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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5695
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 10/03/2006
Subject: JSWED 2.3.1: Andrew's comments (Chapters 11 to 13)
This follows on from Message 5694.
This message revisits Chapters 11 to 13 for JSWED v2.3.1 (but using
a printout of the jswed.pdf from v2.3.0). It does not repeat the
suggestions I already made in Message 5010.
When exporting and importing games as XML, it would be nice to be
able to transfer not only the room-data (and all the data in their
transitive closure, i.e. items, guardian-classes and sprites), but
other data such as the title-screen graphics, the scrolly, the
bottom-third colour-attributes, the tunes, Willy's sprites and start-
position, &c.
If I was writing a JSW64:X game, and decided late in the development-
process that I needed more than 64 rooms and wanted to convert to
JSW64:V, I'd have to use SPECSAISIE Compare to tell me the
differences in these other data from the original JSW64:X to my own
JSW64:X game, and poke/patch these differences into the JSW64:V
version of my game (assuming that the addresses would be the same,
which between MM and JSW, of course, they wouldn't).
#####################
Part III: JSW64 games
#####################
11 JSW64 Overview
=================
The v2.2.9 manual has a new Section 11.1 "Game" which explains the
Diagonal guards bug, but this section does not appear in the v2.3.0
manual.
I'm so glad I printed the v2.2.9 manual the day before v2.3.0 was
released! :-)
=============
12 Memory Map
=============
Why have a separate chapter just to say "JSW64 does not have
guardian tables. Otherwise this screen is identical to the JSW128
one" when the JSW128 memory-map is documented in Section 6.3 as
opposed to a separate chapter?
========
13 Rooms
========
> As with the Manic Miner editor, the guardians have been moved to a"page" -> "screen"
> page of their own.
----------
13.1 Cells
----------
> In Manic Miner, JSW48 and JSW128, the meaning of cells is fixed -"cell" -> "cell-class", otherwise this sentence means that every
> the first cell is air, the second is water, and so on.
room must have an Air-cell at the top-left, a Water-cell at (0,1),
and so on! ;-)
In the "Room graphics" pop-up, the user should be able to move from
cell-class to cell-class by pressing < and >, as well as by clicking
on the buttons marked < and >.
13.1.1 Extra cell types
-----------------------
The Trap cell-type is missing from the Type panel in v2.3.1
(fortunately it does recognise Traps placed using v2.2.9).
> Traps are based on Andrew Broad's "harmless fire" patch.You give me too much credit! :-o
I did not invent the poke for harmless Fire in JSW; my contribution
was the corresponding pokes for MM: a poke to make both Fire cell-
types harmless, and a poke to make Fire 2 harmless (allowing future
MM authors to mix harmful and harmless Fire-cells in the same room).
See Message 5326.
--------------------
13.2 Room properties
--------------------
> AirTo avoid possible confusion with Air-cells, this should be renamed
to "Air-supply" (or "Oxygen", which actually fits in the space
available and avoids the word "Air" altogether).
-----------------------
13.4 Conveyor animation
-----------------------
> Unlike when you are editing a Manic Miner game, drawing conveyorPlacing Conveyor-cells in MM doesn't update the animation either -
> cells does not update the animation (or vice versa).
but setting the animation in MM /does/ place Conveyor-cells - which
it shouldn't, and the JSW64 editor doesn't.
A small cosmetic bug: When you set the conveyor-animation, there's a
peculiar cyan glow in the "Go to" and "Other options" panels.
Off- and sticky conveyors
-------------------------
When you select Off or Sticky from the Conveyor menu, *all* Conveyor
cell-classes in the room become off or sticky. Is this a shortcoming
of JSWED or of the JSW64 room-format?
(Answer: In JSW64, whether a particular Conveyor-cell takes you left
or right is separate from whether the room's conveyor-animation goes
left or right - the former is determined by whether the cell's cell-
type is Conveyor << or Conveyor >>, and the latter by Room-offset
#D6: Bits 1:0 are %00 for animate left, %01 for animate right, %10
for off (and animate left) or %11 for sticky (and animate right).)
I wish JSW64 had Conveyor <> (sticky conveyor) as an extra cell-
type, so that you could mix <<, >> and <> conveyors in the same room
(a cell-type for off-conveyors is not needed since they behave the
same as Water).
Once you have made the conveyors Off or Sticky, JSWED doesn't give
you an obvious way to turn them back into regular left or right
conveyors! (In fact this can be accomplished by setting the conveyor-
animation, which reverts the Conveyor-cells to their original < or >
behaviours.)
Instead of Off and Sticky being menu-options, the user needs to see
a single value (perhaps in "Room properties" -> "General") which can
be "animate left", "animate right", "off" or "sticky" - or in
MM/JSW48/JSW128, "left", "right", "off" or "sticky".
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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