WOW! What an amazing response!!!!! I started out reporting Atic-Atac as a first milestone - because the game engine although top down lends itself to map design and fast sprite requirements. I have made serious progress on this and have created versions for PC, Amiga and SAM which do all you want and add some things like: Puzzles Mentors ( give you upgrades ) You can kill Dracula, Frankenstien and the Devil with weopens that degrade over time but you have to find the weopens There is a library to give you clues AKA Myst and Monkey Island II Proper 4 bit, 8 bit and 24 bit graphics depending on platform ( re-usable game engine - I never thought Id ever do one of those ). Extra castles, exterior views ( forest, houses ).
Ive got a friend working on replacing my terrible attempts at graphics with some hand drawn images which I will scan in. The game music is a pig, I started out using some music I had arranged for a demo some time ago on the Amiga but naff techno doesnt really go with the game style. Also I felt a little sick when this increased the size of the gaming platform by 100x in size. To give you an example the source for this work is 14k in size and when assembled increases to 40k in Z80 - Sam and 143k on the Amiga and rather amusingly 780k on the PC ( no Idea - perhaps I have missed an optimising flag ). It has a built in level editor and the whole display is constructed from data rather than being totally predrawn. The graphics can be edited on any platform and changed. Im quite pleased with it, I am going to tidy it up and put it on a website ( I have a few that I never use ! ). I am still working through all the reams of wonderful advice you have all given me and I hope to give something back to the community real soon. I will use the game engine to finish the RPG based on Angband and Moria ( but less overblown ) and I am considering porting Icewind Dale - because I think I can - in a limited fashion. So If I can solve the sound compression problem ( I see there are some nice routines out there ) and get the good graphics together we have a kick-arse game to play for a bit. I take the point about Head-Over-Heels, fantastic game. Isometric sprite projection follows on logically as a module on the game engine I have developed so far. I think I might implement the rules and a level editor and leave it to some of you folks to go put the thing together. If I recall it was a Crammond game, perhaps we can persaude him to work with us on H-O-H 2, after all it will be an engine developed from scratch! If hes not interested, what the hell. Ive got to admit Im feeling really enthusiastic about this, I will see if I can rescue some of the early ports I did and make the available. Thanks for your fantastic response, its good to be back! Dave. PS: I have some good code from an early Amiga project that renders compressed textures on reduced polygon shapes, if I get time Ill make it available the algorithms should be reusable and as it ran on the Amiga 500 reasonably well I see no problem with the SAM, if I remember correctly the SAM outperformed the Amiga on integer calculations ever so slightly. You can correct me if I am remembering incorrectly. PPS: A tcp/ip stack. I need one to complete the gaming engine, there is a Z80 that I have been pointed to. Ill check it out and see if I can make it available. I think we are talking lightweight library function here but it would be nice. PPPS: I ported Mozilla M9 to the PSION Series 5Mx ( C++ ) and got it running in 1Mb memory ( OK I admit that is before you try and load a page ). Whose up for a browser project? :@) PPPPS: Damn I feel productive!
