Subject: Re: [stella] GTA 2600: Started! From: "Mark Graybill" <saundby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 16:03:35 -0700 |
From: "Manuel Polik" <cybergoth@xxxxxxxx> > > Cool! I mean -> "GTA Vice Dungeon"! Really cool! > That is really cool. > > Have you planned the dungeons and objects generation > > stuff already? > > Unfortunately no. I'm currently reverse-engineering the > 8-Bit version (still any help appreciated!) and hope to > get some ideas from that. Main Problem is that it > completely generates the dungeons out of seed values, > relying on the giant amount of RAM of the 8-Bits. > I did some reverse engineering on the Apshai series and Fargoal way back when. You're right about them taking advantage of all that RAM. Fargoal gets by with less data as I recall, but Apshai would store some fairly large data structures. The old "Devil's Dungeon" game from the book Stimulating Simulations had a very tight structure for generated levels. For the game I wrote ("RatQuest") I started with that structure then moved to a matrix structure that allowed me to modify the dungeon size (and memory usage) easily. In Devil's Dungeon format, a 16-room level would occupy about 80 bytes, in my matrix format it was about 104 bytes, since I added the ability to have named monsters and a named item in the room (taking advantage of the masses of RAM available on the unexpanded Vic-20. ;) I also changed it so that it was possible to trade experience for stats in rooms other than room 1 and room 1 acted just like any other room. The altar became just another flag, rather than a fixed location on the map. The addition of named items expanded the size of the character data structure, too. It had started out at 8 bytes for stats, experience, and gold (two bytes per value), and I added another 16 bytes for a character name, and then the items added another 8 bytes. Basically there were 255 named items in the game, and the character could have 8 of them. Each of the 8 slots was associated with a type of thing, they could only have one type of thing (helm, weapon, shield, etc.) at at time, and the number pointed to a data structure where all the info (name, stats) could be looked up (either in RAM or ROM depending on the platform.) The monster type was an index for lookup of name and description as well. And each level had an additional generated byte for "atmosphere", which pointed to a structure of environment descriptions. On the small versions these were short phrases used in room titles. In the larger versions they were longer and more sophisticated. I'm probably not telling you anything you haven't already thought through, though. But I'm really looking forward to firing up GTA Vice Dungeon on my system, so I thought I'd jump in... -Mark G. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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