WIP: Wizard of Wor

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FrankenGraphics
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by FrankenGraphics »

You may want to focus on not squishing detailed areas as much as non-detailed, if you go that route. Preserve hood/face over robe, legs can still be added to the fly without problem, you could probably shorten its body by some and get a bigger face.
tschak909
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

Yeah, I'm trying all options. It's okay. I'm patient. It took me 20 years to have my first original game idea (Dodgeball for the 2600), and I'll just keep piecing away at it until I get something that I think is okay.

The scaling was simply a quick non-interpolated squish so I could see where potential detail problems could arise. I can only do that to the sprites, really...the tiles for text/maze can't be shrunk, or they lose their arcade sparkle.

I've already dropped the star field, as there isn't a secondary background plane, although...maybe there would be enough cycles to or the maze on top of a starfield in ram with another mapper...dunno...

also, the sparkly text i've already decided will be replaced with nmi palette changes that flicker (for both the red text and the wizard of wor kill)

-Thom
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tepples »

Star Force makes its starfield with low-priority (attribute 2 bit 5 set, late in display list) sprites.
lidnariq
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by lidnariq »

Galaxian does the same. (It also twinkles the starfield by toggling the star sprites' X coordinate 128s bit every 8 vblanks)
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

Ah, didn't consider that. Thanks. :) I do have 16 sprites left over in my OAM allocation, and that might just work...will try that when I get to code. :)

-Thom
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

So, I decided to do an exercise to analyse the speech in Wizard of Wor. Found all the phrases, there are over 70:
Insert coin and game over mode :
1) Hey! Insert Coin!
2) Find me ...The Wizard of Wor.
3) I'm out of spite, ha ha ha ha!

Get ready or coin acceptance mode :
1) Get ready, worrior.
2) You better hope you don't find me, the Wizard of Wor.
3) Another coin for my treasure chest.
4) Ah good! My pets were getting hungry. Ha ha ha ha!
5) My worlings are very very hungry. Ha ha ha ha!
6) Welcome to my world of Wor.
7) So you've come to score in the world of Wor. Ha ha ha ha!
8) You're off to see the Wizard, the magical Wizard of Wor.

Dungeon start-ups :
1) Kill Worluk for double score.
2) You are in the dungeons of Wor.
3) I am the Wizard of Wor.
4) One bite from my pretties, and you'll explode, ha ha ha ha!
5) Worluk will escape through the door.
6) Watch the radar, worrior.
7) Thorwor is red, mean, and hungry for space food.
8) Remember, I'm the wizard, not you.
9) If you can't beat the rest, then you'll never get the best! Ha ha ha ha!
10) You'll never leave Wor alive! Ha ha ha ha!
11) If you destroy my babies, I'll pop you in the oven! Ha ha ha ha!
12) Burwor hasn't eaten anyone in months. Ha ha ha ha!
13) My babies breathe fire worrior.
14) I'll fry you with my lightning bolts.
15) Burwor, Garwor, and Thorwor will do you in.
16) My creatures are radioactive.

Bonus player awarded :
1) You'll get ...The Arena! Ha ha ha ha!
2) Another worrior for my babies to devour.
3) Keep going and you will find me.
4) A few more dungeons and you will be a Worlord.
5) Worrior fear, I draw near, each time I appear. Ha ha ha ha!
6) You won't have a chance for your dance worrior. Ha ha ha ha!
7) Now you're asking for trouble worrior.
8) Now I'm getting mad worrior.

First Garwor appears :
1) Now you get the heavyweights! Ha ha ha ha!
2) Garwor, go after them!
3) If you try any harder, you'll only meet with doom, ha ha ha ha!
4) If you get too powerful, I'll take care of you myself, ha ha ha ha!
5) My magic is stranger than your weapons, worrior.
6) Worrior, while you developed science, we developed magic.
7) Your bones will lie in the dungeons of Wor, ha ha ha ha!
8) Garwor and Thorwor, become, invisible! Ha ha ha ha!

Wizard kills worrior :
1) You've just been fried by the Wizard of Wor! Ha ha ha ha!
2) Bite the bolt worrior. Ha ha ha ha!
3) Wasn't that lightning bolt delicious? Ha ha ha ha!
4) And my teleporting spell can be even faster! Ha ha ha ha!
5) Now you know the taste of my magic, worrior.
6) Maybe you'll see me again worrior.
7) Your explosion was music to my ears! Ha ha ha ha!
8) I'll say it again, worrior fear, I draw near, each time I appear. Ha ha ha ha!

Worlord dungeon startups :
1) Worlord, be forewarned! You approach, The Pit!
2) Your path leads directly to The Pit! Ha ha ha ha!
3) Deeper, ever deeper into the dungeons of Wor.
4) Beware! You are in the Worlord dungeons!
5) Ah! You thought you could hide but I'm the dungeon master.
6) Thor Bur Gar! Dinner’s ready! Ha ha ha ha!
7) Hey! Your space boot's untied! Ha ha ha ha!
8) My beasts run wild in the Worlord dungeons. Ha ha ha ha!

Phrases for The Pit :
1) Now your only chance is your dance! Ha ha ha ha!
2) Are you fit, to survive The Pit? Ha ha ha ha!
3) Oops! I must have forgotten the walls! Ha ha ha ha!
4) Worlord, where are you going to hide now? Ha ha ha ha!

End of game :
1) Come back for more with the Wizard of Wor. Ha ha ha ha!
2) The dungeons of Wor await your return, worrior.
3) Deep in the caverns of Wor, you will meet me, worrior.
4) The Wizard of Wor thanks you.
5) You know you can do better, worrior.
6) Hurry back! I can't wait to do it again.
7) You can start anew, but for now you're through. Ha ha ha ha!
8) He he he ho ho ho ha ha ha! That was fun!

When you have reached the Worlord dungeons, the Wizard calls you Worlord, instead of worrior.
and I broke those down into individual words and ran the result through uniq and gathered the output with wc to get the total number of unique words:

Code: Select all

$ wc -l wor_words_uniq.txt
527 wor_words_uniq.txt
527 unique words. GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY! with each delta PCM word being approximately 500 to 800 bytes, I would need a pretty hefty map to do this right, and none of the existing players could really handle it...so it'd have to be custom....

not ruling it out...just making note of the magnitude of what needs to be stored. :)

-Thom

p.s. the Wizard is the ultimate troll.
lidnariq
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by lidnariq »

Wizard of Wor's hardware has a speech synthesis IC on it (the votrax). Maybe it makes more sense to use the DPCM hardware on a phoneme-by-phoneme basis?
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Myask
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by Myask »

I expect having "Wor" be one thing regardless would save a bunch of space. :P

Have you looked at the C64 port? [I haven't] It might have some graphical and audio insights. Might.
tschak909
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

lidnariq wrote:Wizard of Wor's hardware has a speech synthesis IC on it (the votrax). Maybe it makes more sense to use the DPCM hardware on a phoneme-by-phoneme basis?
The problem here is that unlike other speech chips of the time, the SC-01 phoneme selection uses diphones, and there is considerable logic wrapped up in the target diphone selection (seriously...I looked at the gate level schematic on the SC-01 many years ago and was flabberghasted that there was so much logic concentrated to this task, in such a teeny tiny die. It was a tour de force of highly concentrated logic).

I will revisit this later, I just wanted to try the easy experiments, first. :)

-Thom
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

As I thought about it, I was like, "Surely I could just take an SC-01-A and route it to an audio pin..." 5 minutes of looking and I realize, Nintendo didn't provide an audio pin for the NES on the cartridge bus.. boooooo..... (SERIOUSLY, I THOUGHT _EVERYBODY_ DID THAT!)

now, I know I could literally take the audio output, and route it to a cable where you could plug in the original audio cable and have the combined audio (in a sort of duct taped banana like stacking monstrosity), but that's getting into insanely ridiculous territory...

ugh :P WHY COULDN'T THEY HAVE JUST PUT THE DAMNED AUDIO PIN ON THE CARTRIDGE, INSTEAD OF THE EXPANSION BUS?!

-Thom

(Because they just haaaaaaaad to have those 10 pins for the CIC, didn't they?) :P :)

(and yeah, I know, they did put on on the cart bus on the famicom...what brain damage made Nintendo put it on the world's most unused connector?)

-Thom
Last edited by tschak909 on Sun Jul 09, 2017 3:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
na_th_an
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by na_th_an »

Infiniteneslives is developing a dongle you can put in the expansion bus to re-route the audio pin from the cartridge into the audio mixer, so maybe this isn't quite an unfeasible task in the near future.
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by lidnariq »

tschak909 wrote:(what brain damage made Nintendo put it on the world's most unused connector?)
Snarky: The SNES expansion port connector is pretty underused, too.

Serious: Nintendo didn't even think, at the time, that there was any purpose other than connecting the Disk System to the NES. They got better (hence why there's an almost-completely unused audio input on the DMG)
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

So, after days of constant experimentation and careful study, I think this is about as good as I can get the dungeon cavity:

Image

(I didn't turn on the R emphasis bit for this snippet)

This cavity produces enough for a 10x5 maze, which should be able to properly hold the sprites in both horizontal and vertical orientations. *cross-fingers*

You can see this and a few other screens in the attached test rom.
wow-titletest.nes
Testing graphic output to ensure proper screen fitting.
(24.02 KiB) Downloaded 238 times
Source code will always be available for all builds and releases @ github:
https://github.com/tschak909/wow

(updating first post to reflect this)

-Thom
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tschak909 »

Also, did a quick bit of music, although I will need to either pare this down for Famitone2, or use the full blown tracker (it uses vibrato/tremolo)..grrr...

-Thom
Attachments
wow.nsf
Test Wizard of Wor level entry music.
(6.03 KiB) Downloaded 206 times
tepples
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Re: WIP: Wizard of Wor

Post by tepples »

Pently can do vibrato, just not looping envelopes or portamento between two pitches.
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