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*                                                                             *
*   Game:   Role Playing Game  Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File         *
*   Author: Odiesoft           Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de                *
*   Size:   1 * 194816 Bytes   Date:    25. April 2003                        *
*   File:   Odiesoft Games - Role Playing Game (1991).dsk                     *
*                                                                             *
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Title: Role Playing Game
Year:  1991


In 1992 my sister was playing the various installments of the role playing game
"The Bard's Tale" a lot. Since there wasn't a CPC conversion available at that
time and none was annouced I thought I could take up the job of creating my own
interpretation of this topic.

I didn't really have much experience with role playing games, but I was mainly
concerned about the visual aspect rather than the role playing elements like
score boards, hit points, magic spells and so on. I thought I can get into that
after I've created the display window where all the action would be going on.

For the display of the 3D world I had created a routine that was able to shrink
objects to almost any size from its original size to a mere dot on the screen.

I used this routine and a pre-calculated 3D environment surface that specified
the shrink factor and positions of the objects on the screen, so that these
values wouldn't have to be calculated every frame anew.

At first I started to paint some trees and create a mixed forest with these.
Then I added a stone wall with a big wooden gate that encircled a garden with a
tower inside. I added collision detection, so that you couldn't walk through the
walls. You were only able to pass through the gate to the other side and walk
around in the garden.

Then I added a mound of stones with the entrance to a cave, that was going to
lead to an underground level where the heroes of this game would have to fight
monsters and discover secrets and treasures. I already had started to test
different designs for the walls of the underground caves. When I used these
designs with my shrinking routine it turned out that they were being
perspectively distorted which looked a little weird. I couldn't figure out if I
had painted them incorrectly so that they got distorted or if my shrinking
routine had some conceptual error, so that the walls were being distorted.

I added sand dunes to my game and objects that were supposed to be the waves of
the sea, but somehow these waves didn't really look good enough. They had some
sort of a twodimensional look, like they were paperboard walls or so.

Then I tried to include different weather conditions. I added fog to the
environment by painting white colored dots on the screen. Just a few in the
front and gradually more in the planes that were further away, so that the
objects in the background would be covered more and more by the white dots.
Unfortunately this also didn't look too well. The fog didn't look like fog,
rather like a weird mathematical pattern that was forced over the trees and
other objects in the environment.

Lacking a better idea to create a more believable fog effect I kept this effect
in the program hoping to devise a better routine later. Instead I started
working on the parser for the interaction of the human player with the
characters in the game. I also painted a few characters that were supposed to
appear in the game.

Since real 3D games like Doom, Quake, etc. weren't yet invented at that time I
thought that it would suffice if the other characters wouldn't really walk
around freely in the environment, but just move from one location on the map to
another and appear to the player at different distances on the screen.

This approach had two obvious advances: First of all I could save some valuable
calculation time since I didn't have to create routines that would let the
characters move around the screen, do collision detection and z-buffer
calculations.

The second advantage was that I wouldn't have to create the walking animation
for the characters. Since I'm not very good at painting graphics and especially
at the animation of life forms I was quite happy to be able to get around that
problem.

As usual I also created a map editor. In this editor I used a new approach for
the first time. Besides a mode in which you were able to paint the map with big
icons I've added an overview mode in which you could see a larger part of the
map and actually edit the objects on any location in the map. This overview mode
was like looking on a topographic map. Later I used this idea more often, for
example in the level editor for "The caves of Horwar".

I had to discontinue the work on this game due to a lack of main memory. Even
though I already had the program load the graphics of some of the objects only
when they were needed and replace them with other temporary objects when the
player moved to a different location I still didn't have enough main memory
left. I was using my CPC 464 at that time and therefore was limited to a mere 64
kilobytes of memory.

Most of that 64 kilobytes was already being taken up by the graphics and the
double buffered display window. So when I thought about adding all the other
features, like the other characters, the parser, the scoring system, etc. I
figured out that I've already had wasted too much memory with the graphics alone
and that it would mean a lot of restructuring and repainting to remedy this
problem.

I wasn't really willing to re-paint all the graphics. I knew that I would run
into the memory problem again sooner or later, because besides the graphics
there were a number of other elements in this game that would take up a lot of
memory (e.g. the parser, the scoring system, the map data, ...). So I thought of
keeping the shrinking routine for some demo or other games, but to abandon this
game, because I didn't really see a future for that.

Besides a CPC conversion of the role playing game "The Bard's Tale" had finally
been done in the meantime and even though it's graphics was rather crappy the
gameplay was cool and the game provided a lot of staying power. While playing it
I realized how difficult it would be to create a good scoring system that made
sense and was understandable to the player...


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*                                                                             *
* This program can be distributed freely and without the need of a written    *
* of a written permission by Odiesoft, as long as it is distributed free of   *
* charge!                                                                     *
*                                                                             *
* If you had to pay for this, you've been ripped off!                         *
*                                                                             *
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