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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 4857
Author: Daniel
Date: 06/08/2005
Subject: The Universal Miner Willy Gaming Centre
Thanks a lot, Andrew, for your extensive reply :-) . It must have
taken a good portion of the two hours you were able to devote to JSW
this week :-) . No, seriously, I appreciate it and I am glad that you
will be able to spend more time on the subject once the tennis
distractions are over :-) .
Responding to some questions / observations about my plans for
"The Universal Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner Gaming Centre":
a) On second thoughts, I have decided I will use the British spelling
(for other problematic words like "colour" as well). Even
though I have had more experience with American English over the
years, it would be inappropriate to favour (there you go!) the
American spelling in an area where virtually no Americans are
involved.
b) Perhaps I will call the website "The Universal Miner Willy Gaming
Centre", to shorten the name. Or perhaps I will make it "The
Universal ZX Spectrum Miner Willy Gaming Centre", to mention the
Spectrum and make it clear I am not dealing with other computer
platforms. How does it sound to you native English speakers?
c) Thanks a lot, Andrew, for your permission to use your list (lists)
of MM / JSW games, to quote from the things you have written (in the
right context, of course) and to put your games on my future
website :-) .
d) About the picture gallery: yes, I meant screenshots instead of
snapshots; sorry for the mistake.
Andrew wrote:
> But the real issue is that it would take an enormous number of man-Yes, exactly, it is a mammoth task, but I am willing to undertake it.
> hours to take a screenshot of every single room in every single
> game, and even more time to make maps with these screenshots.
In fact, I have been taking screenshots of every room in every game I
have played so far, so I am quite advanced in this endeavour. It is
extremely time-consuming, because often I have to take up to 20 or 30
shots of a given screen, since I want to get a nice and possibly most
accurate picture (the guardians being in positions which altogether
give a nice impression of the room, their animated sprites in the
forms which I like, arrows showing in the picture, the items to
collect having the right colour so that they don't blend with the
background, etc.) of every room.
Andrew wrote:
> SCR2GIF generates a GIF file of around 5K (it varies betweenI have had no experience with SCR2GIF so far. Up till now I have been
> less than 3K and more than 6K, particularly if an animated GIF is
> used to capture FLASHing colour-attributes). So to have a
> screenshot of all 64 rooms of 60 games, we're talking in the order
> of 20MB.
taking screenshots which I saved in the .tif format. These
are "mother pictures", from which I will prepare the other
ones (for the picture gallery and for the maps). Resulting from the
screen resolution I am using (800x600) and the fact that I am using
Vaggelis Kappartzianis's "ZX 32 Spectrum Emulator" to play
the games, every screenshot I obtain is 1,37 Mb in size when it is
saved as a .tif file. That is no problem, of course, with a 160 Gb
HDD.
For the picture gallery of "Willy's New Mansion" and
"JSW: The 2005 Megamix" I have cut out the parts of the .tif
screens which do not belong to the game (the frames), and then I
saved the pictures as .jpg files, with the maximum quality available.
The resulting files differ in size depending on the contents of the
picture, but I would say they have just over 200 Kb each on average
(64 pictures of "Willy's New Mansion" have 14,5 Mb
altogether, i.e. 226 Kb on average, 131 pictures of "JSW: The
2005 Megamix" have 26,1 Mb, which makes it 199 Kb on average per
picture).
If I wanted to keep this size and quality of the screenshots for
"The Universal Miner Willy Gaming Centre" picture gallery, I
would probably have to use, for this section of the website only,
about 1 Gb of web space (a very rough calculation: 2400 pictures of
48k games + 2000 pictures of 128k games + 260 pictures of MM games,
all this multiplied by 200 = 932 000 kB= 932 Mb, I know this is not
exact and the number of the rooms may be questionable, but I am
talking about a very general approximation). I have no idea yet how
much it costs these days to support this kind of webspace. I must
also admit that I haven't considered the bandwidth problem in my
calculations. Are there providers who offer a limited webspace and
unlimited bandwidth?
I guess a possible solution would be to decrease the quality of .jpg
files when I save them after cutting the frames of the .tif files. I
would hate to do this, since (sadly) I am a perfectionist and I find
it very difficult to give up on quality (or at least what I perceive
as quality) in any circumstances :-) .
Since I don't imagine starting my screenshooting effort all over
again, I will most probably continue the way I have been doing it,
and then see if it is possible to batch convert the .tif files into
another format which would reconcile the requirements of quality and
size. If anyone has any ideas in this respect, please let me know.
e) As far as maps are concerned, the .jpg map of "Willy's New
Mansion" which I was finally satisfied with (size versus quality)
and released (it's in the "WNM" .zip file in my folder in
the Files section), has 413 Kb (and it shrinks to 335 Kb when zipped).
"JSW: The 2005 Megamix"'s map (as yet unreleased) will be
twice that size, probably, but even if I were to make such maps for
all of the existing JSW games, their total size wouldn't exceed
100 Mb, I think, which seems acceptable to me (especially looking at
it as a percentage of what I will need for the picture gallery).
By the way, Sendy, thanks for the tip about Madmekon's map
of "Where's Woody" :-) . In fact, I`ve had the idea
to offer for download maps prepared by other people (with their
permission and due credits, of course) in addition to my own maps,
which I would like to elaborate anyway, because they will keep a
uniform format.
And yes, I will have to map "Strangel" and the other games
with large spaces :-) . And if it turns out to be a complex and
frustrating task, I will call you names, just as I did with Andrew
while playing his games (well, especially "MM - Neighbours -
Allana Truman", and now "Ma jolie" - see more on this subject in my
other message) :-) .
f) As far as the authors' opinions are concerned, indeed my idea
is to have them in a unified format (or rather: size), i.e. no more
than half a page or so for each game. The descriptions in some of the
text files are of course incomparably more detailed, but what I will
be looking for is a short summary of the idea which led to the
creation of the game, maybe a couple of sentences about the creative
process, maybe an evaluation of the work from the perspective of
time, what the authors particularly like about their games, what they
would like to highlight about them, etc. - whatever they would like
to share with the JSW / MM community in a few paragraphs.
g) As far as the players' opinions are concerned, I must admit
that it may be a delicate issue in case of games which people
perceive as inferior to others (if there are such at all). I will
"meditate" on this. However, perhaps it will not be such a
big problem, because from what I can see, the prevailing discourse of
JSW community is, fortunately, perhaps not one of political
correctness, but at least of politeness. Since the contributions to
the website will be voluntary, I don't imagine anyone taking the
effort to write a review only to let other people know how terrible
this or that game is in his / her opinion. So while I do not intend
to apply any kind of censorship (such as publishing only positive
opinions), I imagine that the general tone of the reviews would be
positive and / or one of constructive criticism.
The problem will probably be more palpable in the number of opinions -
if there is a game which nobody cares to review, you can probably
infer that it's not interesting enough. Well, this is a problem, but
it's not really offensive to the authors, is it?, just disappointing,
I would think.
h) Andrew wrote:
> I would also like to replace the zip files of other people's gamesWhy thank you, this would be a most marvellous advertisement for my
> on my site with hotlinks to the copies of those files on your site,
> since my free Geocities site is currently using 11.5MB of my 15MB
> quota, so at some point in the not-too-distant future I'll have to
> delete some files from my website.
website! I will be flattered if you do that :-) .
Speaking about the future website, it may be appropriate to remind
everyone that my current (poorly-designed and very elemental) website
is kindly maintained by Xabier Vazquez at http://xa.bi/jsw . Thanks a
lot, Xabi! :-) , and I think that even when (and if) I go online
with "The Universal Miner Willy Gaming Centre", I will still want to
maintain a separate website just for my own games, which will
obviously not be singled out in any special way on the "main" website.
i) As far as the chronology of MM / JSW development is concerned:
yes, in this case I /would/ go into the designing process, after all.
What I meant when I mentioned dealing with just finished products was
that I do not intend my website to be a place to present or discuss
the subject of designing the games, present partly-finished products,
someone's work in progress, etc. The Yahoo! Club founded by Andrew,
his website and some other websites are perfectly sufficient for
this, I think (and other Yahoo! clubs, too - I hope Sendy will manage
to reactivate JSW64 Mass Collaboration - maybe Herve would design
some rooms, he seemed to be interested). I basically want to create a
virtual "universe" of Miner Willy's worlds.
However, I would like to include diverse elements in the Chronology.
So, obviously the release dates of the games, in as detailed way as
possible (and not detailed where impossible), including various
release dates (of fixed versions, etc.), but also facts about the
Yahoo! Club, about various websites related to JSW (especially in the
context of the Spectrum), perhaps other publications, etc. To make it
more clear, an example of a fictitious future entry would be:
June 2006
8th
Pedro Escoledo releases "Jet Set Willy versus the Moorish Prince" v.
1.0.
12th
Member number 600 joins the Yahoo! MM / JSW Club.
16th
Andrew Broad publishes another update of his list of MM / JSW games.
18th
- A new interview with Matthew Smith is published in "Your Spectrum
Online" magazine.
- George Freeman from Atlanta, Georgia launches his website devoted
to Manic Miner games. It becomes the eleventh American JSW / MM
website created since 2005.
21st
Steve Junks announces the upcoming release of his new game "Manic
Miner: A Mission to Mars".
24th
Adam Britton releases the long-awaited special editions of "Willy's
Holiday" and "The Deadly Mission".
30th
Pedro Escoledo releases "Jet Set Willy versus the Moorish Prince" v.
1.2.
and so on. This is a very general idea of what I would like to do - I
have no idea, though, if I will be able to find the materials and the
time to do it. But I think it would be very nice if such chronology
was created.
I think this is it for the moment as far as my plans for "The
Universal Miner Willy Gaming Centre" are concerned. I will respond to
the other issues raised by Andrew in the following messages,
dedicated to other subjects.
Daniel
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