Tag Archives: testing

Each dawn a new hope, a new beginning

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I now have a test version of The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge for Windows and OSX. The idea is that these can be tested in order to iron out some of the obvious issues while I now concentrate on getting the iOS version built properly. This is now the most pressing task as I would really like to get the App Store version working on the iPhone X range.

There will be some missing features, mainly small gesture shortcuts etc, but I can add these features back in as they don’t detract from playing the game. For example there is currently no Zoom on the Detailed Map page, and Post/Guard on the think page is missing.

Should you wish to test the games here are the download links. But downloader beware these are not finished products. There is no installer and for OSX you will have to override any popups about being untrusted.

The Lords of Midnight – OSX

Doomdark’s Revenge – OSX

The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge – Windows

If you have any issues then please contact me through this form. I will look at a better testing and reporting process later. You can also check the GitHub issues page for known issues.

Doomdark’s Revenge
The Lords of Midnight

Baby Steps

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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.

Is it any less hopeful than defending the Plains of Blood?

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lom_map
Last night I submitted a new version to the Apple App Store. The review process usually takes a week. So hopefully release 1.06 will be ready for Monday 18th.
Unfortunately during my device testing, I found a problem with one of the new features, and made an 11th hour decision to drop it from this release. The feature in question was the Map Pinch and Zoom. The problem was that not all the graphic elements were scaling correctly and during the zoom the focus point of the map was changing. The end result was that it was a little messy and I wasn’t happy letting it out. An evening of work will see the problem fixed, but to do that would mean delaying this release, and I’m painfully aware that the slow down problem needs resolving. So I decided to pull the feature. I know it would be have easy to just delay the release, but I need a working version ready and available on the 18th…

Thankfully, the Android version doesn’t need to be submitted until the end of the week, so I will make the changes and hopefully have the Android version ship with the feature. As long as testing this week proves everything to be working correctly, I will submit another Apple version with just this new feature as soon as possible.

I will upload the current version to the test servers tonight, as I would like it to take a good test pounding this week.

After this month release schedules will be slowed down, and I will go back to utilising the test process more fully!