Improved the keyboard sensitivity. Tidied up my secret bug/enhancement/things-I-haven't-done-yet list, but didn't actually make it much shorter.
Sick of those giant pixels, so I'm upping the resolution to 640x480. Screenshot to follow...
Just a quick note to reassure y'all that I'm still here. I've barely touched AAPC all year but I'm now reacquainting myself with the code. So far I've added some sound effects and water. The sound's still a bit flaky though, so no new download yet.
This is nowhere near finished yet, but the gameplay is pretty much all there, so I threw something together in time for Christmas. There's no sound, no city editor, and I never got anywhere with tweaking the graphics, and the in-game messages are a bit clunky. But the game is there. God knows, it's more complete than Netscape 6.
Download the self-extracting archive here, stick the file in a directory, and run it to unzip the files.
Erm... haven't done a lot. But I've been thinking really hard about it. Honest.
I'll try to release something by the end of this year; there probably won't be any sound, it won't be very enhanced graphically, but it should be playable.
Tweaked the graphics engine to make room for more block types (of the 63 available, about 15 were previously taken up by the player, friend, grenade and explosions. Not any more).
Each level now begins and ends as it should. The ants get faster on later levels. The countdown timer works. The scanner works. And if he's asleep, the player can get up momentarily to throw a grenade. And various other little tweaks.
At this point it is possible to play the game, in a rather raw state; there are no messages, score, sound, etc yet.
One big difference between this version and the original, is that this version keeps the player in the centre of the view all the time. The original version would follow the player when he got close to the edge of the screen, and often as not wander off in some odd direction until the player was nowhere to be seen. I've decided not to emulate that bit.
Tidied up a few of those bits of quick'n'dirty code, made some changes to the graphics engine. The city is now drawn in a different order; rather than drawing vertical columns starting from the back and working forward, it's drawn in horizontal layers, lowest first. No more will ants have their bums chopped off.
The player's friend can now be lost and found.
Back at it after a bit of a break. Grenades are now fully functional. Yes, there are more than five ants here. The ant-count will be an option on the main menu... when I actually do the main menu.
The health/ammo/time counters are present; note the silly grenade count on the left. The countdown on the right doesn't yet. And until now I'd forgotten all about the scanner.
I had given the game directional controls (QAPL), but then I discovered that I couldn't turn round to lob a grenade without stepping off the ledge I was standing on, so the rotational controls are back too.
It may look like the game is more or less there, but I've got a long way to go yet. A lot of the code that is there is quick'n'dirty "let's get this working now and do it properly later" stuff.
The ants are now present and behaving correctly. More naughty gotos. I'd never noticed before that one of the five ants in the original game is faster than the others. Note the ant at top-right on the screenshot; his bum has been sliced off by the floor tile behind him. Must fix that...
This programmer resorts to desperate measures to impart a little sentience to Antescher's hapless couple.
Remember, 2001 fans, you too can make your own reproduction monolith by gluing together two microdrive cartridge covers!
Less progress over the past week; y'all can blame Peter F Hamilton for that. Anyone who hasn't read all his books yet, go and do it while you're waiting.
I've rewritten the player movement code to resemble that of the original game. That means it's just oozing with Dreaded Harmful Gotos, but I'm reluctant to tidy it up too much because something's bound to stop working. Lucky I sorted out that whole "what's a pointer?" thing, turns out they're actually useful wee buggers and let me use the same code to move the other sprites. Hence the player's mate now moves around properly. I don't think she's exactly like the original, but close enough.
The player (a boy for the mo') now walks and jumps and falls off things just the way he should. His girlfriend's code needs some work; she is currently a relentless Terminator-like machine which hunts him down and stands on his head. If a low ceiling gets in her way she will head-butt a hole in it. I may keep her as an option. She reminds me of someone.
Tidied up the graphics code a wee bit, and now it does all four viewpoints. Thanks to those handy blit calls, the graphics engine is only 60 lines of code.
With a copy of Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours in hand, spent a long, long afternoon getting from "What's a pointer?" to displaying the city on-screen. I'm using the original graphics for now, with a blue grid on the ground for... umm... testing or something.
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