Amiga Format: Blitz Basic competition games

[DamienD]

Now that I'm back in Blighty

...thought I'd take a look at "Space Man: The Ultimate Game".

Under Amiga emulation, the following file is funny and not copyable via DirOpus:



From "Shell" it's shown as "rckn.sfx":



From the .ZIP archive that earok provided it's shown as:



@earok; this archive that you found; what type is it exactly i.e. originally a bunch of files, an archive of some sort, or stuff copied off an .ISO?

[earok]

So far as I can tell the correct name is supposed to be "rÕckÕn.sfx"

My source is a Google Drive copy of an old Acid HDD, (though I do have an LHA copy as well, hence where I found the name above ^) so I'm guessing that the filename has been corrupted by the upload - but in any case, so far as I can tell the sound simply isn't used by the game (no references to it in either source or binary).

[earok]

Well anyway..

I was talking with my friend about this again, it was his idea to keep the competition entries out of the general public until permission has been found, but he's changed his mind on that (given that there's a small chance any of the original authors would be offended by it).

So if someone wants to go public with them - mods, CD32 compilation, publish on AMINET, publish with trainers and cracktros or whatever - all fine by me, but I can't speak for the original authors

[DamienD]

RE: Space Man - The Ultimate Game

I've been in contact with the main man / guru AKA ross, to see if he can somehow fix "level 9"... A massive ask / miracle, I know...

Anyway, here's his response after taking a look:

Originally Posted by ross

I can confirm this, sample is unused and unrelated to bug.

I think you need to change also files in /objects and /passages folders.
I've not tried it, I simply trained the game (infinite Oxygen and Energy).

No, map data of level 9 is broken, exe is ok.
A solution can be to make an exe that skip directly from level 8 to 10..
(i've no idea how the original map design can be, was a huge map..)

I'm here
Just to be sure.. when you say "stuck in the air" do you mean the place where there are 2 arrows, going up is blocked and down there is 'the void'?

Ciao,
ross

...so, what should be done people?

Should ross patch the game so that after level 8 is finished it then goes straight to level 10; and is then hopefully completable?

[ross]

At level 10, last room, there is even a final boss

[earok]

At the risk of stepping on toes... (I certainly have no intention of 'stealing' this away from the uber-talented and much appreciated Ross )

This -is- an open source game, so a Blitz developer could presumably add that particular feature easily, and maybe other tweaks here and there (a slow mode?). I don't have a lot of time myself (though I could probably do the level jump thing quite easily), but maybe there's a developer in the Blitz forum that'd be interested in giving the game an upgrade?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by earok

So far as I can tell the correct name is supposed to be "rÕckÕn.sfx"

As far as I can tell, it's supposed to be "råckån.sfx", which is "rock on" with funny Scandinavian spelling (Å is pronounced like "O").

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

At the risk of stepping on toes... (I certainly have no intention of 'stealing' this away from the uber-talented and much appreciated Ross )

This -is- an open source game, so a Blitz developer could presumably add that particular feature easily, and maybe other tweaks here and there (a slow mode?). I don't have a lot of time myself (though I could probably do the level jump thing quite easily), but maybe there's a developer in the Blitz forum that'd be interested in giving the game an upgrade?

Yeah, all good.

...I wonder if the author is contactable somehow?

Surely he would have tested his release before submitting to a magazine / competition, so maybe it's just about the files that you have being corrupt while his "original" ones would not be?

[earok]

Ah, fuck it. I've zoned an experimental "Special Edition" of sorts.

- Reduced to 9 levels (room/passage/object data for 10 has been named to 9, but in the code itself the final level is now 9)
- Fixed a bug where "01" wouldn't show as the level name after finishing the final level (the text would just be blank)
- Restored various trainer keys that were in the source code but disabled
F3: Skip level
F4: Full oxygen
F5: 3 lives
F6: Full hit points

Possible future enhancements:
- The game is capped at 25FPS. We could uncap it to 50FPS (though this could make it likely jerk on low end Amigas), but this would result in the game running way too fast (since it's already pretty rapid) unless...
- The game could be slowed down in places. For a 25FPS->50FPS conversion we'd need to make sure everything was halved, but the game could be more enjoyable if the player and oxygen drain was slowed down further relative to everything else.
- No ending screen, one could be made.
- Maybe some graphic tweaks to the top or bottom banner to make it clear that this is a 2017 special edition by EAB (these are just IFFs so the tweak could be done by anyone)

I sadly don't have any more details for the author other than "Peter & Kalle K"

[earok]

Found a major bug with it - Oxygen is counted down twice (once when paused or not paused, and once only when not paused). This will explain why oxygen is so tight on certain levels..

Well anyway, I've zoned an experimental 50FPS executable. The maximum movement speed of the character has been reduced from 3 to 1 (as the speed is based on whole pixel movement, so I couldn't easily just round it to 1.5 for the 50FPS conversion, so I opted to round down rather than up). I've also bumped the oxygen a bit but this probably wasn't needed since I fixed the other bug with this build).


Edit: Let me know what you'd like in an SE release and I'll see what I can do. I can't put aside a lot of time for it but at least the code base seems easy enough to follow.

[ross]

Originally Posted by earok

This -is- an open source game, so a Blitz developer could presumably add that particular feature easily, and maybe other tweaks here and there

Absolutely the right thing to do!
And from what I see you have already done it

(mine was just a quick look at the situation, i do not known BB2..)

Bye

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

Well anyway, I've zoned an experimental 50FPS executable. The maximum movement speed of the character has been reduced from 3 to 1 (as the speed is based on whole pixel movement, so I couldn't easily just round it to 1.5 for the 50FPS conversion, so I opted to round down rather than up). I've also bumped the oxygen a bit but this probably wasn't needed since I fixed the other bug with this build).

Cheers for looking at this earok (and ross also)

Tried both your versions. The "Spaceman Beta Earok.zip" was all good.

I know it's experimental but the "SpaceMan-50FPS" gave me funny stuff like:

... Definitely slowed down movement but would sometimes increase and then decrease again; especially when moving between screens.
... A few times when moving it seemed the main character was "gliding" as his feet animations weren't occurring.

[DamienD]

...can you tell I was bored tonight and had way too much free time on my hands

I've now created an .ADF out of earok's "fixed" version i.e. "Spaceman Beta Earok.zip" file as detailed in post #49.

Added some details, screen waits for 10 seconds before loading the game:



Attached for anyone that wants it

[earok]

Heh, nice - I'm certainly not finished yet though. For 25FPS version I need to at least fix the oxygen bug (any other requests?)

I could look at seeing if I could do a hack fix for level 9, like I did with those Plumpy levels.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

Heh, nice - I'm certainly not finished yet though. For 25FPS version I need to at least fix the oxygen bug (any other requests?)

Personally I think that's all that's required to fix the "original"

Originally Posted by earok

I could look at seeing if I could do a hack fix for level 9, like I did with those Plumpy levels.

Go for it if you can!!!

Any other things, best to create a standard "earok" SE addition

[earok]

Fair enough! The "beta 2" upload is just the 25FPS edition again, but with the oxygen bug fixed. So that's the best version to use for an ADF release

I won't do any further on it for now - in future I may finish off the 50FPS edition and make it a full blown "Earok SE"

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by earok

Fair enough! The "beta 2" upload is just the 25FPS edition again, but with the oxygen bug fixed. So that's the best version to use for an ADF release

Nice one, I'll update the .ADF accordingly now

I presume it's just the main game file that's been changed?

...but if you can fix the original level 9 issues then this should also be included.

Originally Posted by earok

I won't do any further on it for now - in future I may finish off the 50FPS edition and make it a full blown "Earok SE"

Alrighty

[DamienD]

Ok, disk updated



...and attached to this post.

[hipoonios]

Forgot to say thank you for the fixed version of SpaceMan. This fix with one reduced level is good enough for me

The purpose of this thread was to post videos / screenshots of the games in the Blitz archive. I have recorded videos of all the games I listed in post #24. There are still many more in the archive that needs videos. But these does not interest me. So I let someone else do videos of these games.

It feels a bit spammy to post the videos in this thread since I already posted them in my longplay thread. So better check there

[earok]

Just a quick note - the hack of Spaceman the Ultimate Game has a home on earok.net now on the minor hacks page. Includes DamienD's ADF.

http://earok.net/game/minor-hacks