Castle Paradox

[Bob the Hamster]

[TMC]

It turned out to be really easy to remove battles, and it removed about 90kb from the exe (I haven't looked at removing globals yet). I've left everything else in, eg. foemap checking, because it can be useful for script triggering. Now I'm playing around with the interpreter.

James, is there any reason I can't change script loading so that recusive scritps are only loaded once, by pointing all copies to the same offset in the buffer?

Conincidentally, I was also looking at pushw. I found it in stack.asm, and worked everything out there (knowing assembly helps). Which is cool, because just a week ago I was wondering why I couldn't succeed (or had ever heard of) in my attempt to make some interpreter stack overflow : P

[NeoTA]

TMC: actually, with what you are mentioning, i think an overhaul of the save system should come before any mods like that.. because with the current save system, it's easiest (and ugly and inappropriate) to stick such stuff in the GEN lump (SAV files have one!)

what needs to be done at the least:

* Save only the few bits of GEN that are relevant to saves

* Introduce a size tracking mechanism, so you can add your extra prefs and thus increase savefile size without breaking savefile format. basically just a bytecount for the "miscellaneous sundry items" that are stored there.
Earlier versions could safely ignore this; and it could grow up to 16000 bytes[1] (but who would use 8000!! misc datas anyway)

* increment savefile version (of course)

[1] this is due to the size of buffer()

james will probably agree with me that these things should happen; it is just a question of when these changes should take place.

[Bob the Hamster]

[RPGCreations]

Remember that I haven't looked at the source yet, but:

is the "Loading..." text when you load an RPG file via renaming it or dropping a file onto GAME hard coded into GAME.EXE or could a defineable string be included with the other defineable strings to change it?
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[NeoTA]

I just compiled this.
here is a 'how-to-compile" guide. it should work for you, but i haven't tried it elsewhere than this machine.
If it works for others too, it could go on the wiki..




Preparing (you only need to do these things once)


1. Have quickbasic 4.5.
2. Go into the support/ directory. unzip the nocom.zip there. ( i don't know if this is required)
3. Edit env-set.bat so that the
"SET OBDIR=" and
"SET OHRRPGCE="
point at the directories these things are installed in on your system.
(by default they are set to C:\qb45 and C:\ohrrpgce respectively)


Main (you need to do this every time you want to compile)
1. Change to the ohrrpgce directory
2. Run "env-set" (you only need to do this once per dos session, so if you do multiple recompiles without quitting your dos box, you don't have to rerun this.)
3. Run "compile"
4. If you don't have "grep" installed, be momentarily puzzled by the error message after the compile finishes.
5. Notice that anyway, custom.exe and game.exe compiled ok.
6. Try them out, and rejoice!

I compiled in DOSBox under linux (http://dosbox.sf.net). It took ~4 minutes to compile.
In an actual dos prompt under windows, it should go much faster.
But, you should consider running under dosbox anyway.. because it gives you lots of free conventional memory (i had 637k free). this is important for compiling.

[RPGCreations]

Can't you set up the enviroment variables from DOSBOX's config? I used a slew of commands for OHRBOX to automatically configure things, then switch the virtual drive to C then clear the screen.
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[NeoTA]

sure. but i'd rather make my own batch file that just consists of:

CALL env-set


compile

also, i just finished debugging basclean.py. it works 100% for all ohrrpgce .bas files now. hopefully, due to that bascleaned files will get committed to the svn repository soon.

http://neota.castleparadox.com/basclean.py

[TMC]

No need to unzip nocom.zip, handled by compile.bat

For some reason under winXP, env-set.bat doen't work - QBDIR and OHRRPGCE are treated as local variables. Also, the link to the prompt won't run env-set. Win XP is batty. I moved the SETs into compile.bat

I can only assume that grep prints out compile.out and/or deletes it. I just removed that instruction.

Freelink gets around the memory problem by swapping to disk. Any advantage to be had by compiling through DOSBOX then?

4 minutes? Wow. It compiles in 2 seconds on my machine : P
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[NeoTA]

the compiler is what is prone to running out of memory.

[Ysoft_Entertainment]

under winme I couldn't get any of the bat files work that had to do with the exe files(the variables weren't set, so I went into each bat file, and manually changed the directories, now I am able to compile the project.
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Try my OHR exporter/importer.
OHRGFX
Striving to become better pixel artist then Fenrir Lunaris. Unfortunately the laziness gets in the way of my goals.

[phyrfox]

Alright. I'm looking at the source code here, and it's not making the most sense. Probably because my machine code language usage is a bit rusty (and I was never really that good anyway)...

What is ATTACK.BIN used for? BINSIZE.BIN I have deduced from previous look-sees as something that defines a record-size for the other BIN files (although, I've never seen the values be anything different). I suspect that ATTACK.BIN has something to do with defining attack animations (which I haven't seen documented elsewhere, thus far).

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've done a bit of test-hacking with the SAY format already, so I know I'm headed in the right direction. It seems there's so much more to uncover before I can make something that's fully compatible with the RPG format.

I'd like to thank James Paige for making the default Font and Master Palette separate files; that's made it a lot easier to embed the information into the source code (and thus, as part of the executable instead of as separate files that might get lost).

What other discoveries await me during this most eventful journey of writing my very own (ported) engine? I don't suppose somebody could help me out with documenting the various undocumented portions of the source? My time is unfortunately short-handed, more often than not.

~= phyrfox =~

[Bob the Hamster]

[phyrfox]

[NeoTA]

To be official! i am writing a program to autotranslate OHRRPGCE's routines from QBASIC to Python.
Here is my plan:

1. QBASIC lexing (100% done)
2. QBASIC parsing ( 2 % done)
3. Translate parsed QBASIC phrases into Python lexes* (0% done)
4. Python unlexing ( 0% done, trivial)**

* a lex == one lexical unit.
** unlexing == converting a set of tokens into textual source code. I wrote a QBASIC unlexer already; it's a mere 24 lines long!

#2 will probably take longest; many rules to write.

Special about this project is that it is designed to accommodate translation between any two languages.
If anyone wants to translate ohr to another programming language, they would only have to do the equivalent to steps 3 and 4 for their intended language.

I need to finish this quickly so i can finish this somewhat-secret picture more quickly.

I will post a link when the translator is ready.