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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 6405
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 07/04/2008
Subject: Re: The JSW clock / Andrew's backlog / Flash MM
equin0x80 wrote:
>The bug is that it changes "am" to "pm" at the same time that it
> I always wondered what happens if you let the clock run down in JSW -
> - whether you get the usual foot and barrel or something else.
>
> Today I tried it, and the game reset to the title screen (without any
> explanation or "game over") at 1 p.m. I was a bit surprised, because
> you're supposed to have until midnight, so it seems that you actually
> get less than half the advertised time.
>
> So, er, what's that all about? :) Is it a known bug?
changes "12" to " 1", thus the hours are 7am...11am, 12am, 1pm...11pm,
12pm, with the game ending at 1am - one hour later than advertised.
So if you set the clock to 12:59pm manually in order to test it, I can
see how you'd think the game ended at 1pm.
There are no such bugs with my 24-hour clock patch (introduced in
Goodnite Luddite). There, the game ends at the end of the minute called
23:59, and shows the Game Over screen before going back to the title-
screen.
Here's the latest news on my MM/JSW activities while I'm here:
* I reduced my backlog of unread MM/JSW emails to 309 on Sunday. I only
managed about an hour due to some ad-hoc tennis-distractions, but the
rate at which I was getting through the emails when I did get round to
it was encouraging, so I should be able to do a bit in the evenings too.
* I have decided that I won't upload my List of MM/JSW Games until I'm
at least up to 29th February 2008 in the backlog. This will save me the
effort of updating The Man Who Sold The World in Future Games.
* I recently reached Cavern 29 of Flash Manic Miner
<http://www.darnkitty.com/manic/> for the first time in my life. I've
knocked up a quick-and-dirty alpha-prototype of JSW64:FMM v0.29, but I
don't want to beta-release it until I've solved the problem of
guardians passing through inkful Fire-cells, as discussed in Message
6372.
Another problem is that Cavern 29 contains a vertical guardian that not
only straddles three cell-columns, but has a top boundary one cell-row
above the top of the screen! Possible solutions are:
(a) Give it a top boundary of 0 - give the player a tighter gap than in
FMM.
(b) Move everything in the room down one cell-row, and put invisible
Water-cells in row 0 so that the player can stand on the bottom - an
inelegant solution.
(c) Implement a patch to handle a negative top boundary, suppressing
the drawing of pixels and colour-attributes that are off the top of the
screen - the ideal solution, but could prove very difficult to
implement.
* When I reached Cavern 29 for the first time, I played on to Cavern 31
in the same go! I didn't have time to write two more JSW64-rooms, but
Cavern 29 proved easier than it looked, and when I found myself
standing under a flashing portal, the temptation was too hard to resist.
* Another challenge in Flash MM is to set the highest possible score
for each cavern by taking all the items and then committing suicide.
For the early caverns, each of which have 5 items worth 100 points, you
simply get to the cavern without losing a life, then commit suicide
three times, having increased your score by 1500.
But for Cavern 8, which has only 4 items, you have to sacrifice two
lives in Cavern 7, and for Caverns 9 onwards, you have to sacrifice one
life in Cavern 8 after toppling the Kong Beast (which you can only
score once for 2500 points), and then take the optimum route through
Cavern 8 without toppling the Kong Beast.
So far, I have 'inoculated' Caverns 1 to 9 with perfect scores.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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