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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.