Alternate Reality X: Planning Release 0.75 – A Major release!

Acrin1 7 Comments
I have a good feeling about this next release and hope to address some of the features that I’ve left incomplete for a while. I’d like 0.75 to be something special and really take the project to a new level of completeness and quality.
Everything here is subject to change but here are my initial ideas and plans for release 0.75. There is a big focus on the Dungeon as that is the overall encounter / item system I’m planning to use for ARX, though I’ve added some of the unique City features such as Charm and Trick as well as Potions that were removed or modified for the Dungeon.
Encounters, inventory and items work closely together (at least in my eyes) hence the long list below. If I could complete a lot of the items below then I would really feel I’d made significant progress with the development of the game. The heart of Alternate Reality for me has always been the encounters so it’s important to get these feeling right.
Encounters:
  • Modify encounter frequency – Previously too frequent or not frequent enough!
  • Review use of Dungeon encounter binary data file – this includes encounter weapons
  • Review existing combat mechanics, damage types, influence of armour and overall balance
  • Add all Dungeon encounters – Including weapons, attacks and special abilities
  • Add additional Dungeon encounter tables
  • Add message customisations for different types of weapon and multiple body parts
  • Knock downs, disarming and stunning
  • Add “Surprise” menu including Waylay, Snatch, Leave etc
  • Add encounter animations
  • Review all fixed encounters
Items:
  • Expand the underlying item format to allow use of custom weapons, enchantments and randomised clothing items
  • Review use of Dungeon item binary data file – this includes encounter weapons
  • Add all unique “treasures” to the Dungeon map
  • Add any treasure items that are unique to the City not included in the Dungeon set above
  • Add encounter corpses (where appropriate)
Modules / Special Locations:
  • The Chapel
  • The Dwarven Smithy
General:
  • Separate media packs and add validation to check for media packs
Hopefully everyone will be keen to see these features completed or added to the next release. For me this will be a major release which really takes some of the core game mechanics to a whole different level. Watch this space. Comments as always welcome.

Alternate Reality X – Update, March 2016

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Since the start of the year I’ve managed to get back up to speed and into the process of continuing the development of my Alternate Reality remake. This is based on Philip Price’s unfinished series of games originally for the Atari 8bit range of computers. Originally only the City and the Dungeon scenarios were ever released.

I’ve gone back to my original project goals to regain my focus over the last couple of months and this has been a big help. These are:

  • Create a full port of both The City and The Dungeon for modern systems
  • Move your characters seamlessly between scenarios 
  • Provide a quick, easy to use alternative to emulation
  • Expand upon the original scenarios to include new quests, locations, encounters and items
  • Provide the option of using the original or updated graphics and sound
The wording here might differ slightly from my original webpages but the key goals are still strong messages and still feel very relevant to my current thinking. These will be my key focus over the coming months. I’ll not be losing sight of these again or heading off on any other tracks where my Alternate Reality project is concerned.

I’ve released two updates for ARX during March 2016 so far. Whilst both are only small updates I’ve now got an established development and release process which means I’m not losing time because I’m disorganised. I’m making use of Google Drive to keep my ARX files accessible online regardless of location so I can contribute free time to development. I’m also freezing any updates to the development environment and multimedia library I’m using – what’s there currently is more than capable of seeing my Alternate Reality project through to 100% completion and my current build is fully Windows 10 compatible. As I’m now (and sticking to) using SFML and Code::Blocks (it’s quick and light to install compared to Visual Studio) again ports for Mac OS X and Linux are achievable (at a later date).

At a high level the main areas I’m going to be looking at over the next few weeks and months are:

  • The core engine – specifically remodelling items, encounters and tweaking the display
  • The City – What is required to make the City 100% complete?
  • The Dungeon – What is required to make the Dungeon 100% complete – starting with level 1?
  • The Arena & other scenarios – Bit by bit expanding the Arena content but also laying any groundwork which might be required for future expansion into other scenarios. 

My plan is to expand these key areas into more smaller, achievable items in the next week or so. I’ll publish these plans online with everyone so you can or point out anything I’ve overlooked.

I’m really keen to get feedback from players whether that’s bug reports, general comments for improvement or ideas for new features – content or story. Email, Facebook, the Blog and the forums are different ways of helping to develop ARX so I’d encourage you to make use of them if there are things you’d like to see. I try to  read all the comments and the feedback and suggestions I receive really do help determine what I work on next and how items are prioritised.

Alternatively if you like my what I’m planning or the work I’ve completed to date then you might consider making a small donation via Paypal (link in the right hand panel of this blog and on the webpages) or as a patron on Patreon. These are a great help for my website costs, occasional small hardware additions that help development and the odd book or software licence I buy.

As I’ve mentioned previously my planned approach is more frequent but probably smaller updates. I’ll be tackling some of the bigger items mentioned above in the next couple of releases which I think will help take ARX to a whole new level. Thanks for your support.

Designing Alternate Reality: The Arena

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One of the things that has struck me when play testing my current build of Alternate Reality X is that there are still numerous places where the player comes across the entrances to the unfinished scenarios – The Arena, The Palace, The Wilderness and Revelation (there aren’t any for Destiny).

As I’m planning changes within ARX to better support the City and Dungeon, it’s helpful to think ahead as to how the other scenarios might develop and what features and content they may include. I thought I’d collect my ideas here as the beginning of a design document for Alternate Reality: The Arena. I see the Arena and the Palace as quite tightly interwoven in terms of features and story so there might be some cross over here. Through your trials in the Arena you can obtain fame and fortune, increasing your social status and gain initial access to the Palace.

Entry to the Arena can be gained through an unsuccessful enounter with a gang of slavers, as a spectator or persuading one of the local lords to support your entry to the Arena with the goal of becoming the Champion of Xebec’s Demise and receiving the royal seal which grants access to all areas of the City (including the Palace). Whispers in dark taverns mention other, more secretive ways of entering the Arena.

Starting with the Arena map we have two areas available – one on the City level and a larger area within level one of the Dungeon. There are also a few “Arena Pits” on level two of the Dungeon. These two areas provide ample map space for the Arena scenario and interesting content.

The upper level houses the Great Arena itself as well as smaller Arena pits and shops which support the day to day running of the Arena. Both commoners and nobles visit the Arena from the City to watch the games whilst fighters seek their fame and fortune or meet their fate on the bloodstained sands of the Great Arena. Combatants can also move around with a degree of freedom between events looking for ways to improve their skills. A successful Arena fighter will make use of the weapons masters and trainers that have forged a living selling their services within the walls of the Arena.

The lower level of the Arena houses the darker side of the Arena where the poor souls who have been press ganged into slavery as Arena fighters live as well as housing the exotic creatures and traps that feature in the most deadly tournaments and games. Few have lived through the legendary Trial of Kings, a fiendish maze of traps and ferocious monsters that only the strongest and most cunning can hope to survive.

CRPG DEV – The 2016 Update and future plans

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January 2016 has passed but I hope you had a good Christmas / New Year or holiday.

I’m sorry for not posting anything for such a long time. I’ve found it difficult to focus and use my time well to make the significant updates to Alternate Reality X which I’ve wanted to despite putting in some serious hours. I started some major structural changes as well as trying to make the code fully object oriented. Looking back I tried to change too many things at the same time and my experience of full object oriented coding isn’t really good enough. I should have stuck with the style I’m familiar with rather than what I thought I should be doing.

The SFML media library I use also underwent some other changes which broke my 3D view code as it relied on some no longer supported OpenGL functions. I’ve considered going back to a previous version of the SFML library, though I’d prefer I was using the current version.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and planned out some more realistic short term changes to ARX. I’ll stick with my procedural style and concentrate my efforts on the areas that really need attention to allow progress to be made with the game. With the New Year I’ve given a lot of thought to what I want to achieve this year – professionally and personally – and making significant progress with ARX (and CRPG Dev) is high on my list.

I’m now working on a simple 0.72 release (as my past official release was 0.71). Once I’ve fixed the 3D view I’ll make this available – the purpose of this will be to update ARX to the latest version of SFML and also make use of the new Visual Studio 2013 build. I’m no longer using Code::Blocks as my development environment as I’m trying to improve my coding and many of the tutorials and books I’ve been studying use Visual Studio.

I’ve lots of plans but I’ll not say anything more about those just now until I’ve proven that ARX is still ongoing with a couple of new releases. So hang in there! 

Thank you for your past support and interest in what I’ve been doing – it’s really meant a lot to me. So with that I’d like to wish you (a belated) all the best for 2016.

Alternate Reality X – Modifying the display

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Example Dungeon screen (672×480) from the Atari 800 Emulator

As mentioned previously I was investigating a possible move to using SDL as an alternative to the SFML media library. Whilst I’m not a 100% certain I’m going to stay with SFML it’s looking extremely likely. The main reason for this is that I understand from what I’ve read that unlike SFML, SDL isn’t able to easily mix it’s native graphics with an OpenGL view. One of the things I found useful with SFML was that I could limit my use of OpenGL to just drawing the 3D City / Dungeon view whilst using SFML’s 2D functions for everything else. The disadvantage I’ve found with SFML is that a number of people have had issues with the OpenGL support and video drivers on their Windows machines. There are a couple of changes I can make which might address the problems under Windows and flag up the possible impact on gameplay at start up for the player.

I’ve been spending some time trying out the City and Dungeon using the Atari 800 emulator (version 3.0.0). This emulator seems reliable and hasn’t yet crashed on and lost my emulator settings which I found to be a problem with Atari 800 Win Plus. One of the first things I’m doing is making some changes to simplify the display options to make Alternate Reality X look more authentic and make best use of the original Atari 800 graphics as I didn’t like the way some of them appeared when stretched by my multiple screen options. In practice this is likely to mean more limited screen display options (at least for the next release) but will hopefully make for a better Atari 8bit look which most players are apparently using when playing ARX. I will still be leaving in the support for alternative media but it’s not going to be a focus in the next few releases. 672 by 480 pixels is likely to become the base resolution for the game from the next release with options to have black borders or not. This will give you a very accurate, double sized version of the original and will allow me to match the display very accurately with the original versions.

One of the benefits about my investigations into the SDL media library was that I’ve been reading a SDL game programming book and this has made me rethink some of the ways the game programming could be improved to make better use of the features of C++. These would probably simplify development, improve my code reuse across multiple shop type modules and reduce the risk of crashes due to my ill informed programming techniques. These are general C++ game programming techniques – just as applicable to a SFML game as a SDL one.

These might seem like very trivial points for me to be focusing on but having the display “look right” for me will make a big difference to me. Release 0.8 is now under development so watch this space.

Alternate Reality X – Back to Basics

Acrin1 6 Comments

As I’d said previously I wanted to review what I’d achieved with Alternate Reality X (ARX) and what I needed to do to take it a step closer to completion. I’ve given the project a lot of thought and wanted to post an update.

I found some of my early AR images on the internet dated 12th June 2004. Eleven years ago! These are very old when I was using Mike Robert’s excellent TADS 3 Interactive Fiction system to read the AR binary map files and display an overhead view. Thanks to Mike for answering my often off topic questions when I should have been using TADS 3 to write more adventure games 🙂 Here are the images:
My early Alternate Reality port using TADS 3!

Another screenshot but with a different font and a very simplistic 3D view
My next move after moving away from using TADS 3 was to post a little SDL based demo of some randomised Dungeon combat with various Dungeon denizens things have changed a lot. My original demo looked very authentic and just worked. I liked that version 🙂

My original goals for my Alternate Reality remake were to:
  • Produce an easy to use version of AR that would run on modern systems
  • Allow players to move seamlessly between the City and Dungeon scenarios

It was not my original intention to improve the graphics and sound or to try and complete the other scenarios. The display and audio options as well as multiple screen resolutions have all added to the development time for me. Not ideal when this is really my first proper programming project 🙂
Since then a lot of time has passed and over the years the project has started and paused a number of times due to other commitments and changing ideas about direction. My conclusion now is that the best direction for now is to return to my original goals for the project and try to bring it to a sensible conclusion, or at the very least bring this stage to completion so that there is a solid foundation for myself or others to build on (e.g. adding a new scenario).
The original Alternate Reality:The City
The other conclusion I’ve come to from the emails and messages I’ve received over the years is that the vast majority of people are really looking for a fairly faithful port of the original games – including the original 8bit graphics and sound. I really need to pair back the project to its core so that I can rewrite some of the dubious code in the background. This is turn would provide a solid platform for possible future scenarios to be added – once the City and Dungeon are 100% implemented.
There are a couple of other things I’ve considered. SFML’s use of OpenGL causes a lot of issues foe people who don’t have fully compliant OpenGL video drivers on their Windows PCs. This is a big concern for me with Windows 10 now on release.  A switch to the SDL media library which I believe doesn’t use OpenGL would probably help a lot with this. I’ve also decided that for ARX any ports to Mac OS X or Linux would probably have to be carried out by someone else. Unity 3D I’ll use for new projects rather than ARX.
So where does that leave the project? 
Here’s my current plan and thoughts for Alternate Reality X development:
  • Microsoft Windows only
  • Staying with C++ and a media library (SFML or SDL)
  • Review each section of code, rewriting where necessary
  • Concentrate on adding the remaining functionality
  • Stick to the original 8bit look and feel for now

August 2015 Already?

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Is it really over six months since my last blog post and even longer since my last game upload???

You might have wondered if I was still interested in CRPGs and game development or whether I had hit some serious problem in my personal life. I’m pleased to report that there have been no major disasters but plenty of other things have taken up my time and my personal interests including my game development has suffered as a result.

I’m taking part in a year long training programme which has seen me travelling away from home a lot more than usual and whilst it’s been enjoyable and interesting, it means that when I’m back home there is a lot more to catch up on with my family and around the house . I’ve also completed some other training and exams (work related) that I’d wanted to do for some time. I’m doing some major redecoration and clearing out of our house which has been really time consuming. To top everything off numerous things in the house have broken, developed faults and either need fixing by me or more often replaced or fixed at great expense by others. Additional hassle I didn’t need. Net result that the last six months of 2015 have been a total blur.

On the more positive side I did complete a review of Alternate Reality:The City for inclusion in the excellent The CRPG Book Project. This is shaping up to be an excellent book once it’s complete. The current version has over 200 pages with around 100 game reviews. Felipe Pepe has done an amazing job putting this together so please check it out if you haven’t already. You can find the current version at: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/

I have also really enjoyed playing Rocksmith 2014 which I bought just before Christmas. If you’re unfamiliar with this “game” you plug in a real electric guitar or bass and play along with real songs and play the actual guitar parts.You can slow down sections to practice and vary the difficulty or accuracy. As you improve and depending on your level and playing style (rhythm or lead) the computer gradually adds in more notes until you’re playing the authentic guitar parts with all the notes and nuances. It hasn’t made me a guitar master but it really is a lot of fun and feels very productive compared to something like Guitar Hero as my guitar playing really is improving as result.

On the game development front I’m thinking through a few ideas at the moment – some about how to progress Alternate Reality X and one of my own CRPG projects which isn’t AR related. Unity 3D looks like the most likely choice of platform for anything I do though, mainly due to its rapid deployment to other platforms including web options. Anything I produce I suspect will have a distinctly “classic” look. It probably won’t look anything like a normal Unity 3D game 🙂

Thanks to those of you who have asked how things are and for your continued support and interest in my projects. All the best.

Two Paths to Alternate Reality

Acrin1 6 Comments

Over the last few months I have been giving a lot of thought to my two Alternate Reality related projects and with the move into 2015 have been thinking about my next steps. I think I’m now fairly clear on how I’m planning to develop during 2015.

I’ve spent many years working on my original project (Alternate Reality X or ARX) which was originally focused on bringing the City and the Dungeon together into a single game which could be played on a modern PC without the inconveniences that sometimes come from using emulation such as swapping virtual floppy disks. I think I succeeded in meeting the majority of those goals allowing players to move seamlessly between the City and the Dungeon as well as making a number of adjustments so that (hopefully) moving between the two scenarios isn’t too jarring. Over the years I introduced a variety of display and audio options with replacement art from Ted and myself and music by Furious. However the flexibility in the options has meant that a lot of time has been spent on say for example making display elements appear in sensible positions across multiple resolutions. Whilst some people will appreciate all the effort that went into these, I suspect may just want to play the game. In addition I found myself in a slightly odd position where I was trying to please everybody retaining the old and new. In a single game there were limits in how successful I could be with this approach.

ARX had become a bit tangled code wise and needed some significant work to make it more stable and less buggy before I could really complete it. This in part made me decide to put a hold on it last year and start work on a new version of Alternate Reality which used the Unity 3D game development system. I’ve released a couple of short demos using Unity and I like it as a system. It’s relatively easy to use but provides a lot of power for someone like me that I couldn’t hope to develop myself. In addition it’s cross platform support is amazing. I was able to create Mac OS X versions of my Alternate Reality demos with a few mouse clicks compared to the weeks of work it took me to produce one Mac build from my ARX SFML / C++ code.

The conclusion I’ve reached is that I would like to continue to work on both projects but change the focus of each of them so that they are more clearly . From the feedback and comments I’ve received from players it looks like there are a sizeable number of people who enjoy ARX with its traditional graphics and sound but with the flexibility of the City and Dungeon being a single game. There are also a lot of people who are looking for a much more dramatic update to AR. This just wasn’t possible to produce whilst retaining the old look and feel in a single game. I’m now considering focusing ARX on its original Atari 8bit roots whilst my Unity 3D project (with a working title of Return to Xebec’s Demise – RXD) can focus on new graphics and sound, an updated map and a more flexible environment closer to more recent games but still attempting to retain the classic Alternate Reality atmosphere and spirit. The wonderful encounter graphics and music Ted and Furious produced can hopefully be used within the Unity project. This approach will make the ARX downloads much smaller as well.

So what can you expect to see? Firstly I’ll be updating both SFML (now on version 2.2) for ARX and Unity 3D (now up to 4.6) for Return to Xebec’s Demise so that I can produce small updates of both to get my development environment up to date. Internally things like items, encounters and the player are likely to be very similar so I’m playing with a few ideas as to how to possibly re-use some code between the two. One option would be to use the C# language with SFML as this is the language I use for scripting in Unity 3D.

Hopefully what I’m describing above makes sense and will be pretty clear once you have an update of both projects to try out. Let me know what you think and any better titles you have for the two projects. Thanks as always for your interest and support.