/16 bit are useless in my viewer, so don't bother with them.
Also, I'm not sure ratios such as 3 to 2 are useful, in my opinion only 8x8 -> 1x1, 4x4 -> 1x1, 2x2 -> 1x1 are needed (unsure for 8x8).
For 1 to 8 bits you'll have to do a p2c (probably).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Oh well, at least code that's fast will be fast on faster cpus, too.

Not always !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, but I've noticed strange behaviors when using different instructions, where some seem to pipeline perfectly, while others don't, really odd. Maybe I need to check this again.

Chipmem timings are quite irregular, if not chaotic ;-)
But I have no example of instruction which doesn't pipeline correctly...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, we will: Pong is old-school, 'latest peecee title' is new-school (modern).

No, we won't : Pong was very modern by the time it came, but 'latest peecee title' is just another FPS so it adds nothing new.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I rather get the good stuff from both sides

So both sides will see you as a relapsed heretic and will want to execute you

Originally Posted by Thorham

I have old KEF speakers, man, that bass is deeeeeeeep.

Oh, why did the ceiling fall ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

You know, for the Playstation 2 Final Fantasies you might be right, but all the data seems to be gibberish which means it's probably compressed, so I can't tell.

For the Playstation 1 Final Fantasies it's most definitely tracked, and I guess they do sound just a tad simpler, not much, though.

But how do this tad simpler, tracked sound, look like ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Me neither. But I can tell you that Zsnes works at a constant 50 fps on my old peecee, with vsync on, everything is super smooth, except for the glitches caused by the os (which can't really be helped, not even under AmigaOs).

This program probably has all of the important routines written in hand optimized assembler, and is a good example of peecee software that performs very well.

Performs very well, apart the glitches... And AmigaOs does NOT cause glitches.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Not really. It's just a pitty that I've got to have my peecee on to use net radio, d'oh Guess I need to buy a stand-alone internet radio...

Or a 060.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Apart from partition size limits, validating. This single thing is the reason I've always used small partitions, because waiting for two gig to be validated just sucks. With SFS there is no validating, so there's no waiting. Now I know it doesn't happen often, but when it does it just sucks.

Frankly validating never annoyed me a lot.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hey, I'm from the old-schoold, too (or I wouldn't still be coding in 68k). Diro is easier to use than WB/CLI. There really is no comparing Diro to those two. If I were you, I'd just install it and try it for yourself. It's doesn't need things in startup-sequence/user-startup/wb-startup, so it won't slow down anything, and it doesn't replace Workbench, so you can easily see for yourself.

Also, because of the large number of files you've got which still need sorting out, Diro will be much better than WB/CLI. Try it now

I tested DOpus5 back in 1999 and it didn't convince me.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You've seen the pics I've made, so tell me what you think. I can make more of them, but as said, it takes time.

Stats are probably the easy part. A mockup of the 2D view (with full interface to call menus) would be good.

Originally Posted by Thorham

See above.
Yes, see above, again

Sorry for that, but I just had to

I didn't see much, or you define "modern" as "recent".

Originally Posted by Thorham

Apparently, but what they're writing is really for beginners. Most of DM2 is quite easy with just one character, and the same goes for DM1.

Truth of the matter is that they may have designed it that way, but the implementation doesn't in any way need all chars or even two, one is enough, because your single char will become quite strong, stronger than the individual chars in a party.

So it may not have been intended, but the implementation tells a different story.

Even though it's right the one-man will be stronger than individuals in a party, he's really no match against a full team. Especially at dm1, where you have to wait AGES after a spell such as a fireball before you can use your
hand weapon again.
Besides, the relative feebleness can be compensated with training, and the exponential nature of the levels (you need twice the experience for each next level) will make your one-man's advantage too small to be really useful.

As for dm2, you'll never beat the boss with only one character. Period.

You may say I didn't test the one-character trial. But, man, I do this all the time, and with a very dangerous dungeon : mine !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Perhaps an intended option?

Finish CSB and beat DM2's boss, then we'll see.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Maybe we could just drop the DM view, and go 2D instead? Just asking

If you can use a 2D view for dungeons and still have good puzzles, there'll be no reason to keep the DM view.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Good one. Let's try to avoid weirdness in our game idea.

Avoid weirdness ? Well, perhaps...

Originally Posted by Thorham

HG inventory system could've much better if they'd designed it better. One thing is the large item graphics, this isn't needed. Small gfx that only use up 16x16 pixels are much better, and give you much more room to play with. They really didn't think this through.

Problem is that even 16x16 would still have been too much for that small space.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Not necessarily. Multiple layers only have to be used when they make sense. Take the real world, where you're walking on some grass land. There is only one layer, unless you dig another layer or grow wings But seriously, this can be solved.

So you mean "local" extra layers ? Not easy to handle...
Where would they be used ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's still cool, and it's short. Should have potential.

Yes, if only I could have correct gfx for those icons...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Just implement it later, which sucks, though... Yup, things do need to be planned well, or it will become a mess.

That's right.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Farming warriors and wizards? How about us coders start a farm and see how we do? Or let's build a road... Not that easy to get right, and takes a lot of practice. It's just like a blacksmith, who's certainly strong enough to wear armor and use a sword, rushing off into battle. The end result is going to be a dead blacksmith, because he's got no fighting experience.

My idea:

Have adventurer compatible professions, like warriors, wizards, thieves, etc make up the adventuring party, while there are non-adventurer professions like smiths, farmers, builders, etc who handle building and other settlement related business.

At any point in the game where you want to stay in one place for a while, you can bring in those non-adventuring characters to construct a settlement with farms, etc. Over time this settlement can grow into a city. Such settlements can also have armies of adventure compatible characters (soldiers, knights, archers), and can be used in large scale territorial battles.

Your party can be used to explore and fight in dungeons, etc.

How does that sound?

If we have enough characters, some of them will fight while others provide them with food and weapons. Sounds good.

Now you can't say you can't make the building stuff to fit in the game :-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, but the gems are truly shiny.

Beware of shiny gems, as they're often cursed

Originally Posted by Thorham

Fix the party setup problem, and you have a winner!
As said, the only problem is with party recruitment.

As your fave team always seems to be the one-man, I find this remark pretty pointless coming from you...

Anyway I think I won't "fix" this. It's really part of the challenge, and adds a never-seen part of strategy. It's not a problem, not at all.
Or do you want me to provide you with a saved game of your chosen party, just to prove it's not that hard to do ?

Some ppl did not like csb because it's not linear like dm. Bah ! You won't like my dungeon because the hall of champions isn't safe. I can live with it

Originally Posted by Thorham

You might be able to show a website whith a layout you like?

Not really. And you ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, it's just a 68k emu, isn't it. Why did you write it?

No, it's not really a 68k emu. It's a design based on 68k ideas.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Erm, well, gee, sorry for that I posted the wrong code, I'll look it up again.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You're not to blame anyway, because they should've used a more sensible format.

Even if they did, asmone would still be completely useless to me...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, but I'm finishing those scaling loops first.

I'm not asking anything

Originally Posted by Thorham

Partially. The fact is that in exchange for a little patience, her computer does everything she wants, and she can do it at home, instead of at work. And besides, Ubuntu 8 isn't that slow on her machine.

I can't imaging her installing new software, though...

Originally Posted by Thorham

I still don't see how everything in a gui needs to be remapped all the time.

I didn't tell that. But remapping a small icon isn't the same as remapping a whole gui.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Still, 200 kph in 1906 with a steam car... Not bad!

Not bad. Perhaps not really comfortable ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Perhaps this is because none have been written

Certainly.

Originally Posted by Thorham

The architecture is irrelevant with todays speeds and even with my old 550mhz P3. It's always the implementation that's at fault.

Hah ! Do a better one before saying that !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Nonononono, beer is the heavenly brew of the gods

Now I understand why the gods made such a stupid world !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hey, no problem, it's your code

Always have been

Originally Posted by Thorham

Oh noes, I'll have to scale...

Yes Sir

Originally Posted by Thorham

Of course, but a flashy one can use more colors, like Empy, and be optional.

I think it's not time for the options yet.

Originally Posted by Thorham

What does it lack what you need?

Simplicity maybe ?
Perhaps you can try Personal Paint to see what I mean.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Things here look like if they come from an existing game ;-)

Hehe, I was hoping you'd say that Anyway, some things come from existing games. The portrait comes from Fire Emblem, the large font used for the character name and equipment and the larger number font used in the stat screen come from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and the equipment icons are redone versions of the shop icons in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (and actually look better than the originals). The other font and the layout is done by myself completely.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Graphically it's more than good enough for my taste. Only thing I can say is that the inventory should display many more objects (full backpack inventory).

Originally Posted by meynaf

Stats are probably the easy part. A mockup of the 2D view (with full interface to call menus) would be good.

Look here: Mockups.zip

Ok, only two pics (this didn't take long to do, of course), the map and map with the new equipment screen (renamed to Items). The idea is to have the stats pop-up when you right-click on a unit. The menu as a whole can simply be toggled on and off by pressing the space bar. Shifting through the characters is done with the cursor keys. Right-clicking over an item pops-up a description with specs.

This leaves little to add (which I didn't do as you can see). All that's needed is a cursor for both mouse and keyboard control and small pop-ups for simple stat view and terrain description. Thats it. I didn't really have a lot of time, so I'll do this tonight, I just wanted to post a full reply

The 'map' is actually what I would like the battle view to be like. As for the graphics I've used, they're from, guess what, Fire Emblem. I just downloaded a suitable map, and pasted a bunch of units on top of it. Pity they're copyrighted...

Edited 13 March: Here is more of the interace as said: Map-interface-final.zip

Note that the colors are not very optimal, this is because I've used my Amiga with composite video output. This is not ideal for this sort of work, and I may have to resort to using the peecee in the future.

Originally Posted by meynaf

15/16 bit are useless in my viewer, so don't bother with them.
Also, I'm not sure ratios such as 3 to 2 are useful, in my opinion only 8x8 -> 1x1, 4x4 -> 1x1, 2x2 -> 1x1 are needed (unsure for 8x8).

Good, because I haven't done 15/16 bit yet. As for ratios such as 3x3 to 2x2, these are useful to get the image to use as much screen-space as possible if the AxA to 1x1 ratios are too much. Also, they're already done anyway Just having 8x8, 4x4, 2x2 isn't enough to get good results with a wide selection of picture sizes. As for 8x8, I can do that.

Originally Posted by meynaf

For 1 to 8 bits you'll have to do a p2c (probably).

For most of them, yes. For one and two bits, probably not. Anyway, apart from 8x8, this is the last thing that needs to be done, and eight bit has been taken care of. It's a pity I can't use that code for all the other bit depths as is, oh well

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not always !

Like when?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Chipmem timings are quite irregular, if not chaotic ;-)
But I have no example of instruction which doesn't pipeline correctly...

I've seen it happen. But it might just be those irregularities.

Originally Posted by meynaf

No, we won't : Pong was very modern by the time it came, but 'latest peecee title' is just another FPS so it adds nothing new.

Ok, but tactical shooters have added playing options that go beyond the simple doom and quake style of shooters.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So both sides will see you as a relapsed heretic and will want to execute you

Oh yeah? Well, let'm come

Originally Posted by meynaf

Oh, why did the ceiling fall ?

Indeed

Originally Posted by meynaf

But how do this tad simpler, tracked sound, look like ?

They also look compressed. But they are tracked. Not all Playstation and Playstation 2 games use cd style audio tracks, it's a reasonably well known fact. If they didn't exist, the WinAmp player wouldn't need to do a full audio chip and cpu emulation to play the music.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Performs very well, apart the glitches...

Yes, the glitches are just frame update irregularities caused by WinXp preempting Zsnes. This is not the emulators fault, and all software that runs under WinXp is affected by this, and it can't be helped.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And AmigaOs does NOT cause glitches.

Yes, it can cause update irregularities. If a game running under AmigaOs get's preempted at the wrong time then you'll get those irregularities, and it can't be helped in this case, either. Probably all preemptive multitasking os' cause this.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Or a 060.

The radio is handier

Originally Posted by meynaf

Frankly validating never annoyed me a lot.

It will when FFS wants to validate two gigabyte.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I tested DOpus5 back in 1999 and it didn't convince me.

Then try 4.16 and configure the thing properly. Of course, tastes differ

Originally Posted by meynaf

I didn't see much, or you define "modern" as "recent".

Ok, I give up

Originally Posted by meynaf

Even though it's right the one-man will be stronger than individuals in a party, he's really no match against a full team. Especially at dm1, where you have to wait AGES after a spell such as a fireball before you can use your hand weapon again.

True, but DM1 is still highly playable solo, and I have completed it with one character.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Besides, the relative feebleness can be compensated with training, and the exponential nature of the levels (you need twice the experience for each next level) will make your one-man's advantage too small to be really useful.

Right, but I don't like training too much.

Originally Posted by meynaf

As for dm2, you'll never beat the boss with only one character. Period.

Have you tried? Unless the boss regenerates his health faster than you can damage him, you can defeat him in theory. Don't say this until you've tried it. Also, there's a DM forum where several people have reported playing DM2 with one character. In my opinion it is possible.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You may say I didn't test the one-character trial. But, man, I do this all the time, and with a very dangerous dungeon : mine !

I thought you didn't like soloing?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Finish CSB and beat DM2's boss, then we'll see.

It is, or the game would force you to select four characters.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If you can use a 2D view for dungeons and still have good puzzles, there'll be no reason to keep the DM view.

Yes, of course there can be good puzzles. Those top down view graphics are probably a lot easier to do than DM style graphics anyway. Perhaps I can make something, but I'm not a graphics artist as you know, and I really don't want the graphics to look like crap, so it's going to be hard. Perhaps when we have a working game engine someone from the board who's skilled can help us?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Avoid weirdness ? Well, perhaps...

Weirdness includes things like pink elephants, etc. It's a good idea to leave stuff like that out of the game.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Problem is that even 16x16 would still have been too much for that small space.

At least scrolling through small rows of 16x16 icons is better than how it works now.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So you mean "local" extra layers ? Not easy to handle...

How so? A tile simply has an up and/or a down link which leads to another area. Doesn't sound so difficult to me, or am I forgetting something?

Originally Posted by meynaf

Where would they be used ?

Primarily in dungeons and buildings.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes, if only I could have correct gfx for those icons...

You should focus on getting the interface to handle different font sizes first.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If we have enough characters, some of them will fight while others provide them with food and weapons. Sounds good.

We could have dozens of characters, and multiple permanent settlements that grow into cities over time. Could add a lot of game play.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Now you can't say you can't make the building stuff to fit in the game :-)

That actually was a bit easier than I thought at first.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Beware of shiny gems, as they're often cursed

Originally Posted by meynaf

As your fave team always seems to be the one-man, I find this remark pretty pointless coming from you...

I'm not trying your dungeon solo again until I've completed it with a full party, it's too hard

Originally Posted by meynaf

Anyway I think I won't "fix" this. It's really part of the challenge, and adds a never-seen part of strategy. It's not a problem, not at all.

Ouch, meynaf, that hurts. This is going to take a looooong time to get right...

Originally Posted by meynaf

Or do you want me to provide you with a saved game of your chosen party, just to prove it's not that hard to do ?

Hey, I believe you, it's just that I can't seem to get the hang of it very well, that's all.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Some ppl did not like csb because it's not linear like dm. Bah ! You won't like my dungeon because the hall of champions isn't safe. I can live with it.

The hall of champions should still be safe in my opinion

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not really. And you ?

Well, there are some., I guess. Want me to post pics?

Originally Posted by meynaf

No, it's not really a 68k emu. It's a design based on 68k ideas.

Right, that's what you said

Originally Posted by meynaf

lol smilie here

Gonna post it next time, but there is very little to see, really.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Even if they did, asmone would still be completely useless to me...

Why? For me nothing beats it. I just can't live without having an editor, debugger, command line and hex view in one program. Especially the hex view is un-missable.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm not asking anything.

As the scaling is complete, and the p2c is getting done, I should be able to start on it next week.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I can't imaging her installing new software, though...

Most software is as simple to install as selecting the program of your choice in the package manager and telling it to install it. Done. But you're right, she doesn't know how to do it.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I didn't tell that. But remapping a small icon isn't the same as remapping a whole gui.

Actually, guis don't have to remapped. In WinXp the original gui looks perfect in just 16 colors, and it's the same for all the higher bit depths. The same colors are used over and over. A freshly developed gui doesn't need any remapping except for icons.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Not bad. Perhaps not really comfortable ?

Probably not

Originally Posted by meynaf

Certainly.

This has to change...

Originally Posted by meynaf

Hah ! Do a better one before saying that !

Explain, plz

Originally Posted by meynaf

Now I understand why the gods made such a stupid world !

Yup, stupid it is.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yes Sir

Oh, well, I didn't want to do that, but I'll do it anyway then...

Originally Posted by meynaf

Simplicity maybe ?
Perhaps you can try Personal Paint to see what I mean.

I have, and the same goes for Dpaint. I dislike both programs. Brilliance is faster, and the gui bar at the bottom of the screen is more comfortable to use to me. Also, Brilliance allows editing of 24bit images, and uses ham8 for preview. Great program in my opinion.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hehe, I was hoping you'd say that Anyway, some things come from existing games. The portrait comes from Fire Emblem, the large font used for the character name and equipment and the larger number font used in the stat screen come from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and the equipment icons are redone versions of the shop icons in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (and actually look better than the originals). The other font and the layout is done by myself completely.

Ripped gfx is certainly better than no gfx at all.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Look here: Attachment 20656

Ok, only two pics (this didn't take long to do, of course), the map and map with the new equipment screen (renamed to Items). The idea is to have the stats pop-up when you right-click on a unit. The menu as a whole can simply be toggled on and off by pressing the space bar. Shifting through the characters is done with the cursor keys. Right-clicking over an item pops-up a description with specs.

This leaves little to add (which I didn't do as you can see). All that's needed is a cursor for both mouse and keyboard control and small pop-ups for simple stat view and terrain description. Thats it. I didn't really have a lot of time, so I'll do this tonight, I just wanted to post a full reply

The 'map' is actually what I would like the battle view to be like. As for the graphics I've used, they're from, guess what, Fire Emblem. I just downloaded a suitable map, and pasted a bunch of units on top of it. Pity they're copyrighted...

Edited 13 March: Here is more of the interace as said: Attachment 20672

Note that the colors are not very optimal, this is because I've used my Amiga with composite video output. This is not ideal for this sort of work, and I may have to resort to using the peecee in the future.

Looks good for a start. But those units are soldiers, not adventurers. How to handle them ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Good, because I haven't done 15/16 bit yet. As for ratios such as 3x3 to 2x2, these are useful to get the image to use as much screen-space as possible if the AxA to 1x1 ratios are too much. Also, they're already done anyway Just having 8x8, 4x4, 2x2 isn't enough to get good results with a wide selection of picture sizes. As for 8x8, I can do that.

If you want to use as much screen-space as possible, then it'd be better to write a generic rescale algorithm !

Originally Posted by Thorham

For most of them, yes. For one and two bits, probably not. Anyway, apart from 8x8, this is the last thing that needs to be done, and eight bit has been taken care of. It's a pity I can't use that code for all the other bit depths as is, oh well

Theoretically if you do bitplanes in a loop, one code can handle any depth (and this is one of the few advantages of bitplanes !).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Like when?

Like when a program is mysteriously faster on 030 than on 060.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I've seen it happen. But it might just be those irregularities.

Pipeline in fastmem and you will have no trouble.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ok, but tactical shooters have added playing options that go beyond the simple doom and quake style of shooters.

Like what ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Oh yeah? Well, let'm come

It isn't time yet. But you lose nothing for waiting

Originally Posted by Thorham

They also look compressed. But they are tracked. Not all Playstation and Playstation 2 games use cd style audio tracks, it's a reasonably well known fact. If they didn't exist, the WinAmp player wouldn't need to do a full audio chip and cpu emulation to play the music.

WinAmp does chip emulation because it has no knowledge of the format inside.
If it's tracked, then there HAS to be some editor for it, and it's probably not running on the PS itself but on a PC. A full audio emulation isn't necessary in that case either.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, the glitches are just frame update irregularities caused by WinXp preempting Zsnes. This is not the emulators fault, and all software that runs under WinXp is affected by this, and it can't be helped.

This is why you can not make a clean program on such a platform : whatever you do, something will go wrong. Display tearing is something I really do NOT like.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, it can cause update irregularities. If a game running under AmigaOs get's preempted at the wrong time then you'll get those irregularities, and it can't be helped in this case, either. Probably all preemptive multitasking os' cause this.

It's not the OS : for the game to get preempted, some other program must be asking for cpu in the background.
If no other task needs cpu, you will not get those irregularities (unlike on win$ and even linux).

Originally Posted by Thorham

The radio is handier

Prob'ly, but 060 is fast enough for streaming audio.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It will when FFS wants to validate two gigabyte.

Unlikely, as my FFS partitions are 1 gigabyte only ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Then try 4.16 and configure the thing properly. Of course, tastes differ

I'm probably just too lazy to configure the bloody thing...

Originally Posted by Thorham

True, but DM1 is still highly playable solo, and I have completed it with one character.

This is because it's just too easy ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Right, but I don't like training too much.

That's the main problem of this leveling system...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Have you tried? Unless the boss regenerates his health faster than you can damage him, you can defeat him in theory. Don't say this until you've tried it. Also, there's a DM forum where several people have reported playing DM2 with one character. In my opinion it is possible.

I haven't tried, and I don't want to. But please do it.
The boss won't probably regenerate faster than your damages to him, but so will you and because of his minion spamming you'll die a lot quicker than him.
It may be possible, but this is theory. Here you see that the game was not planned to be completed solo, even though most of it is easy enough.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I thought you didn't like soloing?

Right. But that's just quick-testing a dungeon area.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It is, or the game would force you to select four characters.

I wish it did

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, of course there can be good puzzles. Those top down view graphics are probably a lot easier to do than DM style graphics anyway. Perhaps I can make something, but I'm not a graphics artist as you know, and I really don't want the graphics to look like crap, so it's going to be hard. Perhaps when we have a working game engine someone from the board who's skilled can help us?

You need not be a graphics artist to make place holders, which are what we need for now, to validate the game concept. Ripped gfx is good for that, too.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Weirdness includes things like pink elephants, etc. It's a good idea to leave stuff like that out of the game.

Ok for weirdness, but a few magic won't hurt...

Originally Posted by Thorham

At least scrolling through small rows of 16x16 icons is better than how it works now.

Probably.

Originally Posted by Thorham

How so? A tile simply has an up and/or a down link which leads to another area. Doesn't sound so difficult to me, or am I forgetting something?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Primarily in dungeons and buildings.

So this is like DM levels in fact ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

You should focus on getting the interface to handle different font sizes first.

I simply have no idea on how to do that...

Originally Posted by Thorham

We could have dozens of characters, and multiple permanent settlements that grow into cities over time. Could add a lot of game play.

Unless those characters are immortal, population of settlements won't have enough time to grow significantly - or the simulation is really poor.

Originally Posted by Thorham

That actually was a bit easier than I thought at first.

New ideas will come with time, I guess. But there is a problem we'll need to face one day or another : it is the game's rules, that is, characteristics and experience. How will this work ? I don't want to make a game where the characters have a global level, as this is meaningless in real life !

Originally Posted by Thorham

I'm not trying your dungeon solo again until I've completed it with a full party, it's too hard

Now that's a very good idea !
But you probably won't complete it (I think).

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ouch, meynaf, that hurts. This is going to take a looooong time to get right...

Yep. It's made for that.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hey, I believe you, it's just that I can't seem to get the hang of it very well, that's all.

Perhaps you simply need to play CSB before.

Originally Posted by Thorham

The hall of champions should still be safe in my opinion

That would be betraying the dungeon's spirit. Of course you won't see that until you've played up to an advanced point, so please do it.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Well, there are some., I guess. Want me to post pics?

Yeah, you can.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Gonna post it next time, but there is very little to see, really.

I just want to see why a mem-mem add would have been useful, that's all.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Why? For me nothing beats it. I just can't live without having an editor, debugger, command line and hex view in one program. Especially the hex view is un-missable.

Nothing beats it, eh ? But phxass produces better code and supports more complex constructions (try to assemble V with asmone and you'll see what I mean).

Originally Posted by Thorham

As the scaling is complete, and the p2c is getting done, I should be able to start on it next week.

Ok, ok.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Actually, guis don't have to remapped. In WinXp the original gui looks perfect in just 16 colors, and it's the same for all the higher bit depths. The same colors are used over and over. A freshly developed gui doesn't need any remapping except for icons.

Grab WinXp original gui and count the colors : actually there are many more than 16 !

Originally Posted by Thorham

This has to change...

I don't even dare to hope.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Explain, plz

You say that the implementation is at fault, but I won't believe you until you make a better one.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Oh, well, I didn't want to do that, but I'll do it anyway then...

Originally Posted by Thorham

I have, and the same goes for Dpaint. I dislike both programs. Brilliance is faster, and the gui bar at the bottom of the screen is more comfortable to use to me. Also, Brilliance allows editing of 24bit images, and uses ham8 for preview. Great program in my opinion.

Brilliance, fast ? We didn't use the same program !
And the gui bar at the bottom of the screen uses way too much room.

As I litterally never edit 24bit images, PPaint is better for me, especially because of its color usage statistics - I simply can't live without that.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ripped gfx is certainly better than no gfx at all.

They'll do fine as stand-ins like you said.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Looks good for a start. But those units are soldiers, not adventurers. How to handle them ?

Some of them are soldiers. In Fire Emblem, all units are represented according to their job class. We can do it that way, or make the way they look independent from the characters classes.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If you want to use as much screen-space as possible, then it'd be better to write a generic rescale algorithm !

I've thought about that, but the problem is that such a routine would end up being much slower than the fixed scaling ratio loops. Probably at least twice or even three times as slow This is the reason why I haven't done it that way. In my opinion it would be too slow for a viewer, but if you want, I can give it a shot to see exactly how much slower it will become.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Theoretically if you do bitplanes in a loop, one code can handle any depth (and this is one of the few advantages of bitplanes !).

Anything over one bpp needs p2c. Without it, it will slow down to a crawl, unfortunately (I've tried). Bitplanes are a disadvantage for down scaling. For different bit depths, having multiple loops is also faster, but not much. I can make one loop for all indexed modes, or I can leave the code the way it is now, which is separate loops for different depths, your call

Originally Posted by meynaf

Like when a program is mysteriously faster on 030 than on 060.

How is that possible

Originally Posted by meynaf

Pipeline in fastmem and you will have no trouble.

True. Always four free cycles.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Like what ?

Realism, and cooperative game play with multiple players. In these game you can't just rush in and shoot everything anymore like in Doom, Quake, etc. Older shooters didn't used to be like that.

Originally Posted by meynaf

WinAmp does chip emulation because it has no knowledge of the format inside.

True, but if the music was just an audio stream, there would be decoders for it. There are even Playstation video players which simply decode the data like any other video format, and the same can be done for audio.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If it's tracked, then there HAS to be some editor for it, and it's probably not running on the PS itself but on a PC. A full audio emulation isn't necessary in that case either.

No, it isn't, but tracker formats vary from game to game, so they choose to just rip the audio data with player and all, and emulate cpu and sound chip.

Originally Posted by meynaf

This is why you can not make a clean program on such a platform : whatever you do, something will go wrong. Display tearing is something I really do NOT like.

You can make clean software as long as you don't go out of your way to by-pass the os limitations. Display tearing sucks, but I've never seen it on the peecee at all. Not once. The worst that can happen is that games don't run 100% super smooth all the time, nothing more.

Originally Posted by meynaf

It's not the OS : for the game to get preempted, some other program must be asking for cpu in the background.

If no other task needs cpu, you will not get those irregularities (unlike on win$ and even linux).

When my Amiga has booted, there's 37 tasks active, further more, there are all the interrupts which can interrupt the game. I think it's impossible to guarantee 100% super smoothness under AmigaOs, unless you start hacking around.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Prob'ly, but 060 is fast enough for streaming audio.

I think I prefer the radio.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Unlikely, as my FFS partitions are 1 gigabyte only ;-)

Still takes for ages

Originally Posted by meynaf

I'm probably just too lazy to configure the bloody thing...

Ah, right. Without configuring Dopus, it's not as good as it can be.

Originally Posted by meynaf

This is because it's just too easy ;-)

Indeed

Originally Posted by meynaf

That's the main problem of this leveling system...

I like that system, but I generally don't like needing to level up too much in RPGs, and in DM with one character, you don't have to gain more then a few extra levels here and there.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I haven't tried, and I don't want to. But please do it.
The boss won't probably regenerate faster than your damages to him, but so will you and because of his minion spamming you'll die a lot quicker than him.

It will be hard, yes, but not impossible.

Originally Posted by meynaf

It may be possible, but this is theory. Here you see that the game was not planned to be completed solo, even though most of it is easy enough.

Hehe, there are a lot of people who don't play games as they are intended to, like Final Fantasy no-level challenges, or completing those games with one character, or simply not using the mechanics to the fullest.

A good example of the last one is the Final Fantasy 8 no junction challenge. Basically junctioning allows the player to increase a characters stats, use magic and items, while leveling increases stats very little. Leave out junctioning and the players options become very limited. It's possible to complete the game like that, but it's so difficult it's almost insane , but some people like this kind of challenge, intended or not.

In the end games are intended to be enjoyed by the player, so the player should simply play in the way they like most

Originally Posted by meynaf

I wish it did.

Why? If you want to play with four chars, you can, and if you don't, you don't have to. It seems to me that the current system works just fine.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You need not be a graphics artist to make place holders, which are what we need for now, to validate the game concept. Ripped gfx is good for that, too.

Exactly. But I still want the game to look fairly good with original graphics if it's at all possible.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ok for weirdness, but a few magic won't hurt...

Magic is essential, in my opinion. Magic is fantasy, pink elephants are weird, but possible. Get an elephant, and paint it pink

Originally Posted by meynaf

Probably.

Of course! A lot of the item graphics are much to big, and making them all 16x16 pixels would save a lot of room.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So this is like DM levels in fact ?

Really? I didn't know that. The difference is, that I want the game to be 3D internally, where enemies can follow you up/down. Such a way seems best, because layers aren't really needed outside a lot at all, while in a castle, you'll need plenty of layers.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I simply have no idea on how to do that...

You can have the gui use it's own font, or just the system font. In both cases, get the font dimensions, and draw the gui based on those dimensions. Simple enough if you can handle fonts properly. I've done something similar in FreeBasic on the peecee using the FreeType library for TrueType fonts. Works like a charm, and it isn't very hard, just a bit of work.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Unless those characters are immortal, population of settlements won't have enough time to grow significantly - or the simulation is really poor.

Yes, it's a bit of a problem, but I don't like just having farms and roads put in just for the sake of having them in the game. This has to be solved.

Originally Posted by meynaf

New ideas will come with time, I guess. But there is a problem we'll need to face one day or another : it is the game's rules, that is, characteristics and experience. How will this work ? I don't want to make a game where the characters have a global level, as this is meaningless in real life !

Then the first question becomes, do we go for statistically correct random influences (I've made a routine for that), or keep everything exact?

As for global levels, a better idea seems to be to have characters gain experience based on what they do. Warriors who use swords, will become more proficient with swords, just like in real life. When they switch to axes, while they never really used them, they will have to gain proficiency with axes. Same for different types of magic, and other, non-hand to hand warrior types like archers.

This is similar to DM, but can be worked out a lot better, and it's realistic.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Now that's a very good idea !
But you probably won't complete it (I think).

Once I get an adequate level of control, anything is possible.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Perhaps you simply need to play CSB before.

Yes, and I've started it already. It's indeed harder then DM1. The start of the game is already quite tough , nothing like DM

Originally Posted by meynaf

That would be betraying the dungeon's spirit. Of course you won't see that until you've played up to an advanced point, so please do it.

You're right, of course. I guess I'll just have to stick to CSB for the time being, because I'm still a little rusty, and DM is just way too easy. You don't learn much from it after finishing it a couple of times.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Yeah, you can.

Here's a nice and simple layout. It's a small jpeg image (302x282 38kb):

Originally Posted by meynaf

I just want to see why a mem-mem add would have been useful, that's all.

This is a routine from the kernal I wrote over 10 years ago. It use some lame macros, ignore them The one you're looking for is addu.l, it's located after the FreeMem1 label. Although this isn't used that much in the whole source, at the time it made sense to make a macro for it. Now, I probably would've written the whole kernal in a better way, but that was over ten years ago

Especially note worthy is the lame def macro. I thought it made things more readable

;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
__FreeMem
___FreeMem	=__FreeMem-lib.
;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
;Frees a reserved memory block.
;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		;00=memory block 04=object
;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		;64=free mem entry/-1 if failed
;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		begin2	128
		getmemlink 00(a1)
		move.l	64(a0),64(a1)
		braeq	#-1,64(a0),ExitFreeMem

		getbase	a2
		def.l	a3,_KernalFreeMemList(a2)
		def.l	a3,_ListFirstEmpty(a3)
		def.l	a4,64(a0)

		brane	04(a1),_MemObject(a4),ExitFreeMem

		def.l	a2,68(a0)
		def.l	a5,72(a0)

		braeq	#1,76(a0),FreeMem1
		braeq	#2,76(a0),FreeMem2
		braeq	#3,76(a0),FreeMem3

FreeMem0	move.l	_MemStart(a4),_FreeMemStart(a3)
		move.l	_MemEnd(a4),_FreeMemEnd(a3)
		move.l	_MemSize(a4),_FreeMemSize(a3)
		move.l	_MemType(a4),_FreeMemType(a3)
		writenode  a3
		deletenode a4
		exit2	128

FreeMem1	move.l	_MemStart(a4),_FreeMemStart(a2)
		addu.l	_MemSize(a4),_FreeMemSize(a2)
		deletenode a4
		exit2	128

FreeMem2	move.l	_MemEnd(a4),_FreeMemEnd(a5)
		addu.l	_MemSize(a4),_FreeMemSize(a5)
		deletenode a4
		exit2	128

FreeMem3	move.l	_FreeMemEnd(a2),_FreeMemEnd(a5)
		addu.l	_MemSize(a4),_FreeMemSize(a5)
		addu.l	_FreeMemSize(a2),_FreeMemSize(a5)
		deletenode a2
		deletenode a4

ExitFreeMem	exit2	128
;-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Originally Posted by meynaf

Nothing beats it, eh ? But phxass produces better code and supports more complex constructions (try to assemble V with asmone and you'll see what I mean).

Erm, it's assembler, how can it produce better code? Branch optimization perhaps? AsmOne can do that with the ao command. If not, then how? PhxAss is a command line assembler, while AsmOne is fully integrated, and is much handier for debugging, in my opinion.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Grab WinXp original gui and count the colors : actually there are many more than 16 !

I meant the original gui which is present in Win95 and upward. The themed gui which WinXp uses does in fact use more than 16 colors, but the standard gui doesn't, except for the gradient in the title bar, which can be left out when there aren't enough colors.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I don't even dare to hope.

Yeah, unless samone stands up to the challenge, it won't ever happen. Anyway, what are typical things that you would like to see in a c/c++ replacement?

Originally Posted by meynaf

You say that the implementation is at fault, but I won't believe you until you make a better one.

I already made a crude text viewer with FreeBasic. It's about a million times faster than all that other crap ware, and another example is the horrendously slow replace function in office software and some text editors, this is easy to do a lot better (read CygnusEd speeds). There are plenty of applications which can be improved on a lot speed wise, simply because they're implemented in such a louse way. Sometimes it's really no contest. Why don't you give me an example of something that would be hard to do

Originally Posted by meynaf

Brilliance, fast ? We didn't use the same program !

Even on an A500 it's fast. I must admit I haven't used Ppaint in any serious way, but compared to Dpaint, Brilliance is as fast as lightning.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And the gui bar at the bottom of the screen uses way too much room.

I like the gui at the bottom of the screen, matter of personal preference.

Originally Posted by meynaf

As I litterally never edit 24bit images, PPaint is better for me, especially because of its color usage statistics - I simply can't live without that.

I've never really needed color statistics. I guess it depends on both the users needs and taste.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

They'll do fine as stand-ins like you said.

Sure. When we'll have something up and running, we'll see to get something better.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Some of them are soldiers. In Fire Emblem, all units are represented according to their job class. We can do it that way, or make the way they look independent from the characters classes.

But these units represent groups, not individuals ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

I've thought about that, but the problem is that such a routine would end up being much slower than the fixed scaling ratio loops. Probably at least twice or even three times as slow This is the reason why I haven't done it that way. In my opinion it would be too slow for a viewer, but if you want, I can give it a shot to see exactly how much slower it will become.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Anything over one bpp needs p2c. Without it, it will slow down to a crawl, unfortunately (I've tried). Bitplanes are a disadvantage for down scaling. For different bit depths, having multiple loops is also faster, but not much. I can make one loop for all indexed modes, or I can leave the code the way it is now, which is separate loops for different depths, your call

Do it the way you want, but it ought not end up with dozens of different loops !

Originally Posted by Thorham

How is that possible

Worse chipmem timings, suppressed (emulated) instructions... Who knows what else.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Realism, and cooperative game play with multiple players. In these game you can't just rush in and shoot everything anymore like in Doom, Quake, etc. Older shooters didn't used to be like that.

That's just a few more options ; the game's concept is the same.

Originally Posted by Thorham

True, but if the music was just an audio stream, there would be decoders for it. There are even Playstation video players which simply decode the data like any other video format, and the same can be done for audio.

Originally Posted by Thorham

No, it isn't, but tracker formats vary from game to game, so they choose to just rip the audio data with player and all, and emulate cpu and sound chip.

If the music was just another tracker, there would be players for it, too.

And some tracker data should be visible inside (such as sample names, or even note data). It should be possible to simply rip the module out and play it... as any other tracker module.

If it looks wholly compressed, then it's probably just another style of ADPCM format.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You can make clean software as long as you don't go out of your way to by-pass the os limitations. Display tearing sucks, but I've never seen it on the peecee at all. Not once. The worst that can happen is that games don't run 100% super smooth all the time, nothing more.

Now I ask : do we live in the same world ???

Originally Posted by Thorham

When my Amiga has booted, there's 37 tasks active, further more, there are all the interrupts which can interrupt the game. I think it's impossible to guarantee 100% super smoothness under AmigaOs, unless you start hacking around.

37 tasks after booting

I only have 12 tasks or so after booting, and even now I have browser/mailer/tcp stack/text editor running, I still only have 27 !

Furthermore, even with 50 tasks here, if all of them are WAITING (which is what they should be doing when you run a game !), then smoothness will not be affected.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I think I prefer the radio.

What I called streaming audio here IS the radio.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Still takes for ages

Are 30 seconds ages ? Especially when you can still use your machine normally (apart writing to disk) during it ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ah, right. Without configuring Dopus, it's not as good as it can be.

Sure.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I like that system, but I generally don't like needing to level up too much in RPGs, and in DM with one character, you don't have to gain more then a few extra levels here and there.

You don't like leveling up ? So you don't like feeling powerful, eh ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

It will be hard, yes, but not impossible.

I think it's hard enough with 4 characters who are sacks of mana...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hehe, there are a lot of people who don't play games as they are intended to, like Final Fantasy no-level challenges, or completing those games with one character, or simply not using the mechanics to the fullest.

A good example of the last one is the Final Fantasy 8 no junction challenge. Basically junctioning allows the player to increase a characters stats, use magic and items, while leveling increases stats very little. Leave out junctioning and the players options become very limited. It's possible to complete the game like that, but it's so difficult it's almost insane , but some people like this kind of challenge, intended or not.

In the end games are intended to be enjoyed by the player, so the player should simply play in the way they like most

Such challenges are for people who already completed those games with the normal way of playing, and want to get more fun of them.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Why? If you want to play with four chars, you can, and if you don't, you don't have to. It seems to me that the current system works just fine.

I don't want to play with four chars, I want to play with twelve and more, but I can't

<sigh>

I guess I will never understand that curious preference of single char...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Exactly. But I still want the game to look fairly good with original graphics if it's at all possible.

Being playable is IMO more important than looking good. Unlike "modern" games which seem to be designed more to be watched than played...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Magic is essential, in my opinion. Magic is fantasy, pink elephants are weird, but possible. Get an elephant, and paint it pink

But pink elephants aren't "weird". They're absolutely normal
(normal manifestations of drunken stupor...)

Originally Posted by Thorham

Of course! A lot of the item graphics are much to big, and making them all 16x16 pixels would save a lot of room.

Surely you know that in 16x16 they can't look as good as they actually are.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Really? I didn't know that. The difference is, that I want the game to be 3D internally, where enemies can follow you up/down. Such a way seems best, because layers aren't really needed outside a lot at all, while in a castle, you'll need plenty of layers.

But, man, DM is 3D internally. It's only that stairs can't graphically show monsters in them, and the situation where you try to climb stairs but there is a monster blocking the other way is highly problematic.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You can have the gui use it's own font, or just the system font. In both cases, get the font dimensions, and draw the gui based on those dimensions. Simple enough if you can handle fonts properly. I've done something similar in FreeBasic on the peecee using the FreeType library for TrueType fonts. Works like a charm, and it isn't very hard, just a bit of work.

TrueType fonts are scalable fonts by essence, so it's certainly no big deal on them !

But if you mix them with bitmaps, then the text size mustn't change or you'll have loads of troubles.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, it's a bit of a problem, but I don't like just having farms and roads put in just for the sake of having them in the game. This has to be solved.

Farms provide food and roads accelerate your moves. It's just that population won't grow a lot.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Then the first question becomes, do we go for statistically correct random influences (I've made a routine for that), or keep everything exact?

As for global levels, a better idea seems to be to have characters gain experience based on what they do. Warriors who use swords, will become more proficient with swords, just like in real life. When they switch to axes, while they never really used them, they will have to gain proficiency with axes. Same for different types of magic, and other, non-hand to hand warrior types like archers.

This is similar to DM, but can be worked out a lot better, and it's realistic.

What do you mean, keep everything exact ?

Of course there should not be global levels.
And it may end up better than DM, but DM is more complex (and more realistic) than it looks.

But what I ask is : what will the exact rules be ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Once I get an adequate level of control, anything is possible.

How much time will it take to get this adequate level of control ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, and I've started it already. It's indeed harder then DM1. The start of the game is already quite tough , nothing like DM

I liked the feeling of being naked, in darkness, without a weapon, on a pressure plate which produces worms...

But once you know this place well, it's no longer hard.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You're right, of course. I guess I'll just have to stick to CSB for the time being, because I'm still a little rusty, and DM is just way too easy. You don't learn much from it after finishing it a couple of times.

CSB is much more complex than DM. It's no longer a bunch of levels which have little to see with each other and must be done in order.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Here's a nice and simple layout. It's a small jpeg image (302x282 38kb)

Ok, it looks simple and elegant enough, even if I can say I do not like white backgrounds. What does it give in html ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

This is a routine from the kernal I wrote over 10 years ago. It use some lame macros, ignore them The one you're looking for is addu.l, it's located after the FreeMem1 label. Although this isn't used that much in the whole source, at the time it made sense to make a macro for it. Now, I probably would've written the whole kernal in a better way, but that was over ten years ago

Especially note worthy is the lame def macro. I thought it made things more readable

So it's a matter of structure fields add, eh ? But you're not out of regs in here and a macro does the stuff quite nicely.

And it's true that those macros don't make the thing very readable

Originally Posted by Thorham

Erm, it's assembler, how can it produce better code? Branch optimization perhaps? AsmOne can do that with the ao command. If not, then how? PhxAss is a command line assembler, while AsmOne is fully integrated, and is much handier for debugging, in my opinion.

Branch optimization, yes. Especially forward ones, which are NOT optimized by any other asm I know of !

In fact you simply no longer have to care about branches at all. And that, man, is a saviour of time. Other things like label(An) will be (An) if label is 0, not 0(An). Unsure asmone can do that.

Note that Devpac is integrated too, so why asmone ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

I meant the original gui which is present in Win95 and upward. The themed gui which WinXp uses does in fact use more than 16 colors, but the standard gui doesn't, except for the gradient in the title bar, which can be left out when there aren't enough colors.

And Win95/Win98 are strangely faster than WinXp...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, unless samone stands up to the challenge, it won't ever happen. Anyway, what are typical things that you would like to see in a c/c++ replacement?

c/c++ syntax is horrific and makes it unreadable.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I already made a crude text viewer with FreeBasic. It's about a million times faster than all that other crap ware, and another example is the horrendously slow replace function in office software and some text editors, this is easy to do a lot better (read CygnusEd speeds). There are plenty of applications which can be improved on a lot speed wise, simply because they're implemented in such a louse way. Sometimes it's really no contest. Why don't you give me an example of something that would be hard to do

An example of something that would be hard to do ? The OS itself !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Even on an A500 it's fast. I must admit I haven't used Ppaint in any serious way, but compared to Dpaint, Brilliance is as fast as lightning.

You say Brilliance is fast on A500. But can you really run it on A500, as the exe itself is more than 500kb ? On my A1200 it used more than 1MB of fastmem, btw.

And it's fast when doing what ???

There are no menus, disk options are hidden (took me several minutes to locate the quit option), it opens an awful flickering (interlaced) screen by default, the interface uses way too much space out of the image, zoom (magnifier) is close to be unusable (no scroller on it), palette editor is no good (no way to duplicate an entry, no way to swap two entries).

Is that enough for not using it ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

I like the gui at the bottom of the screen, matter of personal preference.

Wherever it is, it's still too big.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I've never really needed color statistics. I guess it depends on both the users needs and taste.

You probably never needed to mix two gfx having a different palette.

When I wanted to check which monsters of DM/CSB really used colors 9 and 10 (those are variable), I just ordered the program to count colors, and it was done. Now how to do that with Brilliance ???

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Sure. When we'll have something up and running, we'll see to get something better.

Yes, it has to be at least the same kind of quality. Note that the colors are a bit weird because of the GBA backlight setting, they look better in VGA mode in an emulator. All this can wait, of course.

Originally Posted by meynaf

But these units represent groups, not individuals ?

They're individuals. In Advance Wars units represent groups.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Do it the way you want, but it ought not end up with dozens of different loops !

Then I'll merge several loops that can be merged into one, because I've got dozens of loops now

Originally Posted by meynaf

Worse chipmem timings, suppressed (emulated) instructions... Who knows what else.

So there really is a need to take these differences in account. You'd think that everything is just faster...

Originally Posted by meynaf

That's just a few more options ; the game's concept is the same.

It goes further than that. Modern tactical shooters are realistic simulations of real combat situations, this goes way beyond the simple shoot everything that moves concept of shooters like Doom and Quake.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If the music was just another tracker, there would be players for it, too.

Unlikely, because there are so many different games, and ripping sound data with the player is by far the easiest. The music on PS1 and PS2 comes in two formats: streamed and sequenced, and the PSF player simply ignores this and players both kinds by using the games original player code. This is how it works, it's not speculation.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And some tracker data should be visible inside (such as sample names, or even note data). It should be possible to simply rip the module out and play it... as any other tracker module.

As said, different games use different formats, while the PSF player simply handles all of them. It's not about efficiency, it's peecee software after all.

Originally Posted by meynaf

If it looks wholly compressed, then it's probably just another style of ADPCM format.

Not necessarily. On the GBA the games graphics are often stored compressed, and not raw, for example, and I'm betting there are plenty of Amiga games which store modules completely compressed, and not just the samples.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Now I ask : do we live in the same world ???

Yes.

Originally Posted by meynaf

37 tasks after booting 'shocked'

Yup, 37, and that's without running anything else, just booting.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I only have 12 tasks or so after booting, and even now I have browser/mailer/tcp stack/text editor running, I still only have 27 !

It's because you've minimized the amount stuff that's run.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Furthermore, even with 50 tasks here, if all of them are WAITING (which is what they should be doing when you run a game !), then smoothness will not be affected.

Not by waiting taks, no, but interrupts that have a higher priority, mostly disk access, can in theory still cause negative effects. I know it won't happen a lot at all, but it can happen.

Originally Posted by meynaf

What I called streaming audio here IS the radio.

I just meant one of those stand alone internet radios. They seem to be quite convenient.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Are 30 seconds ages ? Especially when you can still use your machine normally (apart writing to disk) during it ?

30 secs is hugely annoying to me, especially if it's unnecessary.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Sure.

Now go and download Dopus 4.16 from Aminet and configure the thing already

Originally Posted by meynaf

You don't like leveling up ? So you don't like feeling powerful, eh ?

True power comes from skill, not leveling

Originally Posted by meynaf

I think it's hard enough with 4 characters who are sacks of mana...

It takes a while, yes. Solo is simply a challenge, nothing more.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Such challenges are for people who already completed those games with the normal way of playing, and want to get more fun of them.

Indeed! Games are made to have fun with, so play as you see fit.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I don't want to play with four chars, I want to play with twelve and more, but I can't.

What do you need 12 characters for in DM? Isn't that overkill?

Originally Posted by meynaf

I guess I will never understand that curious preference of single char...

Four characters is fun, but I like playing solo as well. It's a matter of personal preference. Some people like beer, others prefer wine, while some people don't like alcoholic beverages at all.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Being playable is IMO more important than looking good. Unlike "modern" games which seem to be designed more to be watched than played...

Of course it is. It's the most important aspect of any game. If the graphics can look good as well, then that is a nice bonus.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Surely you know that in 16x16 they can't look as good as they actually are.

As long as they're representative of the items, it's fine with me. Easy to use is more important than having huge pretty item graphics which make the interface annoying to use.

Originally Posted by meynaf

But, man, DM is 3D internally. It's only that stairs can't graphically show monsters in them, and the situation where you try to climb stairs but there is a monster blocking the other way is highly problematic.

I didn't know it is. If it's only a graphics problem in DM, then in our overhead viewed game this won't be a problem.

Originally Posted by meynaf

TrueType fonts are scalable fonts by essence, so it's certainly no big deal on them !

But if you mix them with bitmaps, then the text size mustn't change or you'll have loads of troubles.

It's the same problem. Whenever the font size changes, scalable or fixed, the gui has to be re-drawn completely anyway.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Farms provide food and roads accelerate your moves. It's just that population won't grow a lot.

As long as the adventurers themselves don't end up as road workers and farmers, it's fine with me.

Originally Posted by meynaf

What do you mean, keep everything exact ?

In Adnvance Wares, damage doesn't depend on any random factors. This is what I mean with exact. In a game like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, randomness determines the outcome of actions: if a character attacs something from the back, then the chance the attack will be successful will greatly improve. Attack from the front, and it will decrease. It's still always chance based. In Fire Emblem, the stat growth when leveling is randomized to a degree (weak point of the game).

Personally, I'd like to see everything that makes sense being affected by a small amount of statistically correct randomness, but not so much that it becomes annoying.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Of course there should not be global levels.
And it may end up better than DM, but DM is more complex (and more realistic) than it looks.

It doesn't have to be very complex in our game, as long as it makes sense and is effective. Anyway, in what ways is DM more complex and realistic than it looks?

Originally Posted by meynaf

But what I ask is : what will the exact rules be ?

Ah, the hard part! This has to be carefully worked out and I really can't just plot down a bunch of rules. I can come up with things, but do you already have some good ideas?

Originally Posted by meynaf

How much time will it take to get this adequate level of control ?

I wouldn't be able to tell you if my life depended on it I've tried your dungeon a couple of more times, and I just can't seem to avoid those damned monsters, they keep surrounding me all the time , but do not give me any tips, I hate spoilers.

Originally Posted by meynaf

I liked the feeling of being naked, in darkness, without a weapon, on a pressure plate which produces worms...

But once you know this place well, it's no longer hard.

Hehe, the first time I tried, I thought What the hell?, but it's indeed doable.

Originally Posted by meynaf

CSB is much more complex than DM. It's no longer a bunch of levels which have little to see with each other and must be done in order.

I actually enjoy that, DM is a little bit too linear.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Ok, it looks simple and elegant enough, even if I can say I do not like white backgrounds. What does it give in html ?

Colors can be changed to suit taste. As for html code, it won't be a lot. I've got some experience with html, although I've never made a web page, and it's pretty easy to figure out how to do things in html anyway.

Originally Posted by meynaf

So it's a matter of structure fields add, eh ? But you're not out of regs in here and a macro does the stuff quite nicely.

Yup, the macro works quite well here. Well, this is the example of mem to mem add. I guess all you need for this is indeed just a macro.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And it's true that those macros don't make the thing very readable/

Yeah, some of those macros really do suck

Originally Posted by meynaf

Branch optimization, yes. Especially forward ones, which are NOT optimized by any other asm I know of !

I will need to try this in ASM-One, but I think it actually can do forward branch optimization.

Originally Posted by meynaf

In fact you simply no longer have to care about branches at all. And that, man, is a saviour of time.

With ASM-One you do have to use a different assemble command, but it's easy to use.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Other things like label(An) will be (An) if label is 0, not 0(An). Unsure asmone can do that.

You're probably right. Seems like such an odd thing to leave out, strange.

Originally Posted by meynaf

Note that Devpac is integrated too, so why asmone ?

I tried Devpac years ago and I just like the way ASM-One works better, seems easier to use somehow. Again, user preference.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And Win95/Win98 are strangely faster than WinXp...

In WinXP the whole themed gui can be turned off. In fact, I have the theme service turned off, so I always have the old style gui, it's faster.

Originally Posted by meynaf

c/c++ syntax is horrific and makes it unreadable.

I know, but apart from the horrible syntax, what do like to see in a replacement language?

Originally Posted by meynaf

An example of something that would be hard to do ? The OS itself !

Yup, that ain't easy.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You say Brilliance is fast on A500. But can you really run it on A500, as the exe itself is more than 500kb ? On my A1200 it used more than 1MB of fastmem, btw.

When I still only had an A500, I had 2.5mb extra memory.

Originally Posted by meynaf

And it's fast when doing what ???

Everything?

Originally Posted by meynaf

There are no menus.

Don't need'm

Originally Posted by meynaf

Disk options are hidden (took me several minutes to locate the quit option).

Not a problem for me

Originally Posted by meynaf

Iit opens an awful flickering (interlaced) screen by default.

Interlace flickering doesn't bother me

Originally Posted by meynaf

The interface uses way too much space out of the image.

Gui on the bottom, gui on the side, it's all the same to me

Originally Posted by meynaf

Zoom (magnifier) is close to be unusable (no scroller on it).

Don't need a scroller, use the curser keys, much easier

Originally Posted by meynaf

Palette editor is no good (no way to duplicate an entry, no way to swap two entries).

Of course you can swap and copy entries, look at the left side of the editor. I wouldn't use the program if it couldn't do these basic things

Originally Posted by meynaf

Is that enough for not using it ?

Nope

Sory for all the 'sticks out tounge smilies', but I just couldn't resist

Originally Posted by meynaf

Wherever it is, it's still too big.

Like I said, personal preference. Some people hate it, some people love it.

Originally Posted by meynaf

You probably never needed to mix two gfx having a different palette.

I use Adpro for that, and actually never tried that with a paint packe. I'll have to test this.

Originally Posted by meynaf

When I wanted to check which monsters of DM/CSB really used colors 9 and 10 (those are variable), I just ordered the program to count colors, and it was done. Now how to do that with Brilliance ???

Hmm, I honestly don't know... Maybe it can't...

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by meynaf

Branch optimization, yes. Especially forward ones, which are NOT optimized by any other asm I know of !

In fact you simply no longer have to care about branches at all. And that, man, is a saviour of time. Other things like label(An) will be (An) if label is 0, not 0(An). Unsure asmone can do that.

Note that Devpac is integrated too, so why asmone ?

Sorry to interrupt your conversation but what's it with your hate campaign against ASM-One? Sure, it's not perfect and has bugs but which program is bugfree? And optimising should be done by the coder, NOT by the assembler, that's my opinion at least. And as you seem to praise phx-ass all the time, any assembler that accepts "moveq.w" is horribly broken in my book!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by StingRay

And as you seem to praise phx-ass all the time, any assembler that accepts "moveq.w" is horribly broken in my book!

ASM-One accepts meveq.w StingRay Sorry for that

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by Thorham

ASM-One accepts meveq.w StingRay Sorry for that

Never saw an Asm1 version (and I used quite a lot since 1991) which supports that crap.

a
Pass 1..
** Illegal Size
            moveq.w #1,d1

But that wasn't my point anyway. My point was the "let's bash Asm1 even though I never really used it" attitude.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Never saw an Asm1 version (and I used quite a lot since 1991) which supports that crap.

a
Pass 1..
** Illegal Size
            moveq.w #1,d1

Yep, you're right, of course. I got it mixed up with moveq.l which is accepted

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Sorry to interrupt your conversation but what's it with your hate campaign against ASM-One? Sure, it's not perfect and has bugs but which program is bugfree?

Yeah I don't like it.
Each time I tried to use this bullshit seriously it simply crashed !

Originally Posted by StingRay

And optimising should be done by the coder, NOT by the assembler, that's my opinion at least.

You will never care manually of branch optimizations in a 40000-line source which evolves all the time.

Besides, some opts are not always valid if you have an include lib with lots of if/endc.

Originally Posted by StingRay

And as you seem to praise phx-ass all the time, any assembler that accepts "moveq.w" is horribly broken in my book!

I didn't pretend it's perfect. You can't imagine the amount of bug reports I sent to Frank Wille.

But phxass gives better code than asm1. I resourced enough asm1 programs to know that.

Originally Posted by StingRay

Never saw an Asm1 version (and I used quite a lot since 1991) which supports that crap.

a
Pass 1..
** Illegal Size
  moveq.w #1,d1

A programmer writing such a shit is really a poor programmer
Anyway, your beloved asm1 accepts this other crap without a warning :

 btst #8,(a0)

Whereas phxass says Bit manipulation out of range.

So who's seriously broken ?

Originally Posted by StingRay

But that wasn't my point anyway. My point was the "let's bash Asm1 even though I never really used it" attitude.

No, I never really used it. And you know why ? It's simply because I couldn't ! No source I tried accepts to assemble.


When I type a number in the editor (with numpad) it moves the cursor (how to disable that numpad stupidity ? not found !).

But please come and defend this software here. C'mon.

At least phxass accepts this code :
http://meynaf.free.fr/tmp/v.lzx
Asm-one will never be able to do so. You may wish to adapt the source. Good luck.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes, it has to be at least the same kind of quality. Note that the colors are a bit weird because of the GBA backlight setting, they look better in VGA mode in an emulator. All this can wait, of course.

It can wait, and certainly will.

Originally Posted by Thorham

They're individuals. In Advance Wars units represent groups.

As adventurers are individuals in battles, this settles things I think.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Then I'll merge several loops that can be merged into one, because I've got dozens of loops now

That loops too much. Makes me feel dizzy

Originally Posted by Thorham

So there really is a need to take these differences in account. You'd think that everything is just faster...

We can't take much into account without the real hardware on which to test...

Originally Posted by Thorham

It goes further than that. Modern tactical shooters are realistic simulations of real combat situations, this goes way beyond the simple shoot everything that moves concept of shooters like Doom and Quake.

But half-life is a shoot-everything game and counter-strike is a tactical shooter. The diff is tenuous, isn't it ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Unlikely, because there are so many different games, and ripping sound data with the player is by far the easiest. The music on PS1 and PS2 comes in two formats: streamed and sequenced, and the PSF player simply ignores this and players both kinds by using the games original player code. This is how it works, it's not speculation.

So there are only two formats, eh ? Btw sequenced doesn't mean tracked.

Originally Posted by Thorham

As said, different games use different formats, while the PSF player simply handles all of them. It's not about efficiency, it's peecee software after all.

There should not be many different formats as it would be a waste of time for developers.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Not necessarily. On the GBA the games graphics are often stored compressed, and not raw, for example, and I'm betting there are plenty of Amiga games which store modules completely compressed, and not just the samples.

Even if compressed, there is probably some sort of a cruncher's header.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yes.

I'll put this on the account of beer and smoke...

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yup, 37, and that's without running anything else, just booting.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's because you've minimized the amount stuff that's run.

I only run what I need. But I understand where your boot time comes from, now.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Not by waiting taks, no, but interrupts that have a higher priority, mostly disk access, can in theory still cause negative effects. I know it won't happen a lot at all, but it can happen.

It can happen if someone orders those disk accesses. Remember that the OS in itself won't do that ; we're not in the pc world where a fly's fart next room will trigger disk activity.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I just meant one of those stand alone internet radios. They seem to be quite convenient.

But you don't choose what you listen ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

30 secs is hugely annoying to me, especially if it's unnecessary.

It's a HUGE annoyance, especially because it happens less than once a year and is much less than the time a pc takes to bootup

Originally Posted by Thorham

Now go and download Dopus 4.16 from Aminet and configure the thing already

Nice try ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

True power comes from skill, not leveling

Apparently yours seems to be a little rusty, so leveling won't hurt ;-)

Originally Posted by Thorham

It takes a while, yes. Solo is simply a challenge, nothing more.

Rather.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Indeed! Games are made to have fun with, so play as you see fit.

I see fit to have many characters. Did you try 6-chars games such as EoB series ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

What do you need 12 characters for in DM? Isn't that overkill?

The more, the better

Originally Posted by Thorham

Four characters is fun, but I like playing solo as well. It's a matter of personal preference. Some people like beer, others prefer wine, while some people don't like alcoholic beverages at all.

It is, isn't it ? But alcoholic beverages are toxic for everyone

Originally Posted by Thorham

Of course it is. It's the most important aspect of any game. If the graphics can look good as well, then that is a nice bonus.

The sound/music ambiance can do much, too. It's too often forgotten IMO.

Originally Posted by Thorham

As long as they're representative of the items, it's fine with me. Easy to use is more important than having huge pretty item graphics which make the interface annoying to use.

Apparently they didn't think of it like that.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I didn't know it is. If it's only a graphics problem in DM, then in our overhead viewed game this won't be a problem.

If the monsters were not an obstacle and could be displayed, there would be no problem. That's what DM2 does with enemy's attack minions ; they can change level with ladders.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It's the same problem. Whenever the font size changes, scalable or fixed, the gui has to be re-drawn completely anyway.

So what has to be done is probably to choose the font and stick to it...

Originally Posted by Thorham

As long as the adventurers themselves don't end up as road workers and farmers, it's fine with me.

What do you have against road workers and farmers ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

In Adnvance Wares, damage doesn't depend on any random factors. This is what I mean with exact. In a game like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, randomness determines the outcome of actions: if a character attacs something from the back, then the chance the attack will be successful will greatly improve. Attack from the front, and it will decrease. It's still always chance based. In Fire Emblem, the stat growth when leveling is randomized to a degree (weak point of the game).

Personally, I'd like to see everything that makes sense being affected by a small amount of statistically correct randomness, but not so much that it becomes annoying.

Originally Posted by Thorham

It doesn't have to be very complex in our game, as long as it makes sense and is effective.

I fear that random is necessary : a blow from a sword, from the very same opponent, can leave you with a slight scratch as well as it can kill you at once !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Anyway, in what ways is DM more complex and realistic than it looks?

DM has sub-levels for Fighter, Ninja, Priest and Wizard, a hidden Luck value (for me more for complexity than realism), it has several damage classes giving several armor rules (e.g. fire and magic behave differently than weapons), and the chances of hitting a particular body part depends on the monster.
There are probably quite a lotta things I don't know of, too.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Ah, the hard part! This has to be carefully worked out and I really can't just plot down a bunch of rules. I can come up with things, but do you already have some good ideas?

I don't have much ! What I have is a very basic rule set for fighting, and a lot of particular cases not covered by any RPG.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I wouldn't be able to tell you if my life depended on it I've tried your dungeon a couple of more times, and I just can't seem to avoid those damned monsters, they keep surrounding me all the time , but do not give me any tips, I hate spoilers.

But did you see a new part of it ? I can't believe you're still stuck in the hall of champions !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hehe, the first time I tried, I thought What the hell?, but it's indeed doable.

More than doable, it becomes easy when you know how to prevent more worms from being generated.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I actually enjoy that, DM is a little bit too linear.

In that aspect, DM2 is quite linear too. Note my dungeon isn't linear, provided, of course, that you can escape the initial inferno

Originally Posted by Thorham

Colors can be changed to suit taste. As for html code, it won't be a lot. I've got some experience with html, although I've never made a web page, and it's pretty easy to figure out how to do things in html anyway.

Html is no longer what it used to be. Heard of css ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yup, the macro works quite well here. Well, this is the example of mem to mem add. I guess all you need for this is indeed just a macro.

So at the end nothing misses you in 68k, eh ?

Originally Posted by Thorham

I will need to try this in ASM-One, but I think it actually can do forward branch optimization.

Originally Posted by Thorham

With ASM-One you do have to use a different assemble command, but it's easy to use.

Maybe it can do forward opts, but it has the dirty habit of modifying the source accordingly !
Each time I tried trash-m-one, it crashed in one way or another (recent tests done with 1.48).

Anyway, something as simple as that will not lead to optimal code :

zbra macro
 bra \1
 endm

 zbra label
 nop
 nop
label

 zbra truc
 rept 128
 nop 
 endr
truc

When I see the annoyance it is with even the simpliest things, I can't imagine trying to assemble my dm source with that... Ouch !

I wonder why so many people use this horror where you have to switch to command mode to be able to save a thing from the editor. For me it is plain shite, and that's all.

I know I can be very crude here but diplomacy isn't my strong point, so sorry if I hurted anyone.

Originally Posted by Thorham

You're probably right. Seems like such an odd thing to leave out, strange.

Whatever can be missing I don't really know, but what I could check is that when reassembling things originally done with asmone, phxass produces something smaller (more often than not, and never bigger).

Originally Posted by Thorham

I tried Devpac years ago and I just like the way ASM-One works better, seems easier to use somehow. Again, user preference.

Easy to use, with its awful command/editor/whatever modes ? Better to read that than bein' blind...

Of course I cannot say I like devpac either

Originally Posted by Thorham

In WinXP the whole themed gui can be turned off. In fact, I have the theme service turned off, so I always have the old style gui, it's faster.

And it's faster. QED.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I know, but apart from the horrible syntax, what do like to see in a replacement language?

C/C++ has bogus operator priority, very basic string/array types, and no built-in way to do gfx and sound.
But other languages which may have that are damn slow in comparison.

Originally Posted by Thorham

When I still only had an A500, I had 2.5mb extra memory.

That explains. But it still uses too much memory for my taste.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Everything?

Perhaps it's fast. But the time wasted (at least for me) to find the option I need amongst all those icons clearly outweight it.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Don't need'm
Not a problem for me
Interlace flickering doesn't bother me
Gui on the bottom, gui on the side, it's all the same to me Don't need a scroller, use the curser keys, much easier
Of course you can swap and copy entries, look at the left side of the editor. I wouldn't use the program if it couldn't do these basic things
Nope

Sory for all the 'sticks out tounge smilies', but I just couldn't resist

Like I said, personal preference. Some people hate it, some people love it.

(now I see what the 15-img limitation is for)

I find it strange you say that the view should cover the whole screen in a game and accept half of it to be covered by the interface of a paint program.
Contradictory ?

You probably didn't use it much though. Say, try to get a monster from EOB and adapt it to DM1's 16-color palette. For me PPaint is the best for doing that.

Originally Posted by Thorham

I use Adpro for that, and actually never tried that with a paint packe. I'll have to test this.

Oh, yeah !

Originally Posted by Thorham

Hmm, I honestly don't know... Maybe it can't...

"Maybe" says it all.