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Topics - gumix

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31
Development Progress / Forging game menu (A.D 7.04.2016)
« on: April 11, 2016, 08:54:34 pm »
Most efforts are now concentrated on menu system.
It is pretty damanding part as it must behave well on all platforms, in color and in b/w modes, in lo-res 80x25 as well as 160x50.

Menu system will offer stright interface to all options on a one scrollable page.
Page contains smaller items, called modules which are layed out on page in different ways depending on current resolution.
So we can end up with 2,3 or 4 columns of modules.
Each module, once activated, behaves like separate dialog, allowing player to modify parameters, or jump into actual game.

While working on these things I've imagined a module called 'Player Profile' where user can choose his / her name, change avatar, etc.
After I've painted few avatars in REXPaint I noticed it could be cool to mix parts of these 6 faces together so player could compose his own face. In this approach instead of 6 avatars we've ended with: 1296!

Have a look how does it work:


Menu footage with avatar mixer

32
I spent almost 1 week on preparing internals needed to run ascii-patrol in Free-DOS and DOS-Box.
Good thing is that on any VGA compatible board, game is able to run in 90 x 50 mode.
Yes 90! This is achieved by removing 1 pixel gaps between character cells in standard 720x400 text mode.
So normally it is 720/9 = 80 columns, but after removing the gap we have 720/8 = 90 columns.
Thanks to programmable VGA sequencer and its D/A registers.

From the other side, DOS-Box can even offer emulated 132 x XX modes, unfortunately (don't know why) at a bit reduced RAMDAC frequency.

DOS version will come with 6 fonts sizes, from 8x6 to 8x16. Quite enough to compensate for different video modes and monitors aspects.


Above: Ascii Patrol inside DOS-Box with s3_svga in 132x28, font size 14.

33
Development Progress / 16-Colors ANSI Palette (A.D 11.03.2016)
« on: April 11, 2016, 08:45:20 pm »
Ascii Patrol supports now 16 color ANSI palette!
You won't be convicted to use B/W anymore, but yes monochrome option remains maintained during rest of development :)

So what are next steps?

Seams we will need at some point procedural level generator, for players which passed entire campaing and still wanting to play ascii patrol ;)

Also it will be very helpful for making campaign itself, of course it will require alot of manual tweaking too.

34
Development Progress / In love with REX-Paint (A.D 09.03.2016)
« on: April 11, 2016, 08:42:24 pm »
All game assets are now remastered using http://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint
This allows me to switch from try-test-retry-test-...-compromise path to paint-and-relax ;)

Below we have a sample mock-up screen with colorized sprites:


And some sort of title screen



35
Development Progress / 'Just' set up a forum
« on: April 11, 2016, 08:32:17 pm »
It took a while to set up the mail server, database, php, etc etc...
Finally installed this forum, hope to see someone here soon :)

In the mean time, I'll copy-paste some old format news from the front page in here.

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