On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:50:03 -0500, Albert Yarusso <albert@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> On Feb 28, 2005, at 5:22 PM, Manuel Rotschkar wrote:
> > Hm... Sounds interesting. But while I'm fine documenting how the level
> > data works, I can't see forcing myself to write something like an
> > editor
> > for it. So Christian Bogeys or Kirks PF Tools, plus some minimal "How
> > To
> > Compile" DASM knowledge would be required for someone wanting to
> > design a
> > level.
>
> I don't think that would be too bad--perhaps we could solicit someone
> to write a simple editor that conforms to your rules? Would be fun to
> have a visual editor that allows you to place the various blocks, the
> player's starting position, the exit, moving blocks, the blowing man,
> and set various attributes for the level (color, whether the level is
> moving up and down, and so forth). Even better if it can compile it
> and generate a binary that can then be tested in a 2600 emulator. Past
> "level creation" contests on AtariAge have been very successful, and
> such a design contest for Crazy Balloon would be the first for a new
> 2600 homebrew game (the others have been for hacks of existing Atari
> games).
i'd be willing to do something like this...
it sounds like it could be a bit like the editor I started for
Eric Ball's Leprechaun... (sadly that program has been on hiatus for a while)
http://alienbill.com/2600/lep/edit.html
The trick is making sure the constraints on the level are accurately
reproduced in javascript because it sounds like you've got things
largely data driven. I think javascript is a decent choice, though
unfortunately it requires clicks for each block rather than acting
more like a paint program. (Hmm, also, for stuff like positioning the
player it might be tough if those elements can't be placed "tile wise"
Al, I'm not sure if I ever got dasm working on my unix webhost, which
is why my program just dumps the source code. Does atariage have a
host that can run perl cgi (what I'm most comfortable in on the
serverside) as well as dasm? (or do things need to be PHP to interface
with the back end somehow?)
Ideally, Manuel could make a one-level framework, just easy to insert
a single a level into. Even more ideally, we'd make some sort of
VCS-displayable and human-copyable non-trivial checksum for the level
that would only show up when they beat the level, proving that it is
indeed solvable...
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