Tilting at Windmills

Well, a lot of work the last few days…

I had to restructure the monster array into something that was actually useful. I hadn’t taken into account many of the changes made on the player side of things. In particular, to keep the attack system clean and simple, I ended up implementing fatigue for monsters as well… it’s just EASIER, because otherwise I have to special case out monsters, track which units are monsters and which aren’t, etc. Strange how that works.

I also ended up increasing the array size for monster records to… 42 bytes. I’m sure there’s a joke to be had there. 32 wasn’t enough, and 64 was too much. 42 bytes makes for 6 records in a sector, with a 4-byte loss. That means overall I would lose 120 bytes on the disk. Bleh, I can live with that.

Lots of spreadsheet work as well. I used one to generate the pattern codes for the monsters. It’s just easier that way than using a program, because I’m currently just using Hex Workshop to cut and paste hexadecimal strings into files. The only thing I do on the TI is generate blank files to populate with data. Sure, I could write an editor or two… and I have… but for development purposes, it’s just easier for me to plop the data in there.

I don’t have any actual combat mechanics in play yet, because I had to do all this prep work BEFORE I could do so. But it’s done now, so I can start trying to implement melee combat. I also implemented my “encounter announcement” system, and set it up to load random monsters so I could see how it looks. A big problem, unfortunately, is that monsters who blend into the background colors of the battlemap may get hard to see… there’s not much I can do about that, unless I want to abandon monster colors entirely and make all units white. How boring.

So, gotta have something to show for my work, right? Okay, here’s another movie:

The one little bug I have to address is that long sentences end up with a space at the start on the next line. This is a trickier thing to fix than you’d think.

I found the problem with movement… quite simple, really. I had byte vectors that weren’t quite accurate. A -1 applied as a word requires the whole word to be formatted as -1, not just the right byte. Otherwise you end up with units moving diagonally. A few quick fixes and my units aren’t moving over top of each other or in odd directions anymore. The code base is ready now for the actual “attack and defense” routines, which should be interesting, since there’s so many factors to account for. I also need to find a way to cleanly map area attacks to units affected… preferably with a single routine that can “map” the damage area.

For your entertainment, I recorded a video in Classic99 to show off the start of the combat engine. In particular, you can see the units don’t move in quite the expected order.

Hopefully this gets SOME comments…