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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 4383
Author: john_elliott_uk
Date: 16/08/2004
Subject: JSWED 2.1.6 uploaded
JSWED is now at 2.1.6. You can get it from the usual place, that is:
http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Jsw/jswed.html
There are two main changes this time, and both are to do with JSW64.
To be precise, a lot of the JSW64:MM functionality has been moved into
the main game engine and made available to JSWED.
Here are the details:
* All that empty space in Bank 7 now contains two 256x64 images. Each
can be used to replace the top half or the bottom half of a screen
(compare the Final Barrier in Manic Miner). You can also use the top
or bottom half of the title screen for this.
* There are some more guardian types, some of which do some pretty
powerful things.
Type 8: Skylabs. You can have 'up' Skylabs, or 'down' Skylabs.
Type 24: Angry Eugene.
Type 40: Angry Eugene, colour-cycling like other JSW64 guardians.
Type 56: Angry Eugene, colour-cycling like the Manic Miner Eugene.
Type 136: Trigger.
Type 152: Switch.
Type 168: Opening wall.
Type 184: Stopper (don't move, don't draw).
Type 200: Stopper (draw, don't move).
OK, so what do these weird extra types actually do?
Triggers are the important one. You put a trigger before another
guardian. It will watch a byte; when that byte goes to zero, the
trigger is activated. It pokes five bytes into the following guardian
(byte 0 and bytes 4-7), and then disables itself.
So, for example, triggers can be used to turn a normal vertical
guardian into an Angry Eugene; or to change the right-hand boundary of
a guardian; or whatever.
(at this point, Sendy is probably cursing me because he needs to
redesign all the rooms in his WIP to take advantage of this).
Switches are, basically, something that triggers can watch. You can
have one-shot switches (like in MM), toggle switches, or just
decorative switches that sit there not doing anything.
Opening walls, like triggers, watch a byte and activate when it
becomes zero. They then remove a segment of the room - 8 pixels wide,
and arbitrarily high. It's also possible for a trigger to watch a
wall, so that the effect seen in the Kong rooms can be replicated
(wall opens; then guardian goes through it).
Stoppers act as a temporary 'end' to the guardian list. Guardians
after a stopper either don't move, or don't appear at all. So you put
a trigger before a stopper. When the trigger is activated, the stopper
is removed, and all the guardians after it suddenly appear / spring
into life.
Things that still *can't* be done without patch vectors are:
* Kong falling from his perch into the portal.
* The Swordfish effect at the Final Barrier.
I have not yet updated JSW64:MM to use these facilities rather than
patch vectors. But I will, Oscar, I will.
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