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Message: 4211

Author: Alexandra

Date: 12/05/2004

Subject: Re: Andrew's beta-review of Role Reversal

 

In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, andrewbroad wrote:

Alexandra wrote:

John fixed that with a patch called 'Adjacent ropes' (or something similar). So you can have all 8 guardians as ropes, if you

like :).

But not stationary ropes, which exploit the `feature' patched by
Adjacent Ropes. Unless you use the 4th May revision of JSW64 that
supports stationary ropes (cf. Messages 4173, 4179).

Not so sure... I make ropes stationary by setting the swing byte to
0, whereas it can be done by 'jamming' it with another rope (which is
usually 1 pixel long). Have to look into it as it's a bit of a grey
area for me.

However, I noticed in Strangel (and also ZX HEROES) that certain
ropes can sometimes 'teleport' you, usually when you just enter
the room. Maybe this is one of the things fixed in the new patch?

A rope will `teleport' you if it collides with a pixel near the top
of the screen, since Willy always gets picked up at the rope's point of collision.

These teleports appear to be happening unprompted by any collision.

But I think you can also get `teleported' if a rope is placed in
certain columns - something of which I don't currently have a
precise understanding. I've noticed when trying to place non-
swinging ropes in a room, that this bug can occur for some columns
but not others, with no obvious explanation in terms of pixel-
collision.

That is probably the root of the problem.

Erix1-mode has quite a few unexplored quirky features, such as
being able to jump off of the top right hand corner of a 'special'
fire-block asif it were a wall :).

I thought I noticed that (possibly in "The Busy Road"), but then I
couldn't figure out what had happened or how to make it happen

again!

Yeah, you probably did. Jump to land on the top right corner of
a 'special' nasty, whilst holding jump. I've only seen it happen when
jumping from left to right.

What is a "'special' fire-block"?

One which appears as Water in the editor but has been hackulated to
act like Fire. It's a little hard to explain but you can't use them
willy-nilly, you have to plan and do some creative workarounding.

Hackulator? Is that some sort of Erix1-mode editor, or are you
just referring to the Erix1-mode game-engine?

It's a quick poke type utility for setting up the extra features
of each room. Very quick interface, does the job OK though :)

Who wrote the Hackulator? Is it publically available?

Erix1 did. And no, but you could always ask him for a copy. He said
he's making a more user-friendly version for public consumption but
that was a long time ago.

I think Erix1 Mode and SPECSAISIE RoomJSW were talking at crossed
purposes there - the way Erix1 Mode makes certain block-types behave like other block-types is more confusing than the character-shifts
in a David Lynch film!

I could detail all the possibilities if you like. You could even make
RoomJSW display Erix1 rooms correctly, but at this stage there isn't
much need for it I guess.

What I was proposing would look something like this, from RoomJSW's
perspective:

||||||..-----------------|--||||
||||*|..........................
||**.|-.........................
|*...|..........................
|....|..........................
|....|...........|.......|--**--
|-...|-----.....----..*-.*......
................................
..............................*|
|--**|||**-.....-**-...-****..-|
|**--|..........................
|--**|..........................
|**--|||----------------------||
|--**|..........................
|....|..........................
|..|||..----------------------||
The Fridge JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK

|..|||*****||------|||||--|*****
|..|||**$|||-......-|---..|||***
|..|||*||---.......-|-......||**
|....|||-...........-.......-|||
|............................---
|||.............................
**|------...........----.....-||
**|............................|
|||........................----|
|--..||||||..---..---|||.....|||
|....|--..............-.......|*
||||||.....................---|*
|----||||||..--...--||||......|*
|.........................----|*
|||..........................-|*
**|||||||||||--|||-||||||||---|*
Deep Freeze GBBBG GG G BG

(The two background-blocks at the top of "The Fridge" are to stop
the behavioural static nasties in the top row from killing you when
you try to go down; the extra wall-blocks at the top of "Deep
Freeze" are to deny direct access to the bottom-left of "The
Fridge".)

I see. I'll bear it in mind... I think that appearing inside the wall
when you go down to get the item, might look a bit surreal for the
context of the rest of the game. I could maybe see how it looks
hollowed out.

No, we have yet to play _manic person_ here. I'm looking forward to
that one, as there are way too few new MM games being released.

I feel less of a need to hack MM now that we have crumbling floors
and more aestheticly-empowering room formats in JSW. And now we have
a version of JSW with solar beams, AIR, portals etc... It's looking
even less likely! I will post my 10 completed rooms in a bit.

Along as credit's given where credit's due! :-)

I like to think I'm very fair :). I pretty much bill JSW: RR as a
joint project anyway...

By that logic *all* MM/JSW games could be considered joint projects
with Matthew Smith, and all Java programs could be considered joint
projects with Sun Microsystems! ;-)

Yeap, well I think I always put Matt in the credits, though because
he's in everybody's credits (or probably should be), it's less novel.
And I always like to think that he would enjoy and approve of what
I'm/We're doing to his ancient code :)

If I had a copy of MvSB Revision D to hand, SPECSAISIE Compare
could compare D with E and tell us the pokes needed to fix the
bug. Unfortunately my only copies of Revisions A-D are on a
Mac-disk with no Mac to read it. :-(

soa1000 kindly sent me a copy of Revision D, for SPECSAISIE to
compare Revision E with.

And so, the following pokes upgrade Revision D to Revision E:
POKE 34251,0
POKE 34273,0
POKE 34274,1
POKE 37426,182

Strangely enough, Role Reversal already has the above values for
34251, 34273 and 34274! However, 37426 in Role Reversal is currently 183 (as Revision D), so I guess you need to apply POKE 37426,182 and then do a complete playtest to see if the bug recurs.

Thanks for investigating.

 

 

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