Nearly finished with the upgrade that I mentioned on IRC. More info on the Omni, but attached is a screenshot of my messing around with the effects layer.

Also, please forgive the flicker and the bars. I haven't quite figured out the whole 15MHz grayscale thing myself, but it seems to work well enough.

The effects, in their respective order are (and copied right from source):
;EFFECT none
;EFFECT one lighter
;EFFECT two lighter
;EFFECT all lighter
;EFFECT one darker
;EFFECT two darker
;EFFECT all darker
;EFFECT invert all
;EFFECT invert gray
;EFFECT diverge
;EFFECT monocrhome
;EFFECT unkown

Also, just so you know, the effects layer won't work right if the tilemapper is running. The best effect I can achieve is monochrome, and it tends to show a little gray on the cycle that isn't rendering the effect. Still looks a little cool. Should make a screenshot of that one eventually.

That looks really great, Iambian! I know how much work you've been putting into this over last few days, and I'm sure you'll figure out what's going on with the marching bars.

If I'm not mistaken, won't some of these effects be used to simulate lightning, cutscene fades and other events in the game?

I sure hope so, because it looks perfectly suited to something like that!

Well. I finished upgrading the grayscale routines and added a grayscale config menu that can be accessed from the title screen or the pause menu using the DEL key. The grayscale also appears cleaner in the emulator and the screenshot shows it.

Also, the value for the LCD delay isn't right (hacked save file), but it doesn't affect the emulator anyway. On the real calc, this will be initialized to $27 and can be toggled in increments of 8. Having a value of $00 seems to break the display on the real calc (TI-84 Plus SE) but you can still toggle it back to a good value even though you can't see what's going on.

That looks amazing! Tell me about that 12-square grayscale test in the settings screen, and how it is and is not supposed to look.

It actually didn't matter that much in the screenshot because Wabbitemu was configured to render "game gray." I should probably post a screenshot with more realistic settings.

The tile that was chosen for the test tilemap was picked because it had a fair amount of all four colors. Some tiles have only three colors, some only two. Others that had all four colors didn't have them distributed as evenly as the one I chose. And if you really wanted to know, this tile *does* appear in the game.

On the real calculator, choosing a higher interrupt frequency number will slow the scroll of the tilemap while giving the gray a better appearance. Having a lower number makes the thing run faster, but makes the grayscale a fair bit less than perfect. Barely acceptable if you ask me. A good value that I found for my calculator is a frequency of 4. So that will be the default value. Grayscale looks decent and the speed wouldn't take that much of a hit.

With the screen delay value, it really didn't matter how I changed it. There was some slight effects but it felt more like I was tweaking the thing by just a little instead of making a huge impact on what it was showing.

So to shorten everything up, the tiles represent all the colors while the grayscale tilemapper is running. And the grayscale is not supposed to look like crap. Understanding that the tilemapper is actually part of one of the LCD writes, this test is necessary to ...uh ... test for consistency.

Slightly off-topic, but I thought I would mention that there is a sequel to the game currently in planning. It will largely recycle the same codebase, with some revisions and additions. It's also a direct continuation of events after Escheron. (which I won't divulge too many details about just yet, as there are many spoilers)

"Rephaim" centers around Edmund as a protagonist this time. The engine is much more robust, giving each character their own collection of personal skills, as well as access to summoned monsters that grant characters a selection of spells. I did away with the character progression system in Escheron, favoring traditional experience levels instead. Character growth is extremely linear, giving each character a specific function in battle. There are seven characters you can recruit, and each of them can be freely swapped in and out of your battle party.

The world is quite massive, and everything is 1:1 scale. There aren't any icons representing towns or dungeons, for instance - they're all directly integrated into a giant world map. (the maps are technically in different segments, but the transition from one to another is seamless) Suffice it to say, it's going to be a substantially longer play experience.

I can't even express in words how truly amazing those screenshots look. These look so... epic.... (trails off into wonderment). I'm enjoying how you have 65535Kr money and 65535 experience. :lol I notice you seem to have designed your font as a 3x5 fixed-width font, with the l and i in the middle of their 3x5 spaces, yet I notice an "li" and "ll" compound character. Am I correct in thinking you added special "ll" and "li" characters?

I can answer this question, and it is a "yes". He wanted me to add in those characters for E:SoR. I initially told him no because I wasn't confident that I'd have space left on the fontmap, but seeing that I have enough to put them in, I may reconsider.

Oh. And in "Rephaim", he's not kidding about the world map. Its dimensions is 65535x65535, with "puny" 127x127 "islands" in the middle of the randomly generated sea of nothingness. Good luck navigating

This seriously looks amazing. It really seems like this game is going to push some of the technical limitations of the calc, and really show what it's capable of.

There are il, ll and li compounded tiles. It saves space in a few areas, and allows for slightly longer names. I wanted to try to make the font look more variable-width, but that's about all I can do without actually having a variable-width font.

For reference, Kr stands for kero. It's just the game's made-up currency.

I figured that's what it was. And thanks for confirming the compound tiles; I think that's actually an impressive way to handle that. Hopefully you didn't get caught up in too many confusing string-width routines by adding that?

It's not too difficult to be consistent with string width, just bearing in mind that anything involving L and I can have a bit of additional space. It might be confusing if I had a lot of compounded tiles, though.

I would have compounded T's and I's as well, but it would look just slightly crammed. I can't think of any other characters that might be suitable for compounding.

I guess you'd have to have the horizontal ligature for the t on the pixel above and to the left of the top of the non-dotted i, right? But yeah, you don't want to make your text too complex for the sake of a few extra pixels of string width. I'm very impressed with the artwork, at any rate.

I'm impressed with the artwork, too. Too bad it's not original. I just use modified sprite-rips from console games.

Most of the fonts, and some of the miscellaneous graphics, are the only original bits.

Yeah, but even the sprite rips take a fair bit of effort to modify to look nice in 4-level grayscale on a 96x64-pixel LCD.

Information regarding details about the battle engine in E:SoR. I put this in a code box to preserve the fixed-width spacing. Best viewed with a column width of (at least) 86. Tell me what you think.

Code:

Wow, that seems very thorough to me, and in a careful read-through, I can't really find any particular holes or flaws in it. What about the rest of you?

The project might be on somewhat of a hiatus, as Iambian's laptop is suffering from technical difficulties. (which is more or less his coding environment)