Tilting at Windmills

And now for something related…

My brother and I have been gaming since the 80′s, when my mom and dad bought my brother the Expert rules set (the original blue box with the illustrations by Erol Otus) and he later acquired the AD&D hardcovers. Of course, we both being pretty young at the time, we couldn’t make heads or tails of those books… My brother’s character was a multi-class paladin named “Gepotalin Rudilee” (he created the name from a boggle game set of letters) who had a laundry list of magic items and generally blasted his way through every dungeon because, naturally, they weren’t really playing the rules, more engaging in fantasy make-believe with some rough guidelines.

At one point, when he was in high school (or close to it), they convinced a friend’s brother to run a game for them. The brother was not particularly keen on doing it, so he made them roll up 1st and 2nd level characters for real, following all the rules, and then proceeded to TPK the party in the first encounter. It was an epiphany for my brother though; it was the first time someone had actually ran the game in a more-or-less correct manner, and they had followed the rules as presented. Later in college, he played a lot of 2nd Edition AD&D and was introduced to alternate games like GURPS and Traveller. But we never did go back to those old hardcovers, except to read them for some entertainment at times, and bemoan the political-correctness of the 2nd Edition.

It goes without saying we loved 3rd Edition. In fact, we played it until we were sick of it, almost literally. While we all disliked the ridiculous class/race restrictions of the old editions, and hated the ludicrous level limitations for non-humans, 3rd edition had obviously not been play-tested to see what the effect of removing these restrictions would have. Prestige classes were absolute killers of balance. Wizards and clerics were still far too powerful and necessary; ironically clerics ended up being the best magic-item creators because they were not reliant upon spellbooks. Magic item production became a dreary power-gaming bonanza, with players mass-producing wands of healing, magic missiles, and other effects to circumvent the spell-casting limitations. Finally, pretty much like every edition of D&D, the game started to break down balance-wise once the players got close to epic levels… sometimes well before then.

I’ve been running a 4th Edition D&D game off and on for the last two years. I do like 4th Edition; it went much further than 3rd did to fix some core issues to the game. But I really felt like trying to run a real old-school session for a bit, so I asked my players (none of whom have ever played the older editions, except one who was absent) and they all agreed to give it a try. My brother and sister-in-law even drove over the mountains (a 100 mile drive) to play!

Given I had several players who had never played before, and my brother suggested higher-level characters for a single session, I went ahead and designed a pre-gen party with an average of 5th level. I also gave them some decent magical gear, nothing too powerful, but enough so they felt like they were an experienced party. The party was balanced as well, with a ranger, paladin, cleric, fighter/thief and illusionist. I actually decided to use the random dungeon generator for a bit of fun and inspiration; it worked out all right, because I could use some of the ideas to make a more interesting dungeon, and discard the silly ones. (“ANOTHER elevator? Nah, I don’t think so.”)

So, we played for about four hours this Saturday, and the result was a lot of fun. (Although my sister-in-law was a little bored as the cleric; she didn’t get to hit much and she didn’t have to use any spells to heal anyone.) Here’s some of the highlights:

• Rangers in 1st edition are absurdly over-powered. They get their level as a bonus to attack and damage against giants and humanoids, which includes orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, etc. Against these enemies they deal sick amounts of damage. They also reduce the chance for the party to be surprised to a 1 in 6.
• Surprise was pretty lethal in the game; the unsurprised side got up to 5 rounds of free attacks/spell-castings/missile fire with no penalties. My players were never surprised though. (See above)
• Poison is very bad in 1st Edition. It was basically a “save or die” situation. The idea was that IF the player made the save, he lost no hit points. However, this works out to be pretty crappy in gameplay. 2nd Edition revised it so poisons that kill instantly are much more rare, and more likely to be encountered after the party has access to slow/neutralize poison spells
• Combats are much more quick than in 4th. I hadn’t realized how bogged down encounters had gotten, really. It’s like every fight is with a minion… but even one lucky strike can seriously debilitate or kill a player. It feels a lot more… heroic and risky
• The DMG is an absolute horror to try to find anything in. Plus it has a lot of material that makes no sense at all to include in a heroic role-playing game, like the effects of a urinary tract infection.
• Money in the game is pretty silly. Magical items like spellbooks cost thousands of gold pieces. If the DM is not giving it out like Monty Haul, the players won’t even be able to pay for training up to the next level. Also, 10 coins per pound? SERIOUSLY?
• Just to really make things weird, you get experience for magic items kept, magic items sold (usually twice what you would get for keeping it), and gold, at a direct ratio of 1gp to 1xp. However, training costs are exponential, so a player by 2nd or 3rd level would likely have the XP to train up, but not the money to pay for it. And getting more money would just make it worse!
• Thieving skills are kind of lame. As my brother discovered in the book, the DM rolls ALL of them. What fun is that? For things like trap detection, I could understand a hidden roll, but for climb walls? And don’t get me started on backstabbing…

I was asked at one point by someone why I didn’t run in 2nd Edition instead. My answer: specialty priests. They are the BANE of that edition, and a wise DM will absolutely forbid anything from the “Faiths & Avatars” handbook. They totally destroy any semblance of class balance, since instead of playing a given class, you just play a cleric of a god associated with that class, and get most of the benefits with none of the penalties! Fortunately, if you stick with the original 1st printing, and stay away from the Forgotten Realms, you can avoid this curse. Looking over 2nd Edition core rules, they did address and fix many issues I saw with AD&D… the next time I want to go Old School, I’ll definitely give that a try.

Still not doing active development on the CRPG… My next post will be the 100th post I’ve done, so it WILL have some CRPG content of some kind!

I’m about 95% unpacked and placed now. I have a bunch of utility stuff (cleaning supplies) that still need to be organized and put away properly, and my office is still in boxes that need to be unpacked and sorted into a system. I’ve been pretty lax in the past about dealing with paperwork, having stuff stack up into huge piles. My goal with this new place was to stop that habit by not allowing myself a great deal of desk-room for such nonsense. So far, though, I seem to be able to live with growing piles of receipts and statements just fine. Drat.

My biggest annoyance is that I really have NO space for any retro computing in a permanent fashion. I could set my TI up in my office, but it will take up a lot of room next to my PC, and to be honest, I don’t fire it up often enough to justify it. In my old place, I had a side table set up for the TI and a PC. My downstairs rec room would be ideal for that, except it only has a single electrical outlet, and I would need to move out a couch before I’d have the room to make it co-exist comfortably with my gaming table. So, for now, I’m just trying to find a place I can pack my stuff in an accessible location to dig out and set up on an as-needed basis.

Anyway, having a new place, I’ve also found I have less interest in just sitting in my computer room/office and gaming… there’s a lot more to do now, and the computer will be there when I am ready.

Still here… just been really busy the last two weeks moving into a townhouse condo!

Some things I’ve learned from the moving experience:

• Don’t trust big banks to close when they say they will. Mine was one business day and weekend late, and as a result I ended up having to move during the week rather than on the weekend
• Load up or down stairs if you must, but try and unload at the same level
• When swapping locks, just put the same brand/type that’s already in there. Otherwise you may find yourself in for more of a project than you bargained for (Hole-cutting, chiseling, etc.)
• With condos, any repair work the inspector advised on should be checked to see if the Association handles it

I’ll put a photo up of the place later on this post.

It’s going to be awhile before I turn my attention back to CRPG development. I still have a ton of boxed books to unload before I feel that I can relax and actually start doing something again. I’m also uncertain as yet where my TI will go… I have a nice rec room in the garage area, but it doesn’t have a lot of plug-ins. Also, the natural gas water heater is right there, and I’m a bit nervous at the idea of having electronics so close to it…

Ah, busy busy… anyone who’s bought a home, especially a condo, knows the confusion and frustration with the complexities of it. Insurance in particular is a hassle… even though a full home costs a LOT more for the owner to insure, at least it’s all on him… there’s no master policies to consider. Also, half my apartment is packed away now, with more to come in the next weekend. All my TI books are safely packed… fortunately all the knowledge is up here (taps head) or on the Internet.

I had a great idea on how to manage multiple targeting a week or so ago, and I’m working on implementing it now. I’m actually leveraging some code I had taken out long ago that was part of the animation system, so it’s back in! Good thing I saved it elsewhere just in case…

The battlemap is an 8×8 sized grid. Interestingly, character patterns on the TI are also an 8×8 grid. So, why not use an 8×8 pattern to store affected areas for different attack types, and then use the rotation code for animation to orient it and map it onto the battlemap?

Let’s look at an example. You can see on the left two patterns. The first one is the battlemap, with friendly units in black and enemy units in gray. The second is the blast pattern for a spell. The default direction is down. The topmost ally unit intends to cast the spell forward. So the process here is:

• Rotate the pattern twice clock-wise to change direction. Each rotation is also accompanied with a shift upwards to keep the center pixel in the same position
• Using the unit’s position offset from the center pixel, map the affected squares of the battlemap
• Scan all unit positions, check if they are within the effected squares. If so, add them to a stack of affected units

Now on the right image, you can see the affected areas. Three of the enemy units are affected by the blast, one is just missed. Not too bad, and I can make this the single entry-point system for ALL attack types, even melee which only affect a single square. It can also help me with tracking special effect boundary limits, so that flying sprites don’t go beyond the borders.

I’m a ways off from having another “interesting” video demo of stuff in action. Right now I’m in the rather dull infrastructure design part, where a lot of pieces have to be brought into alignment for something neat to happen. I also have to go back and make sure my monsters are ready for combat, so I can make sure attacking actually works… Special effects I’m saving for after all the hard work of determining results is done.

And since I’m also moving in two weeks, I expect that will take a hit on development time. Oh, and playing Mass Effect 2. And Dwarf Fortress. *sigh* Full days…

It’s interesting how history repeats itself…

Eight months ago, Yahoo shut down their blog service, Yahoo 360. Given that it wasn’t a very good blog service in the first place, I didn’t shed many tears. However, I was left with the problem of where to locate my blog. Yahoo generously offered transfers to WordPress, but I had it in my mind to move to Blogger instead. Several of my friends used Blogger, and it looked like it had a lot of flexibility and control.

Moving over wasn’t easy, though. Blogger had no support for importing Yahoo 360 blog entries, so I had to actually create a WordPress blog first, and then transfer from that! And then Blogger didn’t get any of the comments for my older posts. Still, I was willing to forgive and forget.

And now, Blogger has decided it’s too much trouble to offer FTP services. Instead, they’d rather make all their users use their web hosting services. Since the majority of their users use it for free, it’s not a total surprise. However, a lot of FTP users were that way for a reason… they had a lot of custom content that required their own server, or they already had domain space to use, etc. I think Blogger’s going to find the fallout from this move far worse than they thought it would be. In addition, the fact that Google owns their servers may hurt them as well; Google’s reputation for security has gotten rather tarnished of late…

Anyway, I’ll be updating the CSS for this blog in the next few days to make it something more unique and to my tastes over the standard appearance. WordPress looks like a good blog service, I hope to stick with them. And I like that I got all my old comments back as well!

Whew, haven’t posted in a month… Had a lot of things outside my hobby work going on.

My work team has moved to a new high-rise building in Bellevue… which I’d be happier about if I hadn’t been downgraded from a shared office to a workstation. (NOT a cubicle, a workstation, basically a desk in a large room of desks.) Also, not all that keen on heights… I’d turn down a windowed office if offered.

Also, my parent’s dog, a delightful mini-schnauzer who’s only five years old, is probably not long for the world… she was severely anemic and required a blood transfusion. It’s probably some form of bone marrow cancer; my parents have decided not to put her through the agony and torture of a biopsy just to find out which terminal disease it is. Instead they’ll just enjoy the time they have left with her.

Game-wise, been playing a bit more of World of Warcraft lately. The new expansion was announced and was a considerable surprise to me… revising the old content was not something I expected. A step in the right direction, really.

A lot of what made some of the old games like Ultima special to people was how attached they became to familiar places… so when you screwed with them it really triggered an emotional response. The general decay of the land due to pollution and ignorance in Ultima VII is a good example… I’m not sure Ultima IX is as effective, because the land is so radically different that it really isn’t the same place at all.

Anyway, I’m going to try and get my programming work on the CRPG going again this weekend… I’m making some display changes first, then I want to work on figuring out action interfaces and determination.

A few long hoped-for wishes of mine came true recently…

The first is that I finally contacted Quinton Tormanen, a TI developer from the late 80′s/early 90′s. He had written some truly amazing game software released through Comprodine Software and then disappeared. I had met him at a TI faire in Portland, Oregon in 1990, and possibly being bemused by my ardent fanboyism, showed me the prototype/alpha of his current project, a Gauntlet clone for the TI called “Gold Vault”.

Anyway, Quinton is still around, and he still has all his old TI stuff, but he hasn’t used it in years. He told me he never finished Gold Vault because he was never happy with the action, and he had also been working on a Might & Magic clone. Both projects were so large, though, he eventually lost interest, around the same time he made the permament move to PC development.

The other big thing to happen is that Tursi, possibly as a belated birthday gift, re-wrote his disk system in Classic99 so that it can at last support assembly work! And to make things even better, his emulator can directly read PC text files and treat them as TI text files, so I don’t have to even convert my source over. This will greatly speed up my development time and reduce my frustrations… well, maybe.

There’s still some kinks and bugs to work out. My initial rewritten code promptly crashed on me, which lead me to unpack an older demo to see that the assembler and Classic99 were still working with it. It does, but my older demo has shown some oddities… sound is nearly absent; only a few sound effects work. It also has problems accessing two relative internal fixed files, although others work fine.

File troubles are nothing new, really… for example, relative record access isn’t documented very well in any of the available TMS9900 materials. I originally had my starting record set in the open part of the DSR, only to find that the Myarc Controller habitually assumed 0 for the starting record regardless of what was in the peripheral access block. So I wrote my DSR routines to just populate the record after the open, which worked for both controllers. Since some of my files work and others don’t, and this worked fine in MESS and on my actual TI, I figure it’s either a bug in my code or Tursi’s. Probably mine, or none of the files would work.

Well, three weeks of blissful non-single status came to a crashing end… I guess that leaves the computer as my sole source of company again. Bugger.

I’ve been considering changing my combat mechanics that I had plotted out. As time goes on, I’ve found myself pruning out things that came from other sources. It’s always good to design your engine to match the context of what it runs on and how it plays out.

In this case, I’m considering dropping hit resolution, which is rather big. The idea of an opposing check (with some randomness thrown in) to determine if a target is struck or not is a sacred cow of not only the CRPG but the RPG itself.

But I’m not doing abstract combat, showing monster portraits. There is a tactical battlefield in play, and the way hits are determined is where your unit is and is going to be, not some abstract number. So my idea right now is to remove hit values entirely and just have it so if you aim at a particular square or move into an opponent, you automatically hit.

Well, not ALL the time. I’ll probably add an evasion action that can potentially happen, with more agile classes like rogues more likely to do it, whereby the target can move into an adjacent square (if one is available) and avoid the blow. And of course, other defensive measures like parry and block are available, and those would still be determined through skill rather than position.

At this point, of course, it’s really damage that comes to the forefront. Since hitting is less random, then I’ll probably want to add damage types to the game. My initial plan is blunt, piercing, and slashing weapons (club, sword, axe), and magic as damage types. Armor will be rated for what it protects against, and monsters may be immune to certain damage types.

Anyway, I need to sit down and rework some numbers for this and see how it pans out on the spreadsheets. A lot to do… but at the moment, it’s a welcome distraction.

It’s been awhile since a post, time for some news. I went on vacation to Disneyland, I turned out to have a misaligned scapula which has been the source of my left side aches and pains for six weeks, and I met a wonderful girl. Not all in that order…

So I haven’t been working on my CRPG too much… Although of late sitting down was moderately uncomfortable, so I haven’t been doing much of anything at the computer. I also have been trying to get more fit, so spending time outdoors is also on the list. And spending time with a very wonderful woman.

So, I’ll take a moment to discuss one aspect of CRPG’s, which is the tone.

A lot of CRPG’s of the vintage days are well known for their unique character. Wizardry had a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach; Ultima had tons of pop-culture (for the time) references, and Might & Magic had science fiction mixed into their fantasy.

This isn’t too much of a surprise. Many CRPG designers started with tabletop games, and anyone who’s played those knows that nobody takes themselves too seriously. Sooner or later, a Monty Python quote will be uttered at the table, or an exotic name will be mispronounced to comic effect, and any tension disappears. That IS the point of these games after all, to have fun and relieve stress.

I think it’s important, though, to decide on the tone of the game you intend to design. Tone can include names plots, quests, map designs, and the end goal. Having these keep to a consistent pattern will contribute to the feeling of your game world being “real”.

When games take a wrong turn on tone, it can really wreck the experience of a game. Spoilers below…

For example, the game “Legends II” on the TI-99/4a was all right until the very end, when the “lost king” mentioned to being kept a prisoner turns out to be… Elvis.

Another would be Ultima 9, where the world map had a large number of unique and interesting places and terrain, but they were arranged in a fashion more like a theme park than a game. The various peasants met on the road also were generic, contributing single lines of fixed dialogue, often random. The game had regressed back to the first three Ultimas in terms of conversation!

So if you’re designing a CRPG, keep in mind that the tone you set will greatly influence how people react to your game. And if they want to continue playing after a particularly upsetting encounter.

It’s always good to hear from other retro-enthusiasts pursuing the same kind of work I am… here’s a link to a fellow working on a VIC-20 cartridge-based CRPG, and the picture above is of what it looks like. Very cool!

Honestly, the VIC-20 is a decent machine, and it’s unfortunate that it was overshadowed by its big brother, the Commodore 64, so fast. I think the only thing people even remember about it was that William Shatner was their spokesman.

Most 99′ers, unfortunately, have a low opinion of the machine, and not because of its capabilities. It was the price war between TI and Commodore that eventually lead to TI ending its home computer division. This lead to a lot of bad feelings between the two groups.

I wish I could say it was all in the past, but I have personally experienced this hatred. And from another 99′er, no less.

When I first joined the Yahoo 99′ers group several years ago, I was researching other computer’s video capabilities, to see how the TI could measure up to them in various areas. The Apple II’s complicated 6-color high-res display was very puzzling, and the Commodore 64′s exact color limitations were not always clear… apparently it stayed mostly in 160×192 mode for most games. It was possible to trick it out to do 4 colors an 8×8 block in 320×192, but this required heavy CPU manipulation and interrupting the retrace, and most of this was done in the demo scene in the mid 90′s, long after the machine had left the stage as a contender.

Anyway, I made some posts on the subject on the group, and one 99′er made some nasty comments about posting about “trash” machines on the boards. I tried to laugh it off and explain myself, but he wouldn’t leave it alone, and he started viciously attacking me in print, and in personal e-mails. He wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than my banning from the group entirely.

Nobody else thought this, and many of the group’s members came to my defense. His responses to them were equally nasty, and eventually the moderator had to ban him after it became obvious that he was completely irrational about it.

It was a very strange and uncomfortable thing to happen, and unfortunate since this fellow was the owner of a large stock of TI software and copyrights, which he then withheld from the board’s members all of whom he considered “traitors”. He also accused them of piracy, something that was particularly inaccurate, since most of the group were, if anything, over-zealous in their efforts to prevent software piracy.

Anyway… it’s a sad comment, I suppose, on how some people are unable to let go of a grudge, even after 30 years. I like to think all retro-gamers and developers can find common ground in their love of old platforms and nostalgia of the old days of computing.

Realms of Quest III (Vic-20)