[Graham]

Verasev, on 13 September 2016 - 06:04 PM, said:

Here's a question: how come no one has never released a megazeux game that has heavily commented code? Wouldn't that help any new comers? Anyway, good luck on your project Graham.

I've thought of doing that for education purposes, not in a game but a tutorial game sort of. I guess I just settled on doing the YouTube videos so I could try and reach as many people as possible and make it as accessible as I could. That is something that could still be done though. I've seen this done in the Wiki articles, have you seen those?

[Lachesis]

comments also waste a lot of screen real estate if you're using the robot editor (vs. editing a text file) and look terrible, so it's understandable that people wouldn't want to do a lot of commentation and spacing. the speed thing doesn't matter much unless you're putting comments in high traffic sections of code (i.e. things that will run hundreds or thousands of times per cycle).

[Dr Lancer-X]

They also waste a ton of robot memory, which sucks when you push against those limits a lot. Depending on the robot's task it can be difficult to refactor a robot into two robots.

[Verasev]

What about taking an old project and releasing a commented version of it? It wouldn't be intended to run so no worries about memory or speed.

[CJA]

or maybe one of my projects which are generally technically unimpressive all-round. I might consider doing that.

Anyway, welcome back, Graham! Good to see you again! Message me if you want any more tracks for Servo, or, uh, anything at all really.

[Graham]

CJA, on 14 September 2016 - 08:59 AM, said:

or maybe one of my projects which are generally technically unimpressive all-round. I might consider doing that.

Anyway, welcome back, Graham! Good to see you again! Message me if you want any more tracks for Servo, or, uh, anything at all really.

Hey CJA, thanks it feels good to be back. I honestly am very pleased with the tracks you chose to share with me already. However, not to sound too greedy, but if you have more 8bit style tracks that you aren't using for anything I would love to listen to them and maybe consider switching a few out. I love listening to your stuff and will just put on a random track while I'm testing the game just to hear more stuff. And you'll definitely be among the first to help beta test, when ever that happens (coming in 2017) ;-)

[Graham]

Dr Lancer-X, on 13 September 2016 - 06:10 PM, said:

Because comments slow down your robotic code.

Is that true of blank lines as well? I cannot remember.

[Lachesis]

Blank lines are a command too, yes

[Graham]

My son has asked if he could play MegaZeux for the last two nights now. He made a maze game, of course, but it's a start. He asked me to help him create a cat that would follow him around the maze, so I got to show him some robotic. Pretty neat :-)

(The thumbnail is upside down, but the picture isn't.)

This post has been edited by Graham: 07 October 2016 - 01:11 AM

[Graham]

I had him play Forrester too to see a good example of a great game with a slight maze-like quality. He liked it.

[CJA]

that's awesome, man.

I ought to get my little girl to show me how to make games again.

[Graham]

Lachesis, on 16 September 2016 - 11:51 AM, said:

Blank lines are a command too, yes

One more clarification: do any blank lines anywhere in the robotic code get read every time the code is executed, or would only those lines that are in a section of the code that is currently being executed be read? In other words, does the entire program get scanned when a robot is running, or just the lines that are between cycle ending commands (e.g. label and goto command)?

Reason I ask is I've been leaving a lot of lines empty after goto commands, I've felt it has helped me sort things out better and I didn't think it had any effect, being after a goto. If all of these blank lines are being read, I might need to think about whether I want to remove them. The game runs well, but it might affect slower computers, maybe?

This post has been edited by Graham: 14 October 2016 - 04:48 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 14 October 2016 - 02:47 PM, said:

One more clarification: do any blank lines anywhere in the robotic code get read every time the code is executed, or would only those lines that are in a section of the code that is currently being executed be read? In other words, does the entire program get scanned when a robot is running, or just the lines that are between cycle ending commands (e.g. label and goto command)?

Reason I ask is I've been leaving a lot of lines empty after goto commands, I've felt it has helped me sort things out better and I didn't think it had any effect, being after a goto. If all of these blank lines are being read, I might need to think about whether I want to remove them. The game runs well, but it might affect slower computers, maybe?

Only code that is run can slow things down.

It's been a long time since I've looked at MZX's source but I think labels are stored in a jump table, so that won't matter. The only thing to perhaps be concerned about is "loop for #", which scans up for "loop start". That's only relevant if you're doing something absurd like:

loop start
goto "a"

. "five thousand blank lines"

: "a"
loop 10000

Seriously though, blank lines don't really matter and you don't really need to worry about them. The amount of execution time they take up is almost immeasurably low. There's probably a billion things you can optimise that will give you better results than removing your blank lines.

Honestly, the main reason I shy away from comments is because they consume a lot of robot memory and running out of robot memory is super annoying - in many cases a robot can be extremely hard to split, especially if it is subroutine-heavy.

[Graham]

Good to know thanks. I wasn't super worried about it, mostly curious. Fortunately, I have not written any programs yet that have exceeded the robot's size limit.

[Graham]

I took a huge step this past week and altered gameplay somewhat. I made the levels more independent, less reliant on one another to progress through an area. It was a big to do but I can already see that it's paying off. This is the way the game should have played from in the beginning. I've been able to do something today that I haven't been able to really ever do because I just hadn't gotten everything together and working in this fashion before; I'm able to play through the game, level to level, play testing it.

So what I did was remove the requirement that you must carry forward the abilities of the previous level you played into the next one. This was cumbersome because you had to hunt around an area to find the level that used the abilities you currently have. Now when starting a level your abilities are cleared except for the ones you need. The requirements for beginning a level are that you have the minimum ability slots needed and that you've previously found the abilities needed in another level. On subsequent playthroughs of a level you can choose which abilities to begin with. This makes for a fun, somewhat non-linear play experience that allows for some exploring but focuses on the progression of the game. Feeling good about this.

[Old-Sckool]

On the previous topic, does/could load robot from file strip out comments/blank line commands?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Old-Sckool, on 30 October 2016 - 06:41 AM, said:

On the previous topic, does/could load robot from file strip out comments/blank line commands?

This is the sort of change you would get from debytecode (as the stuff that's executed will no longer have blank lines / comments) but it doesn't really belong in MZX before that; load_robot should load the exact code you included in the text file. I mean, your game might do something fancy like a preprocessing step in which you save_robot -> replace certain comments with commands -> load_robot and for that to mysteriously break because you happened to use load_robot beforehand would be unintuitive.

[Graham]

Ok so, bit of a dilemma here and I welcome any input you all have.

I've written some options that allow the player to easily switch between keyboard, Xbox 360 controller and a custom, user definable control set up. You can redefine the buttons in each setup and they are saved separately. I felt this was important because servo relies heavily on its controls. There are lots of buttons utilized to make all 16 abilities available. In that regard, it's a lot more like a modern console game than the classic side scroller that it looks to be.

The problem I've ran into is that I decided early on to make use of MegaZeux's built-ins wherever I could. I'm using the default text box quite a bit for messages and menus. The button to select options in this box is ENTER and that isn't definable to anything else as far as I know. I can designate the ENTER key to be one of the controller buttons so the player can select items in the menu but designating ENTER to another button has become a sticking point. I need to be able to do this because of variations in controllers and user preferences. A controller that has button 8 as it's A button will not be the same for another type of controller. And some players may want the start button to be the select button rather than the A button.

So if I can write some code that modifies the .cnf file for my game, I don't think I actually have a way of knowing which button# corresponds to which controlller button and I'm not exactly sure yet how to write this code. The good thing is that I've tested modifying the .cnf file while the game is running and using a swab world command to refresh these changes in the game works. (Yay!) so if I can figure this out I can do what I'm trying to do and make the user experience much more friendly. Thoughts?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 10 November 2016 - 12:26 PM, said:

So if I can write some code that modifies the .cnf file for my game, I don't think I actually have a way of knowing which button# corresponds to which controlller button and I'm not exactly sure yet how to write this code. The good thing is that I've tested modifying the .cnf file while the game is running and using a swab world command to refresh these changes in the game works. (Yay!) so if I can figure this out I can do what I'm trying to do and make the user experience much more friendly. Thoughts?

I don't think there's a great way of doing what you want here. Two possibilities, if I'm understanding the problem correctly:

- Bind a ton of things to enter, just for the configuration screen.

- Force the user through a screen where you make them press the button they want to use for the enter key first.

EDIT: I guess the first one wouldn't really work since you need to be able to distinguish each button and you can't do that if they're all bound to enter. I've never actually used the gamepad support so I'm not very familiar with it.

[Graham]

Dr Lancer-X, on 09 November 2016 - 06:38 PM, said:

I don't think there's a great way of doing what you want here. Two possibilities, if I'm understanding the problem correctly:

- Bind a ton of things to enter, just for the configuration screen.

- Force the user through a screen where you make them press the button they want to use for the enter key first.

EDIT: I guess the first one wouldn't really work since you need to be able to distinguish each button and you can't do that if they're all bound to enter. I've never actually used the gamepad support so I'm not very familiar with it.

Yeah option one is out, unless MegaZeux allows binding more than one key to a controller button at once, which I don't believe it does but I've not tested that yet.

Option two might work, but I've got to figure out some way for the program to recognize which controller button is being pressed. I don't think there are any built in counters that does this? So the only solution I can think of right off hand is run a code that scans every button on the controller to see which one is being pressed. The controller buttons are only recognized by their current bindings so I'll actually be looking for key_pressed and match that to the button that is currently assigned to it in the .cnf file. Whew, this might be tricky.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I assumed you already had something like that for configuring the buttons. All you need is to bind each button # to a different key, then check which key is pressed.

[Graham]

Ok, so I've decided that since I'm nearly done with level design I will probably finish that part myself. Where I could really use the help is with fleshing out the story. More specifically, creating journal entries that servo will find throughout the game on floppy disks. These can be one to two paragraph long bits that tell servo how Brennan is doing while imprisoned. They can be funny or revelatory stuff like that. I need maybe a hundred of these entries. They can be linked into a contiguous story line or be somewhat independent.

Spoiler

The hired goons work for the corporation that kidnapped Brennan (Rorke Defense Systems, a government funded organization with an eye on global defense and making a profit on war).These goons and the Execs that are holding Brennan captive are not sinister and evil as much as they are bumbling idiots. They are more like the Wet Bandits.This keeps the difficult subject matter (the kidnapping of a child) more lighthearted and easy to digest. Brennan himself is kind of like a young Tony Stark.He's about 12-14 years old. He's planning his escape under the guise of making some machines for these bozos. Because he cannot get out, instead of making a suit to protect him while he escapes, he is writing software that will help the robot he made find him. These are the abilities that come into play in the game. He re-programs spy drones to drop these floppies that give info and iPads (or similar tablet) that have the programs on them that Servo can access. Later he will find a way to get upgrades to Servo that help him even more.



The abilities are:

Jumping

Running

Climbing-vertical surfaces

Hanging-from ceiling and rope, this includes shimmying across

Falling-a parachute deploys from Servo's back, preventing death from falling

Ladders-build a ladder from the ground. Climbing ladders can happen anytime, even without the ladder ability

Bridges-build a horizontal bridge from the edge of any cliff

Punching-knock back enemies and bore through soft walls

Digging-drill downward through soft floor, also harm enemies beneath you

Carrying-pick up boxes or enemies and throw them, this becomes a big puzzle solving mechanic later

Rockets-launch up vertically from any solid surface

Hovering-launch horizontally, like rockets, from any solid surface

Rolling-roll up into a ball and pass through narrow tunnels or simply avoid damage

Swimming

Shooting-fire a laser beam from servos eyes, this is aimable

Bombing-throw a cooked grenade which you can aim, or drop it and move away. You can select large or small explosions



The upgrades are:

Armor-sustain more hits when you collect this upgrade plus find batteries to charge your shield

Double jump

Jump-Carry-allows carrying things while jumping or using hover or rocket

Multi-rocket-Allows you to use the rocket or hover ability in air or while falling, you can go back and forth from one to another

X-ray-allows scanning the surroundings for hidden areas or fake walls. Turns the view green and turns off foreground layer so you can see hidden paths. You cannot move around while scanning

Super-Punch-when you double tap punch you can harm enemies, rather than knock them back

Hover-Attack- harm enemies when hovering or rocketing into them

Roll-Attack-combine roll and run to harm enemies by rolling into them at speed.



Towards the end of the game, Brennan will be forced to begin creating robots similar to Servo for Rorke Defense. They will use these robots to try and attack Servo and stop him.Brennan creates a backdoor into their programming that allows them to be reprogrammed by special stations. He creates these stations and deploys them with the help of the spy drones mentioned earlier. When a duplicate (Servo Clone) steps on a reprogrammer, it becomes docile and can take instruction from Servo.



The instructions are:

"Stay here"

"Follow me"

"X-Ray"-will stand and X-ray for Servo, allowing you to roam around

"Go over here"-Servo will aim his laser some where to go

"Attack this"-Servo will aim his laser at something to attack

"Carry this"-Servo will aim his laser at something to pick up

"Drop it here"-when a duplicate is carrying something, Servo will aim at a place to drop it

"Become 2nd player"-This is initially a hidden option. It may be revealed through a cheat or new game+

"Self destruct"

As you can see there is a lot of information and story to convey. It mostly needs to be done through these Floppies. This will keep the game interesting and put the player into the world a little more. So would anyone like to contribute? It would be great if I could collaborate with someone who loves to write and wants to help me out.

[Graham]

Update: I've been writing the story out and it's not half bad. I guess my passion for the source material is helping. I didn't expect to be able to write it this well though. I guess I won't need help after all.

[Graham]

I was stalled on the game for quite a while. Like, since about the summer of 2015. It wasn't the game, it was my life that was stalled. My marriage fell apart, I was depressed, my financial situation was becoming dire. I had undiagnosed sleep apnea too.

Fortunately, I'm in a much better place in my life. My wife and I are working towards divorce. It hasn't been easy and I'm discovering she isn't who I thought she was at all. Of course, I'm not how she thought I was either. Make of that what you will. We are working together pretty well on matters of custody though. That's really all I care about, not losing my relationship with my son. We will retain equal custody which means a lot to me. We are both good parents and don't want to take one another away from him. I'm taking Wellbutrin, I have a C-pap machine that I sleep with at night. My finances are still fucked. It'll take a few years away from this marriage to fix that and restore my credit. All in all I'm doing ok. I have my own apartment and although I'm lonely on the nights Brennan isn't with me, I'm overall way happier than I was a year ago.

I got back into my game about a month ago and have been working on it full steam ahead. I was pretty directionless for a while the last year or two. But I realized that I've implemented all of these systems in the game that I have yet to use. So I've been going through the game tying everything together. It's starting to take shape and I like where it's going. It's reinvigorated my drive to see it completed. I still have no idea when it's going to be complete, but I'm hoping that within 2017 it'll be ready to play test. Wish me luck.
Edit: I've actually been into it for more like 2+ months now. My how time flies.

This post has been edited by Graham: 13 December 2016 - 09:44 PM

[CJA]

Woo! Glad to see that you're back and working on it.

[Verasev]

Be careful with Wellbutrin. It gave me rage issues and they had to take me off of it. Also glad to hear you're back in the saddle. Do you still want my help or have you got it by yourself? No worries either way.

[Graham]

Verasev, on 14 December 2016 - 09:03 AM, said:

Be careful with Wellbutrin. It gave me rage issues and they had to take me off of it. Also glad to hear you're back in the saddle. Do you still want my help or have you got it by yourself? No worries either way.

Been taking it for a little over a year. Pretty low dose though I don't remember how much. No rage. Just more even feeling through out the day. No feeling of depression now. And I'm not anxious like I used to be.

Do you write? If you want to help with story, I can show you what I've written so far and you could consider if you want to help.

[Graham]

Well I spent the afternoon playing Servo's Adventure. I haven't been able to do this to this degree before because I have a lot more things connected than I ever have. I only made it to area two (there are seven levels in an area) and encountered a LOAD of bugs to fix. This doesn't surprise me I figured this would be the case, still it's disappointing. Some are game breaking, others are just nuisances. This will probably just be incomprehensible gibberish to you but incase anyone is interested, here's the bug report from a few hours spent playing my game:
-1-4 level portal has wrong background instead of black when cannot enter because of not having the running ability

-says 3 levels completed when it should be two. Is it counting house as a level?

-1-2 elevator was moving servo up and down when he was standing beside it. Later it worked as normal.

-during downloading an ability, game became unpaused and bees stung servo at point of auto save. When servo dies and restarts, he should be invulnerable for a time. Probably need to double check that game stays paused when in ability info screen inside tablets. Also must stay paused when going back into anytablet to download another ability.

-in 1-4, when rc truck killed me, I didn't start level over, instead I went back to 1-3. Probably should check that truck is going left or is further away from servo to give you more time to react.

-because I use [ instead of % for messages, some look screwed because they are showing color codes

-in status menu, when you read about an ability, it takes you back to help menu when finished. But empty slot, ram and floppy work correctly. (This is caused by opening the help menu just beforehand)

-saving message stuck on screen after downloading ability from first tablet in 1-6. Happened after downloading jumping or swimming from first tablet. Also tablet non responsive now. tablets not responding after downloading the bridges ability from second tablet in 1-6. Also happened with punching. Both those were new. Didn't happen with one that wasn't new. Happens elsewhere and with reg tablets too.

-first save position overwritten in 1-6 at first tablet. Possibly related; first position not returned to in 1-5 when dying before getting first tablet.

-started 1-5 with ladders instead of jumping

-message on gold floppy in 1-5 is wrong. (Vr training, level one, part 5 of 7) is all it says.

-messages started displaying the level found on after the fifth message. Update: it's the wrong level. For instance the message found on S-1 shows as hovering hills. (Message 21)

-servo wasn't flashing to indicate shield. Not sure why, general didn't return to the loop?

-upgrade was counted as a tablet by rewind menu standards.

-I'll have to be more strategic about battery placement. They were invaluable in 1-5. Need to be like that on every level I think.

-why can't you climb spiderwebs?

-couldn't get out of the water in 1-3

-basketball blends into brown background

-damn corners of rocks in 1-6 underwater still wrong characters

-add a hint about statistics screen when floppy dialog opens up.

-not necessary to double confirm exiting level

-can't punch last bit of dirt and grass in 1-3. Need more digcolors?

-rc copter bombs don't work correctly

-level portal for 1-2 unresponsive after trying to re-enter level. Paused on white flash. Servo frozen.

-level 1-7 has two gold floppies. Neither has a message

-scorpion not climbing stairs

-fish was changing direction out of water, instead of dying, stuck

-in S-1, servo chars were written to 242 when he moved close to a snake on board 20

-need another save tablet up top in S-1. Have to go too long before next save

-scorpions in S-1 aren't resetting properly. They hang out near the board edge and are wrong chars sometimes

[KKairos]

Graham, are you using default MZX save functions, or loading a customized save file format?

[Lachesis]

Graham, on 09 November 2016 - 07:26 PM, said:

So if I can write some code that modifies the .cnf file for my game, I don't think I actually have a way of knowing which button# corresponds to which controlller button and I'm not exactly sure yet how to write this code. The good thing is that I've tested modifying the .cnf file while the game is running and using a swab world command to refresh these changes in the game works. (Yay!) so if I can figure this out I can do what I'm trying to do and make the user experience much more friendly. Thoughts?

The way I've done this in several games is to have a separate MZX file to work on the main MZX file's CNF. This separate file has its own CNF with every possible joystick axis and button mapped to unused key_pressed values (like 10001, 20025, etc). Because everything has its own unique key_pressed value, it's straightforward to determine which joystick and axis/button was pressed. Labyrinth of Zeux has one of these files, if you want to see how it works.

The catch is that every release of MegaZeux as of now does not handle key_pressed values higher than 511 gracefully and such a file can cause MZX crashes and other bugs. This varies between machines; I was using this method for years with no problems before I found out. Within that limitation there aren't enough values to map every possible axis/button on every joystick, but you could probably fit a few.