Amoszine 6

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@2 F O R T R E S S I I D I A R Y @3 Part Five @1 Author: Lee Bamber @4 It does seem, does it not, that there is just no end to this damn diary? I had scheduled F2 to be completed no later than November 1994, ready for a timely Christmas release, when buying games is on the forefront of everyone's mind in due preparation for the festive season. Not to put a fine point on the matter, but it seems I was a bit out. As the code is implemented, true professional cold-heartedness escaped my eager mind, and F2 began to take on new avenues of gameplay and increased details in regard to planned and prepared for features. Such is the scale of the new additions, it is putting the project, not under a strain, but a pressure to stop the innovation of creation and finish it. As much as I would like to start selling F2 and get some reward for my toil, the gameplay is literally hungry for each and every new feature put forward. In an effort to stop this privileged grasp of every conceivable feature to grace a single strategy game, I've decided to end the brainstorm for more ideas, work with what is already on the drawing board and finish F2 before the summer heatwave when no-one will want to be sitting at their computer screens; when they should be out walking, playing soccer or paintballing their closest rivals. It's not for me to schedule a second date for completion, but I shall be aiming to get it released as either commercial or through my own means before the end of April 1995. Working the unavoidable delays in playtesting, debugging, submission, negotiations and anything else that rears it's ugly head, I'm due to start putting the finishing touches to F2 within the next two months. As I write, today being the 20th January 1995, I look ahead to what hopefully will be a very prosperous year with F2 completed, Relics of Deldroneye sharing the limelight with it's sequel(s) and at least three more smaller titles released through licenceware. But all these trivial rantings aside, you're certainly wanting to enter the realm of chronological creativity that is the diary... @3 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- @1 DATE: 20th January 1995 NOTE: The story so far Fortress II designs now cover every part of the game, allowing a sense of what the game is finally going to look like. It doesn't star a spikey blue rat, nor smells of the latest blockbuster, but for the would-be gods and strategically inclined it's grand waste of your time. For the easy going, it's simple, uncomplicated to play and full of little features you can relate to. And above all the classifications, it's all out war. No farming, cuddling peasants or kissing babies. This is a weapons only, cards on the table, blood-thrusty fight to the death on a global scale! The code is crawling along nicely, with the odd limb missing and no teeth, but certainly recognisable! We need to see the final implementation of the castle fighting, town fighting, army fighting and enemy intelligence. We have to sort out titles screens, selection screens, death screens, completion screens, world map screen and all the rest of it. I've decided to drop the serial interface idea if I can't get to grips with true enemy intelligence. A secret to you and me, but enemy intelligence can be wholly stupid things and still seem to know what they are doing. If I go cheap and whip up a pseudo intelligence that to the player seems to present a challenge, then that's fine. But if I am successful, the enemy will act and think totally separate from each other and use exactly the same battle logic maths as the user. If I can do this, making one enemy take control from the serial port will be simple. If the multi-logic maths don't pay off, the serial is dead. At least while I know very little about it. One last thing before I say good night, the last idea I have to add to F2 is the idea of Army Camps. In solving the problem of what to do with up to 20 divisions of troops after a battle, and only being able to move 4 divisions at a time because of Army restrictions in other areas. It left me with a huge number of troops stuck at a town or fort. To solve this, I have decided to create something called a CAMP. A CAMP is a stationary area dedicated to the storage of up to 20 divisions of troops. The CAMPS can hold up to 20,000 troops in total, a maximum of 1,000 troops per division. Armies may be formed in the CAMPs and sent about the business and the CAMP can take in numbers of troops of the particular division type into the ranks. The CAMP can be disbanded if there are four or less divisions remaining, forming the final army. Likewise, a CAMP cam be created at any of your towns or forts. Upon studying the problem, and this solution, it occurs that a CAMP could also be used strategically, where large numbers of troops need to be assembled in a town close to a huge enemy fort. Upon even further reflection, the whole idea was quite logical, and had it not been implemented, the game may have suffered due to the restricted movement of large numbers of divisions. It's not that late, but I've been very tired this last week or so, and it's not a good idea to work yourself too hard when you're already worked to the ground. I think I'll watch some videos until the early hours, get some rest and attack the new code for the CAMP idea in the morning. It will be Saturday, so the earlier I get up, the more time I have to try and not do nothing and press myself to do something worthwhile, all the time feeling like not doing nothing. Well at least one of use knows what I mean...Gutten Aben! @3 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- @1 DATE: 1st February 1995 NOTE: Back to the camo, lads! After finishing the Doom Diary(see elsewhere in this issue), I felt it would be a swell idea to actually do some F2 work! And so here I am. Right, I'll be writing a new prototype program to get the CAMP icons fully working and get armies created, removed and amended before I try and putting it in the main code. I find it's best to do this as the main code takes such a long time to run, testing and amending the new code takes forever. I can also scrap and start again real easy, using this method, which is the hall-mark of a very seasoned coder. (Being able to scrap some very clever code to rewrite it into even more cleverer code!) Plans for tonight...New program with camps...Yep, that's about it. LATER THAT NIGHT/MORNING . . . Sometimes I surprise myself. I started the CAMP code around 12:04AM, intending to create the structure before the main coding rush. Well I have accidentally coded it all at once. Once I had it in my head, the code just flowed into a nice logical order of tasks. In the end, I had to drag myself from a feverish attempt to make it more important than the rest of the game. There is nothing special about it, other than it`s usefulness in the game itself. The CAMP can hold all twenty division types and up to 9999 troops! The camp is used by transferring troops into and out of the camp via an army. The army is, as normal, a maximum of four divisions and thus the camp acts as a supply and reenforcement post for large scale battles. I`m sure I`ve covered CAMPS before. My mind isn`t what it was. Come to think I don`t think it ever was what it was. In fact, I can`t remember whether it ever occurred that what it was wasn`t what it was when it wasn`t. To be safe, let`s agree that I need help and put it off for a long time. By then, I hope everyone will have grown old and died. By which time of course, I`ll be stinking rich and I`ll sue anyone who claims that I`m a foaming loony with the mind of a dribbling foaming loony. Anyway, the camp interface is done. The transfer from camp to army and back again works perfectly without hitch. All the error trapping is so pre-meditated, it was written before I loaded Amos (writing in abstract you understand. Amos is good, but I`m afraid the day languages write their own code is some way in coming). I had a few nice letters congratulating me on my diary and how brave I am to attempt such a gruelling task. Their modest praise is exactly why I am doing all this. And I want more! I like letters saying how great I am. It doesn`t half look good on my wall when visitors accidentally meander into my room and get trapped. After I have done the old `brains-to- toothpaste` trick on them, they leave with a kind of fixed grin, and as far as I have witnessed, keep it for several days. I`m really nice when you get to know me, but as I hate everyone at heart no-one has every known me. Which is just as well, considering my very complicated personality. Not mean, and please don`t confuse me with a mean person. I`m very nice. I`m just hateful of everything, but you wouldn`t know by looking at me! Possibly, game writing is a vent for this global hatred. I mean, how many games have I done where you are killing or perminantly disabling something or someone at some point in the gameplay. I`m sure F2 falls into the category of a death-based affair. Sure, lots of thinking and protecting your empire. But without a bit of rival conflict, friendly conflict and absolutely-no-reason conflict, the world just be dull... STROY ALERT! ------------ Back in my early college days, I wrote nonsense stories which people liked reading. To this day, I can`t figure why. They where so bad, I even got the title wrong when saving out the word-processor file and it came out STROY. Since then, I`ve written loads of them, all usually violent and containing characters both real and not at all coincidental! I`ve toned down this one because it`s a family read...Stroy`s are never long, nor contain moral messages, just stuff that happens...This one is what I feel when I talk about the absence of violence in my work: "Hey you, take that you naughty warrior", said Mr Red Bad Person. "Oooh, you bounder. I shall tell your mother, Mr Red Bad Person", said Mrs Blue Good Person. "Aw! Please don`t tell, I shall never slap you again!" "Friends then, Mr Red Bad Person?" "Friends!", agreed Mrs Blue Good Person. And from that day forward, they lived, hand in hand, as Mr Green Not-very-Good-or-Bad Person and Mrs Green Not-very-Good-or-Bad Person. I certainly won`t stand for any of that! And to make sure you`re not going to finish now with such a `lovely` scene, the story actually ended... "Hey, you two!", shouted Mr Black Git. "Stop in the name of the law!" Both Mr and Mrs Green bla bla stopped, turned and regarded the uniformed warrior with warm smiles. "See this gun?", yelled Mr Black Git. "Yes, we see you shiny gun", replied the pair in duo. "I`m going to shoot you with it.", continued Mr Black Git as he walked down the grassy knoll towards the green pair. "I`m going to shoot you at point blank range." "Oooh", chimed Mr and Mrs Green bla. Mr Black Git jogged the final few meters over to the two lovely people and started to load the double-barrel shotgun. He dropped one on the floor, only for it to be picked up by Mrs Green. "Here you are, you dropped this.", said Mrs Green and handed the small tube cartridge over to Mr Black Git. "Shut up!", ordered Mr Black Git. He closed the shotgun with a swift jolt of the handle and moved Mr Green in front of Mrs Green to form an almost perfect line between his gun nozzle and their respective heads. "Right you are sir, right you are.", submitted Mr Green as a way of an apology. [Camera pans away as they sometimes do when the story gets a bit explicit and focuses on a rabbit, eating some vegetable stalk from Mr and Mrs Greens lush garden. The sound of a single BLAST from the shotgun, brings the almost simultaneous sound of a wet slosh sound, and then the sound a bag of spuds make when they drop from a great height. The camera moves back onto the threesome, to reveal Mr and Mrs Green stood over the corpse of a headless Mr Black Git.] "Fascinating", commended Mrs Green, "I`ve always wanted to know what would happen if you fired a petrol pellet from a shotgun." She handed Mr Green the real gun cartridge and winked. She started towards a corner of her garden. The rabbit had since disappeared down it`s hole. "Clever girl", praised Mr Green. "Save the ammo for next time!" He picked up the shotgun, wiped it down, and rejoined Mrs Green who was already busy, weeding the garden. THE END. I`m sure you have a full idea of what I think about when I remove the violence from my games. I hope my stroy has offered a more colourful explanation of the inner workings of my sordid little mind. As for F2, I have absolutely no problem with the level of death and violence portrayed. By what I am capable of, it is positively kindergarten stuff!@3 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- @4 Fortress II is either the biggest damn project in the world, or Lee Bamber likes writing in AMOS so much that he can't help but write games all the time. If I were to tell you that it's both, you can understand the briefness of this entry. I'm about to submit my game AQUAKON for evaluation to F1 Licenceware and finish off the demo version for PD release, and also polish off the game JERONIMO and have one last go at making the Serial Game-Linking mode work faster. Enough of such talk, you haven't the first clue as to what I'm talking about. And quite right too, that's another D.N story! Fortress II will continue full tilt development as soon as I finish my other small project (very hush hush at the mo!) No more this issue, you'll have to wait and wait and wait...or you could give in and just write. Must run, see you next bi-month. Stay AMOS! @1 End.