New Homebrew - Armed For Battle

[rizz1010]

Why release this on NES only?  If you made a Famicom version, I would buy it and play it.  But if you only make a NES version, I will not play it, as I never use emulation, and don't play/collect NES games.

I have not looked into what it would take to port this to a famicom format, sorry.  Right now, I'm concentrating on the NES release.

[fcgamer]

Why release this on NES only?  If you made a Famicom version, I would buy it and play it.  But if you only make a NES version, I will not play it, as I never use emulation, and don't play/collect NES games.

I have not looked into what it would take to port this to a famicom format, sorry.  Right now, I'm concentrating on the NES release.

I am not overly technical with this stuff, but if the game is in NTSC format, why would it be overly difficult to release it on both Famicom and NES format?  There are dozens upon dozens of people who "reproduce" Japanese-only games, putting them on NES carts, and while less people take NES carts and slap them onto Famicom boards, it has been done before.  I don't think that it really would be a huge deal to do.

Of course it is your game, your decision, but if it were me, I would be trying to offer it up to the biggest audience possible, especially if the work to do so were minimal.

[rizz1010]

Why release this on NES only?  If you made a Famicom version, I would buy it and play it.  But if you only make a NES version, I will not play it, as I never use emulation, and don't play/collect NES games.

I have not looked into what it would take to port this to a famicom format, sorry.  Right now, I'm concentrating on the NES release.

I am not overly technical with this stuff, but if the game is in NTSC format, why would it be overly difficult to release it on both Famicom and NES format?  There are dozens upon dozens of people who "reproduce" Japanese-only games, putting them on NES carts, and while less people take NES carts and slap them onto Famicom boards, it has been done before.  I don't think that it really would be a huge deal to do.

Of course it is your game, your decision, but if it were me, I would be trying to offer it up to the biggest audience possible, especially if the work to do so were minimal.

I will discuss this with the hardware people, and find out if it's as simple as that.  Hopefully so!

[fcgamer]

Why release this on NES only?  If you made a Famicom version, I would buy it and play it.  But if you only make a NES version, I will not play it, as I never use emulation, and don't play/collect NES games.

I have not looked into what it would take to port this to a famicom format, sorry.  Right now, I'm concentrating on the NES release.

I am not overly technical with this stuff, but if the game is in NTSC format, why would it be overly difficult to release it on both Famicom and NES format?  There are dozens upon dozens of people who "reproduce" Japanese-only games, putting them on NES carts, and while less people take NES carts and slap them onto Famicom boards, it has been done before.  I don't think that it really would be a huge deal to do.

Of course it is your game, your decision, but if it were me, I would be trying to offer it up to the biggest audience possible, especially if the work to do so were minimal.

I will discuss this with the hardware people, and find out if it's as simple as that.  Hopefully so!

Great, thanks mate!  The game looks really intriguing so far, so I want to give this one a shot when it comes out   Keep up the good work.

[rizz1010]

How do you calculate distance between units? No need code, just algorithm.

I use a simple approach, in order to avoid square root calculations:
Y2-Y1 = Ydistance
X2-X1 = Xdistance
Ydistance and Xdistance get converted to absolute value.
Ydistance + Xdistance = total_distance
If Ydistance = Xdistance, then something is diagonal.
Example - when a knight is looking for a target, it can hit something with total_distance = 1 OR it can hit a target that has total_distance = 2 if the target is diagonal.

[rizz1010]

Ah, ok, so if target "in diagonal", unit can detect/hit with longer distance.
Is it still UNROM, or you switched to MMC1?

Yes - the diagonal can be targeted with a longer distance (maybe a square root in assembly is easier than what I think, but I didn't want to take a chance, hehe)

It's UNROM.

[rizz1010]

I now have a development blog.  I'm hoping to add some sort of content weekly - if I have nothing new to talk about, I will add old stuff, which might be scans from when I was designing parts of the game on paper.  I used to go nuts over the Nintendo Power articles that had to do with game development, so maybe you'll find this to be cool.

The latest entries in the blog feature a preliminary sketch for the box artwork, and an interview from pixlbit.com.

[rizz1010]

Armed For Battle now has a demo you can download!


The demo is at my blog (the blog is very new too, so please check it out):
http://1010howe.blogspot.com/


My youtube channel has 4 tutorial videos that will show you how various parts of the game are played.  You will also see the newer look of the game in the videos:

Castle/Kingdom View

Upgrade Screen

World View

Battle View


If you have any additional questions about how gameplay works, please contact me, or you can add the question to the comments section of the video.

Hope you like it!

[That Guy from Faxanadu]

Cool, I´ll try it in the weekend!

[famifan]

square root is very interesting!

could you tell us how bigger the integers?
what accuracy you need?
and what time could you spend on computing the square root?

what do you think about trading some ROM space for the faster computation time?
Post Merge: January 10, 2014, 07:01:23 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_max_plus_beta_min_algorithm 

[rizz1010]

square root is very interesting!

could you tell us how bigger the integers?
what accuracy you need?
and what time could you spend on computing the square root?

what do you think about trading some ROM space for the faster computation time?
Post Merge: January 10, 2014, 07:01:23 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_max_plus_beta_min_algorithm 

Hello - I hope I can answer your questions.
The integers that I use are 1 byte.  Please remember that I am not using a square root formula.  All I need to do for my code is subtraction, so everything is whole numbers.

I do like to use ROM space if it's available.  I think you are talking about using a look up table.  I do like using look up tables when I can.  It comes down to how many bytes the lookup table will need.

Did I answer everything ok?

[famifan]

absolutely!

there is no need to compute squares and square root of their sums.

you can use approximation with the help of alpha max plus beta min algorithm:

V = a*max(x,y) + b*min(x,y)

if you can live with Largest error 11.80% and Mean error 8.68%
you can just use a=1, b=1/2
so, V = max(x,y) + min(x,y)/2
(dividing by 2 is just bit shifting)

[P]

It's a well made game! I tried the demo for a bit and it's easy to get into. I didn't get how you are supposed to fight though. I had much more troops than my enemy but still they moped the floor with my troops. I think it hanged in the battle though. Also in the upgrade menu and in battle the green background sometimes disappear until you leave that menu. Tested with Nestopia.

[rizz1010]

It's a well made game! I tried the demo for a bit and it's easy to get into. I didn't get how you are supposed to fight though. I had much more troops than my enemy but still they moped the floor with my troops. I think it hanged in the battle though. Also in the upgrade menu and in battle the green background sometimes disappear until you leave that menu. Tested with Nestopia.

I'm guessing you pushed the start button to initialize an enemy attack?  If you had around 20 or more troops (troops are Archers, Swordsmen, Knights, Wizards, Catapults), then it would have probably been enough to defeat the enemy (they attack with 10 troops).  Thanks for letting me know it was Nestopia - it's possible that something might have been different with that emulator that I'm unaware of.  I have used fceuxdsp for testing over the course of the game's creation, in case you want to try that one.

[P]

I don't remember but I think I had closer to 30 troops. I attacked an enemy fort and deployed as many troops as I could. Then when the battle started I kept sending the rest of my troops randomly (I didn't know what troops to use against what lol) and they just died one by one while the enemy troops didn't even seem to decrease at all. I had all the 5 kinds of troops.

When I was out of troops to deploy and only a few left out on the field they suddenly stopped moving. The enemy didn't stop moving but they couldn't kill me. I assumed that it hanged so I shut it off after I had waited for quite a while.

I guess I should check out the how-to before I give it another try.