That sounds great! I'm looking forward to having some fun with this

Wow, so soon? I can't wait to test this out.

I hadn't even thought of trying to add traditional characters. For simplified, the 12x12 font is pretty easy even for me to read. The 8x8 font is pretty good and with context (and translating taking the font size into account) could probably work out well. It's been really great to watch this game develop over the years, it never ceases to amaze me every time i watch the screenshots. The detail and all the crazy action going on at once, it's amazing!

Yeah, it's a crazy amount of detail (just when it seems like one thing is done, one more missing feature becomes apparent). Like lately, I just realized there's no feature to automatically power down the calc during idle.

The Oceanside boss was really a handful because of its multiple segments. Any objects over 8x8 are already multi-segmented, but for this boss, each segment had to be drawn in a specific order instead of all at once. Mostly just because of how much of the screen it takes up. The one boss segment that is vulnerable to attacks is also responsible for destroying the remainder of the boss when it is destroyed. I won't give out any spoilers, but it's a really fun boss battle!

I put the text.asm file: https://github.com/RobotwarTI/robotwar2-doc/blob/master/TEXT.ASM . There are major spoilers throughout, but the dialogs aren't necessarily shown in order. As part of the code cleanup, I marked some of the obsolete stuff [depreciated] so it can be ignored until later. The Chinese font codes could make a good parallel project. I'm betting there are bitmaps on the web somewhere for things like LCD character displays and electric signs. For the French version, it would also be handy to have a unique French titlescreen too. I'm not sure what the French is for "Robot War 2: The Bionic Wars," but I can give it a quick re-draw.

Recent:
- Fixed a quick-travel bug/crash
- Oceanside boss now off-limits until Oceanside quests are complete
- Improved text.asm and main header file commenting

In Progress this week:
- (Optional) Add auto power-down support
- (Debug) Re-check item HPs. Some items break way too early.
- (Debug) Re-check attack reloading logic.
- (Debug) Re-check Oceanside boss destruction codes
- On-calc testing

I'd use "La guerre des robots 2: les guerres bioniques".

Not to nit-pick, but "depreciated" ("diminished in value") should probably be "deprecated" ("not to be used").

Anyway, looking forward to a release in the near future

I was thinking about that. I tend to favor "depreciated" in case some of these earlier ideas are worth taking a second look at. If I continue the TI-82 version, it might stick to the older content more (depending on how much space is left).



Here's a draft french title. I did some on-calc testing with my TI-84+SE. It was plenty stable. The gameplay might be a hair too fast for the LCD at times due to blur. I'll probably ignore that for now, but I might need to rethink the top speed of some of the enemies in the game (plus Edgar himself).

Looks good

Last time I visited this thread, there was no activity, and I assumed the worst. I'm really glad that isn't the case and work on this has resumed once more.

Yeah, I had actually relocated not too long ago...kept adding some minor codes, but never had time to post updates for a while. But I think the demo is in the home stretch.



Recent testing: So I did more on-calc testing this weekend. Found a strange item bug, and possibly one bug in a new DELETE_OBJECT subroutine I recently added. The issue probably isn't the sub itself, but in the timing in which is it used. They weren't game-crashers, but definitely worth looking into in case there is a stack pointer mishap somewhere. Controls-wise, the key layout seems to work well for >1hr gameplay. The game requires a lot of diagonal movements here and there, so made sure none of the keys near the direction buttons do anything.

Game speed: The LCD blur could be a problem at lower contrast settings. I set my contrast I high as it could go without causing screen artifacts. Aiming was no problem, but it gets tougher to distinguish coins from enemies at higher speeds. The easy fix might be to make walls and barriers darker and slow down some of the faster enemies.

Chiptunes: This isn't 100% calc-related, but I got a kick out of listening to Krelez's chiptune compilations in recent years. It's excellent calc-programming music!

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Coming out of the shadows to say: this is awesome! I know how long you've been working on this, and I'm happy that you're still at it! Makes me miss my old 83+.

Ohai IAmACalculator, long time no see

Also glad to see new progress on Robot War, Digitan

I too listen to those chiptune mixes, they are great for coding .

Must be working on it a lot. Looks kinda hard. I don't know if I could make a program like this at my current state

It's a IAmACalculator! Yep, the code is slowly but surely coming together. The on-calc version hasn't crashed yet either, so that's good news.

Q: Unlock Elemental Attacks?

Okay, here's a question that may affect future builds after the beta/demo. Right now, there are 5 elemental attacks (fire, water, metal, wind, and earth) and they are all available at the start of the game. Depending on your attack and the enemy's body type, your elements will either do 0 damage, normal damage, or normal damage + bonus loot.

Should all 5 be available at the start of the game, or should you have to unlock them with experience?


Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) fonts
I did some random google searches this weekend to get some idea of how these fonts are encoded. I got some pretty handy results from image searches for "字符集编码" [character set encoding - zìfújí biānmǎ] or sometimes simply "字符集" [character set].

It looks like 3 major standard are GB18030 (Mainland), Big-5 (Taiwan, Canton, Macau), and Unicode/UCS-2 (International). Some of the resulting pages were kind enough to render the character sets as images that paste well into MS paint as 16x16 sprites (one example here: http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/CJK.html). The difficult part is that the symbols for the GB standard seem to be sorted by pronunciation rather than frequency/liklihood of use. Anyway, this could make a cool side-project later

I think unlocking them as you progress through the game would be a cool gameplay element (err... pun intended?). Little progression things like that always feel nice, IMO

Also I'm just going to say again how impressive this game looks. I find the screenshots fascinating to watch over and over!

I also think collecting/enabling the elements as you level/progress through the game is a nice idea.

Regards Chinese/Japanese encoding (Korean has an alphabet, as far as i know the Hanja aren't often used unlike in Japanese), i would write a computer program to analyze your text and figure out what characters you need and only include those characters in the program's actual data. Including the most common 3-4000 characters is probably enough for most purposes, but will put a huge dent in your memory.

Some more fantastic work! And I agree, learning the items via level up would definitely be the way to go, to give reasoning to do some level grinding :p

I think unlocking with progress is a great idea, especially if you allow the player to choose the unlocking order as a way of customizing their strategy and gameplay experience.

Alright, I'll draw up some start some element-unlocking concepts gifs after I make some more progress. RW1 used the Greek lettering system to indicate how many times an elemental attack had been upgraded, so something like that could work here too.

Recent:
- English version of text.asm now on Github
- French titlescreen finished
- Fixed a setting that caused some items to insta-break after very little damage
- On-calc testing

In Progress this week:
- (Optional) Add auto power-down support
- (Debug) Re-check attack reloading logic.
- (Debug) Re-check Oceanside boss destruction codes
- (Fix) Lower keypad sample rate after titlescreen

Well this is pretty interesting. I did some light research on the Chinese/Japanese/Korean (CJK) font idea and it turns out there are already some GNU resources already on the web that could make this possible as a side project.

Basically, to support Han, Hangul, Kanji, etc. we can download a raster (sprite) font as a bitmap that can treated like an enormous sprite sheet. (It would have to be raster-type font, as opposed to a True Type or other formats). One such project to do this is the WenQuanYi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WenQuanYi), which is available under the GNU General Public License. The WenQuanYi project produced several fonts...at least two of which were raster styles that were in turn adopted by the GNU Unifont project. The Unifont font maps to Unicode 8.0.0, which is the latest release as of today, and just about anyone can use it.

You can check out Unifont's latest code sheet here: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

Usually, displaying any given font would require a font resource file, plus a font rendering system. For our purpose, the Unifont bitmaps could form the resource file. And then maybe there could be a separate PC utility to only supply the calculator with symbols that were actually used. Anyway, it's an interesting topic.