dMZX Forums: hseiken - Viewing Profile - dMZX Forums

I noticed it still says ANSI on the menu...did it not get changed to XBIN or is XBIN silently supported?

Somehow, I had a wild hair up my ass to try another crack at doing a scrolling shooter. Now this is fun because this is sorta like...a Robotic version of comparing a drawing when you first started sketching to 5 years later drawing the same thing and noticing the improvements.

In this case, I had done some robotic experiments making a space shooter in pure ascii (0-128, monocrome chars) for fun. I enjoy the idea of super low spec systems punching above their weight in terms of gameplay and action, so this was the perfect thing to try...except the first time I went after this idea, I hadn't made a single damn thing in 'normal megazeux'. No 1x1 explorations with how the player interacts with items and very limited attempts at getting a robot to bounce around the board and shoot at the player in a somewhat dangerous way to the player, not just firing off to be scary. Instead, I jumped straight into trying to figure out sprites. That's probably not the best way to go.

I also immediately started using subroutines because I come from that kind of paradigm. Unfortunately, there's some underlying behaviors of megazeux that make this approach absolutely wasteful of cycles, gets you nowhere and confuses you more. ALl those 'you's just referred to in the last sentence are all 'ME's.

See, I had a star field scrolling by, a ship you could move and bullets you could fire...and i had no idea what to do next. Everything was sprite based, but i really had no idea what was happening and it ran slow as hell (i instinctively thought raising commands to maximum meant you were just making mzx run at 'full speed'...when in actuality, you're telling it to do excessive work if that's necessary to get the screen updating fast ennough...


At any rate, fast forward to recently where I am doing this 'bend classic mzx, forget sprites, see what can happen', and i have the same starfield running same detail but faster, everything is under 75 commands (nothing disappeared yet) and it runs perfect on my machine that's basically 200mhz pentium. Not only that, but i just figured out how to do a bullet system and set up swarming enemies, two things I never got around to adding in the old version cause i seriously didn't know what i was doing...to the point where I felt like cause i had to add so many commands, just adding enemies would render mzx a slideshow.

But yeah, that was all me doing that. This current iteration is...well, ZZT'ers would be able to figure out how it works easily, let's put it that way. bullets 'GO' places after they duplicate self and copyrobot 'aim' and...idk...it's just working out somehow....

I'm still facing some challenges, but they're far less daunting. Keeping track of the moving parts? Yeah, that's a little hairy, made me bust out a pen and pad to keep all my junk sorted so the right robot tells the correct left robot who to be a copy of at this specific moment, etc.

Right now, I'm looking at aiming, and still keeping with zzt style commands like horizpld and such to see if i can get the 16 aiming directions of the bullet i made to at least come close to grazing a stationary player without having to bust out a protractor and get the correct exact slope. I think just having these few directions firing off at different locations will be plenty to kill a player dead.

Especially if they're coming in different speeds...did i mention they can go different speeds? OOOOh yeah. And blow up...again things i wouldn't have known to even try on the first pass...interesting how when you give into the unchangeable, you see more solutions to your problem... Video comes when I can get a swarm of enemy ships in formation come at the player, guns blazing.

ANd now for something completely different...

A card game...

See, long ago, when I was basically the same but younger, I also had game ideas...and one was a card game based on principles of some sort in the fight videogame world. It's gone through about 8 iterations over the years...and the latest version might end up getting an MZX treatment...!

I think I'm the only one silly enough to make all fo the cards in the game individual robots who themselves dance around to shuffle on the board. It's pretty tedious making a single change to how they behave though...gotta make that tiny change to all 52 cards of BOTH decks (each player uses a full poker deck).


I also somehow today also made a silly game in 2 hours called RHODES THREW YOU OUT!, in which you take on the role of unfortunate scientist kicked out of the compound by Colonial Rhodes at the end of George Romero's Day of the Dead. You have 8 screens to cross with just 100 bullets and an avalanche's worth of goblin/zombies in your randomly generated cave path. Only 4 touches from the crawlers and you are dead, but you get a full health refill on the 3rd and 6th screens...no ammo, though. So you better be patient and go when you absolutely have to and shoot when you have no choice.


No screenshots today, just blahs.

Interesting project. I can't view the screenshots. Maybe they can go on Github? Because I'm too lame to compile anything. Literally and objectively too lame.

BIG MODE CONTINUES.

https://www.youtube....h?v=LjmLTJJezMk