I’ve been working on getting guilds completed to be more like the Dungeon. Many features are missing from ARX guilds. Only the basics are in the game right now. So guilds do not accept you automatically. Some days they do not accept new people and you have to come back the next day and check. Also, if your alignment changes and moves outside of what is acceptable by the guild, then you can be ejected from the guild. So if you join a good guild and start to turn evil, they will give you warnings like the Dungeon and then will kick you out as you get outside of the alignment requirement. I think that is a good feature, being good and getting into a guild and then turning evil shouldn’t be accepted. I like the Dungeon thought of this, so now it is part of the game. If that guild is you main guild, then when they kick you out then you lose everything in your locker. So watch it. If you show up and you alignment is way out of wack then they might not give you a warning and just kick you out. So watch it.
The other new feature of about guilds is you end up killing people from that guild. You will get a warning and then kicked out if you continue it. If you get kicked out, then they will attack you. Also, you will lose your locker if that is the main guild. So watch it. The city didn’t have these features but they are now part of it, even listing the wizard is from a certain guild. So watch it.
Next thing is huge and has been taking most of my time when I have it. It is spells. I completely rewrote the spells section because it was not even close to be completed. First step was that I load in the spells from the original Dungeon Binary. The city didn’t have spells but the 16bit city did. So I created those spells into the dungeon spell binary, so all spells are loaded from the binary.
I have to say, I love how spells, potions and special items work in the game. It is a great design and very very efficient. Unlike how we code today, it was very tight and generic. I love it. So I took that idea and recreated it in ARX game. All spells, potions and special items use this “Special Effect” class inside ARX. These special effects define things like timer, when it becomes active, how many time to loop through the timer, an area of telling the game what memory locations to add/sub or other options on how to effect the memory location. These memory locations, can be player related, encounter and/or area related. I’ve mapped all the memory location to an ARX option. There are a few spells that are special that have special code related to them. Those are the only one left to re-create in ARX. It took many many days to get all the memory locations mapped out. There are many websites that talk about memory location, but are far from being completed. I’ve got all of them except one memory location mapped out and two spells call that location and I can’t figure out what that is related to.
My favorite is 0x6320 for the dungeon. Normally you will see 0xff (255). This field mean the active encounter which you are battling. So trying setting it to 0x00 and see what happens. This way you can test fighting every single encounter in the game. Want to fight againt the “Long arm of the Law” F.B.I agent. You can at anytime. They are around 0x06, I don’t remember its number.
So I’m making changes to the game to match the Dungeon. Like certain areas where the spell “Location” will not work. So for this, I’m preventing the “Auto Map” feature to work during these areas also. So you can’t cheat and get through the maze area easily. I’m trying to make sure the hardness of the original is in the remake.
Of course the remake is a remake and is not an emulation, so it will be different from the original. Acrin1 did such a great start on the game and allowed me to pick it up to complete the game. I don’t think I would have started from scratch to create Alternate Reality. I saw the bases was there, I couldn’t let it go. I wanted to see the city/dungeon completed.
Also, when it comes to the dungeon, there are many screens missing from the 16-bit. So I’ve been busy taking the 8-bit screen and converting them to appear to be 16-bit so you get the same look and feel. When I’m done, there will be a 16bit graphics for each and every thing the 8-bit had. I don’t want someone to play 16-bit city and then when they go to the dungeon to be swapped back to 8bit graphics for most of it. I’m going to complete the 16bit graphics conversions.
I’m also, adding new features into the 16-bit graphics. There can be animation in the 16-bit screens. I’ve taken the time to allow any texture in the game to have animation. So when it calls an texture to render then texture will determine what texture to render, to end up creating the animation effect.
I don’t want to do much inside OpenGl for animation. I want to make sure the look and feel ends up being 8bit or 16bit and not a game with todays physics, lighting and animation with 8bit or 16bit graphics. I want the feel to be authentic to the version you selected. So the animation is based on what was used back in those days.
Once the spells are complete, it will be easy to allow the items to use the “Special Effects” without any code changes to turn that feature on. I still have to get alignment check in the game for picking up items so a good player can’t easily use an evil item or the reverse.
This is just a quick update on what I’ve been doing.