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Alternate Reality X – Bug Fixes

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It’s been a couple of months since I did any work on Alternate Reality X – a combination of work, home life and other interests but after that break I’m keen to progress to the next release. I spent a few hours over the last couple of days fixing some bugs which were reported on the forums. The following problems are now sorted out:

  • Worked out why every encounter in the Citywas automatically followed by a second encounter
  • The game no longer crashes when you try to leave the City and enter the Wilderness
  • Fixed the currency handling and change given when paying for goods with varying gold, silver and copper – no more credit at the Damon & Pythias!

Planning to start adding some functionality to the City taverns and shops.

Alternate Reality X – Adding Dungeon levels 3 & 4

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After the 0.3 release I thought I would add the two remaining Dungeon levels to the game. That would mean I’ve then covered all the maps in the original Alternate Reality City and Dungeon scenarios. I converted the original game files to my text format and have now connected up map level 3 to the game.

I hand to go back the Atari 8bit Dungeon in order to familiarise myself with how the maps fit together. I also tidied up some terrible old code where I was inconsistent with how I handled map references. This initially broke teleports, shops and map zones amongst other things but it’s finally fixed and will save me lots of time when I add more content. This has been annoying me for ages so it’s about time i sorted it.

Hopefully I’ll add level 4 and the various wall textures for these two levels in the next few days.

Alternate Realilty X – Demo 0.3 released!

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Finally demo 0.3 of Alternate Reality X is available for download from

https://www.crpgdev.com/

You can try the latest version of ARX from the downloads page. In addition there are plenty of new screenshots on the home page and on the screenshots page. Hopefully people will find it of interest and think the progress is decent. I managed to add in buying items from the Damon & Pythias shop (below) after all so that was a positive.

Buying weapons and armour from the D & P

This release has been a long time coming but it’s significant because tempted as I was to move onto easier, more interesting sections of the project I’ve recently put a lot of time into fixing the problems that already existed such as the incomplete City gate sequence, lack of mixed case character names and more importantly the purchasing of weapons and armour and creation of inventory objects. The result is a release that doesn’t have a lot more to offer play wise but in terms of my progress and learning has put me in a strong position to make release 0.4 a good one – that’s my plan anyway.

Weapons & Armour purchases in place

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You can now buy all your weapons and armour from the Smithies in the City. It took me a while to iron out a bizarre bug when equipping armour bought from the Smithy but everything now seems to be working smoothly. It was also a useful refresher on the way I’ve set up the objects in game and weapons and armour.

Weapons and Armour in use

I’ll try and implement the Damon &Pythias equipment purchases whilst this is still fresh in my mind. Then I can add some more interesting object types and treasure in the Dungeon.

New Year , New Challanges

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As we come to the start of another year I’ve been thinking about the last 12 months and what I want to achieve during 2011. Lots of things are uncertain at work just now so I’ll need to see how they develop over the next few months and I’ve other things I want to work on such as my guitar playing but I’ll not go into the details of that here.

In terms of my CRPG projects I had hoped to make more progress with Alternate Reality X but I have made a lot of progress behind the scenes in terms of things I’ve learnt and how to write better code and I expect to build on this further during 2011 though I’ve still got a long way to go. I also finished Ultima IV – The Quest of the Avatar for the C64 (under emulation). It only took me 20 years!

Obviously I haven’t been playing it continuously during that time 🙂 Anyway I wanted to set out some clear but achievable goals for my crpg.dev projects so here they are:

GOAL 1
Complete Alternate Reality X (ARX) to include all City and Dungeon content by the end of 2011. I’ll also be aiming to have a lot more regular builds for download. Demo 3 should be available later today and I would hope to have demo 4 out by say end of February 2011. I’m keen to get some alternative graphics but so far no one has actually delivered a single image. I’ll widen my net here to hopefully get someone on board.

GOAL 2
Create a fully playable demo of my own original, classic style CRPG by the end of 2011. Possibly under a donation type scheme. I’ve been surprised how many people have offered to donate to the ARX project to try and speed up my progress. Thanks to everyone who offered. I can’t accept any monetary donations for ARX as it’s not my game/copyright.

GOAL 3
Play more CRPGs including the old classics and newer games. I have Fallout 3, Baldurs Gate, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, various Ultima’s and Might and Magic’s to complete amongst many others. I will probably post a bit about my game playing on this blog so let me know what you think.

Happy New Year!

Alternate Reality X – Teleport trouble!

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For some time now there has been a bug in the teleport code which I needed to fix. Basically when you tried to use a teleport square which moved you from one Dungeon level to another you ended up being moved into a void outside the current map. This should have been easy to fix but instead took me hours. Every time I thought I had found the problem I came across another missing piece of game logic. Anyway I think I finally fixed it but it might raise it’s head again when dungeon level 3 is introduced.

On a more positive note I managed to resolve the issues with text input for the player name in a few minutes so now you can name your AR alter ego using both upper and lowercase letters. I needed to use SFMLs TextEntered event type.

I also successfully added some extra options to the auto map to display specials such as encounters, treasure and effect areas. This will be really useful for testing and adding to the game. For anyone who is wondering the mini and full screen map options in the next demo WILL NOT have this feature enabled.

I’ve also added a little FPS toggle button so you can see how well the game is performing on your PC. Without the mini map enabled I get about 60 frames per second. With the mini map on about 30 frames – I’ll modify the mini map for demo 4 so it doesn’t take up so much processing time.

Automap – Further progress

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Further work on the automap is going well. I’ve tweaked the images slightly so doors look more like the ones on old Dungeons & Dragons maps. Personally I think they look much better. I’ve also fixed a problem about the map display wrapping when viewing the edge of the map and added some additional checks for wall types in the Dungeon such as barred doors.

I’ve also added a large map display. Initially this could display a maximum map size of 64 x 64 like the City map or first level of the Dungeon but it was quite hard to read so I’ve changed this display to show the 32 x 32 segment that you are currently located in for larger maps. I also added a key for locations in the City.

Need to fix a wrap around display bug for smaller maps and also make the map display only those areas explored so far. Let me know what you think.