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General Discussion / Re: Are we gamers or developers?

« Last post by Kyzrati on April 12, 2016, 08:34:24 am »

Ha, I apparently answered the same as yourself. About 4-5 years back I would've gone with 50/50, but it's really a question of available time. I just don't have the time to play very many games anymore, that and honestly once you've spend decades playing them, much of what's out there starts to seem samey, so may as well put the effort into creating something instead

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Development Progress / Re: Forging game menu (A.D 7.04.2016)

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 09:33:44 pm »

Now I'm thinking about possibility of keeping synchronized in game player profiles (display name, avatar, etc.) with forum accounts, seams not that hard to make it, unfortunately not with DOS-clones.

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General Discussion / Are we gamers or developers?

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 09:15:14 pm »

Feel free to add any other polls you like.

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General Discussion / What is this Ascii Patrol all about?

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 09:07:03 pm »

Ascii Patrol is a one guy's project who imagined to bring "Moon Patrol" arcade game developed by IREM in 1982 to text consoles in form of ascii game.

"Moon Patrol" wiki page:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Patrol

Ascii Game, (more formally: Text based game) wiki page:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_game

Some Ascii Patrol game tech specs:
- pure 7-bit ascii charset (aka oldschool ASCII Art)
- 2 modes: black-on-white & 16 color ansi palette
- resolution: anything between 80x25 - 160x50 (in characters)
- platforms: FreeDOS, Windows, Cygwin, Linux, js/html (web browsers)
- optional input handling via X11 (with ssh tunneling too)
- sound is at the moment out of the road map

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Development Progress / Forging game menu (A.D 7.04.2016)

« Last post by gumix 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

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Development Progress / Support for DOS / FreeDOS / DosBOX (A.D 22.03.2016)

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 08:48:31 pm »

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.

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Development Progress / 16-Colors ANSI Palette (A.D 11.03.2016)

« Last post by gumix 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.

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Development Progress / In love with REX-Paint (A.D 09.03.2016)

« Last post by gumix 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

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Development Progress / 'Just' set up a forum

« Last post by gumix 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.