I thought the War was lost and Midnight doomed.

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Rorthron

I’ve been working my way through the outstanding bug list. One of the areas that seems to cause contention, is battles.

It causes me some problems because the original is actually pretty haphazard where battles are concerned. So I’m going to talk about the battles in a little more depth, just so that you can get an understanding as to why certain things seem to be happening.

Firstly, night processing goes like this…

1. Reset all characters at dawn
2. Give all AI characters their turn
3. Process Battles
4. Place things on map
5. Move Mists
6. Remove things from map at location’s where characters are
7. Check if characters can recruit soldiers from strongholds
8. Re-spawn armies at strongholds
9. Check for important deaths

Secondly, the interesting point here is, characters are given a chance to move BEFORE battles take place. So, if you attack a character, there is a good chance he will move and thus a battle will not take place.

To understand that a little more, let’s look at the AI turn.

The AI character must decide what to do every night. Each character will react to a number of objectives.

1. Goto Liege
2. Goto Foe
3. Goto Object
4. Goto Home
5. Do nothing

If they have a liege, and that liege’s objectives are 1 or 2, then this characters objective also become 1 or 2.

Otherwise, we pick a new objective

When picking a new objective we pick a random number between 1 and 16. If we choose 1 to 5, then these are our objective. Otherwise we continue with our current objective.

So as you can see, there is a 68% chance that we will just continue on with what were we previously doing. Which means that unless you are at a characters stronghold, and his current objective is to go home, then the likelihood, he is moving away from you.

There is only a 6% chance that the character will stay at his current location.

Personally, I am very surprised at these stats, because it makes battles bloody difficult. Unlike The Lords of Midnight where a nearby army would drop everything to attack, or an attacked army would stay until the death, in Doomdark’s Revenge, everything apart from battle seems to be of more interest.

Baby Steps

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Rorthron

I have been looking into a couple of issues still plaguing Doomdark’s Revenge game play.

The first one is movement. I have to admit, I dropped the ball on this one. I wrote this code so long ago, that I assumed it was working. Well it isn’t. And there are three issues at play.

The first issue is actually a bug fix.

There are two versions of movement tables, one that the Spectrum used, and one that the c64 used. What these tables do, is decide which terrain the character gets for free. The problem is, the spectrum version had a bug. It didn’t point to the required table, it pointed to random memory. Therefore movement on the Spectrum doesn’t work as intended. I had fixed this bug. Which means, movement on the new version isn’t the same as either the Spectrum version of the C64.

Secondly, The Lords of Midnight movement code is based on leaving the current location. Doomdark’s Revenge is actually based on the location you are moving into. I had this wrong.

And thirdly, if you move into a location with a critter, you take a penalty. However because of the difference in the way I implemented the critters on the map, ie: 0 = NONE, whereas 0xff is NONE in the original. My critter check was always triggering. Thus you always got a penalty.

The three items combined, make for pretty shoddy movement, when compared directly to the original.

The Forest Keeper

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Rorthron

When Mike and I were talking about The Lords of Midnight remake, one of the things we were going to do, was start the game earlier.

The Novella starts with Luxor and Morkin at the Forest Keeper’s hut. They are on their way to The Tower of the Moon in order to be part of the Council of the Wise.

The Novella is effectively all exposition. It’s about giving you the player, the information you need to know, in order to continue on and immerse yourself with the game.

This came to mind the other day because I was asked about remaking The Lords of Midnight, again. It is something I would love to do. I’m just not fully sure anymore what it would mean. However, there was one thing that I remembered that we did want to do, and that was change the Novella into a Animated Graphic Novel, and split it up with the initial game play which would then start from the Forest Keeper’s hut.

The game would place in you a restricted map, inside of the Forest of the Moon, and you need to find your way to the Tower. This would allow for the Narrative to be blended with the tutorial, and thus, by the time the game starts proper, at the start of the Solstice, you would have all the information you needed without having to read any manuals.

Once you start to increase the production values, then maybe there is something that could be for a larger audience.

I’ve already had some conversations about the audio. About how to score the game.

And visually, we have an idea of how it would look. Most of you already have an idea from Jure’s art that was non-original style for The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge. But I place a gallery at the end of this post. But if you then take into account this image the Jure sent me the other day when were were discussing how we would make the game look…

The real issues comes down to the interface and the gameplay. What would we need to change in the actual game. The main thing is to stay in the narrative. Every decision we make must be based on the story, and staying in story. We would probably need to make a few slight changes to the original just to give it some breathing space.
And all that text… it’s problematic but it’s also the charm of the original, you wouldn’t want to get rid of it, but should some of it be lost? I really don’t know the answer to that yet. What if it was all spoken?

Now, if I could just find some money to allow me and Jure to work on it full time… or almost full time…