Castle Paradox

[Shadowiii]

Fyre can make games on his watch.
_________________
But enough talk, have at you!

[Joe Man]

My watch is a PDA.

Edit: and I can make games on my calculator.


Edit again: Why can't James just divide OHR into several seperate programs? Is there something about quickbasic I'm unaware of? Is it just too much to do? Would it make all .RPG files completely obsolete?
_________________
"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Frobozz]

[TMC]

"divide OHR into several seperate programs"? What do you mean? Why would he want to do that?

QB is already on the way out, and have been so for a long time. You could say it's been dead for quite a while considering that its use has been shunned for years. I've never heard of FreeBasic though.
_________________
"It is so great it is insanely great."

[Leo]

The 36 NPCs per map limit is problary the most annoying...
_________________
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
-Douglas Adams

Download Zander (Swedish)

or Zander (English)

[Ishrie]

[phyrfox]

Did you look at the source? I'm honestly surprised it runs. It wouldn't run in QB 1.0, to say the least. Even without optimizations. And, as he noticed in the source, it won't run unless compiled; it needs every last ounce of memory you can give it. It's fairly packed full, having nearly reached the limits of a DOS BASIC system (and using a series of rather interesting hacks in the process).

The color limits was due to the nature of the pixels (that is, 4bit pixels to compress images), and the language (Mode 0x13h, referred to as SCREEN 13 in basic, only supports an 8-bit palette, and is the only 8-bit graphic mode that BASIC offers without some *really* ugly hacks).

Since the palette is shared, it makes sense to limit tiles to 16 colors, since that will mean it'll be less likely to conflict colors. And makes the tiles and sprites 1/2 the original size.

Sound effects could be implemented, but I only see MIDI-ish support in there so far, no way to easily put out FM effects (such was a WAV file or something). That could be implemented, but you'd also have to carefully adjust the sound, since MIDI and FM almost constantly are set to different levels (and, in some cases, don't mix at all, you'd either either music or sound effects).

And, of course, the limits of the file format itself. To add sound effects or expand the tile palette would require "breaking" the current format; writing a separate utility to convert up to the new format. And requiring users to upgrade their software, since it would not maintain "forward-compatibility".

This is why I think he's "done" with OHR. He wants to make more features, but that would require more ugly hacks (and, although commented, is already rather heavily packed). So thus, Hamster Wheel is likely to be borne of this need. But OHR will live on, and it will be a new success all over again. After all, castle paradox needs to have something to do with all the games on here.

~= phyrfox =~

[Bob the Hamster]