CodeWalrus

In May 2002, I released Mana Force for the TI-83+, my first RPG to use an actual tilemap engine. In 2013, it was translated in English and that version received bug fixes and other changes. And now, in 2015, it will finally be in color!

(https://img.ourl.ca/ffmfnewscreenie1.gif) (https://img.ourl.ca/ffmfnewscreenie2.gif)
(https://img.ourl.ca/ffmfnewscreenie3.gif) (http://img.codewalr.us/menu.gif)
Screenshot thread: http://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=254.0

Although the original game worked on the 84+CSE (one of my only 83+ RPG that actually ran at all on that calculator), there were some display issues and the lack of any color made it a bit pointless to play on a color screen. Now it is receiving the Doors CSE 8.1 treatment, thanks to the built-in Celtic and xLIBC libraries.

Since this game code is a disaster (there's a Repeat instruction with 31 conditions and lots of spaghetti code), optimizing will probably come later, since the primary goal of this project is to really update the game so that it takes advantage of Celtic 2 color features. Nonetheless, here are the changes that have happened so far (newest additions in blue):

-First TI-OS menu replaced with custom one that appears directly in the title screen. Some options removed.
-Save slots reduced from 5 to 2 due to lower RAM (who needs that many on 1 calc, anyway?)
-Expanded the village to fill the entire home screen.
-Moved stuff around to take advantage of the larger screen
-Renamed Metamorphoses to Jobs
-Massive code cleanup (everything was in a single line of code since back then I coded on-calc and Goto took too long to reach errors otherwise)
-Removed many ClrHome commands and replaced them with a custom (sometimes temporary) screen erasing utility.
-Mana/Item prices decreased to accomodate the lower GP increase, but it takes longer to gain enough gold to buy them.
-Nut item renamed to walnut and Super mage class renamed to Wizard.
-Made intro text uppercase to save RAM
-Got rid of "Welcome to village of hope", as the intro text now mentions you must save that village instead of the kingdom of the same name.
-Decreased experience given per enemy to ensure next level requirement is never higher than 9999.
-Decreased gold given per enemy to 10 times lower its original amount.
-Battles
-Dungeon select screen
-Fix shop
-Replace entire map engine and make dungeons full screen
-Revamp in-game menu
-Replace every Disp command with Output
-Fix magic animations that used 3-bit color mode because the animations are not visible enough
-Remove all lbl and gotos from battle commands selection
-Add boss outro event or animation


Todo:

-Enemy balance (Dungeon 1 through 6, as well as enemies from dungeon 7 are done)
-Better ending
-Extra final boss maybe?

Regarding the TI-OS status bar being erased, I am using xLIBC to do that. To erase the busy indicator as well you must set the LCD to 160x240 mode then back to 320x240 without redrawing the status bar. This is why at the beginning the screen stretches up during a picosecond.

Anyway, enjoy!

Heh, 'looks nice at the moment! :p

Quick Edit : olol the filename!

Hehe thanks. As for the file name it's because back then I had the tendency to use the theta character in my file names. This caused problems around 2003-05 when TI started breaking compatibility with TI-Graph Link software. This version of the game will eventually ditch the theta character in all sub-program names.

Looks good! And i use a theta always to mark a program as source

Thanks. :)

One idea I had recently for that empty space at the top of the screen was using xLIBC text to fill it with an HUD. I could display the character level, HP, MP, Mana, experience needed for next level and gold pieces there. I could perhaps display the character class too. That would allow me to get rid of the in-game stats menu.

However, there is one problem: xLIBC number display routines only allows numbers from -9999 to 9999, so in order to display next level experience properly I need to either write a routine to split the number in half and to display it where it should or to edit the battle victory rewards and item costs so that you never need more than 9999 gold and 9999 experience. Changing experience requirements might prove to be problematic if they alter the game difficulty considerably.

That empty screen area would be very handy, though, because I can fit up to 76 characters there:

(https://img.ourl.ca/wabbitemu2.png)

Or you could make gold/exp harder to get? also wouldnt it just be gold/9999 and gold % 9999 to display it?

Or just *10 all the things! :p

Yeah that's what I meant by changing experience requirements actually. Enemies  would give much less experience in thw process as well.

Cool project. I'd divide every number that might go over by five or ten if I were you but I think that this is more of an opinion question.

The main issue is I need to ensure I still get gold and exp vs weak monsters. If I got enemies giving 1 exp and others 12 then if I add 1 to every enemy but divide by 10 one monster will give 1 exp and the other 2, which is where significant balance problems can arise.

You can always code a BigNum library (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic) and store your gold/XP in base 10000. And yeah that area would be handy for the HUD.

I will check how experience per level was calculated. If it was LV^3 like I think, then I'll just change requirements to LV^2.

For items, prices used to be like this without the Bargainer job equipped (items are 50% off with it):

Herb: 10 Gold
Nut: 100
Potion: 1000
Ether 10000

There was also no maximum of gold you could carry on you.

Now it will be the following:
Herb: 6
Nut: 50
Potion: 400
Ether: 2000

And the max amount of gold you can carry at a time will be 9999.

Mana will cost 3 GP to replenish instead of 10.


Also a minor update: I removed the Welcome to village of hope screen from the game and made the intro include mention of that village. I also made the entire intro uppercase because lowercase letters take twice more RAM. The 5th boss, which kept appearing at random locations on the screen, was also replaced and no longer moves. This was glitchy as hell and annoying anyway.


EDIT: Now instead of giving (EnemyLV*2)^2 experience points, enemies will give (EnemyLV*2)-1. Next level requirement is now CurrenLV^2 instead of CurrentLV^3. For gold, they will now give 5 times less the original amount.

EDIT2: Some speed improvements have occured, thanks to the custom screen clearing program now allowing partial clearing. Also, I am slowly moving most controls from (-)/ENTER/numpad  to 2nd/ALPHA/Fkeys, so that your fingers always remain at the top of the calc. Some cosmetic changes occured as well. You can see how the game looks like below and I also created a screenshot thread.

(https://img.ourl.ca/manaforcecolor2.gif)

I can't seem to get this to work on my calculator. It makes the program name instead of thetathetathetathetaMANA, in DoorsCSE it makes it thetathetathetathetaMANAJ. Yeah, nine characters. I can't do anything with it!!! When I try to open it from the menu, it opens Frogger???

Seems very strange. Have you considered backing your data up then reseting your RAM? I havent heard of such issue before.

Update: Some work on the HUD has been done tonight. It was finally implemented in the village and shops and now shows actual values rather than just placeholder text. Also, the HP and MP now shows in red if they're too low:

(https://img.ourl.ca/mfhud.gif)

It flickers, though, since text has to be stored in a string prior running the xLIBC text routine. tr1p1ea should probably change that in xLIBCE. >.< But it does the job well.

Update (small due to lack of time this weekend)

All sub programs renamed to get rid of all theta characters. This should eliminate some file sending problems.

Also some loading speed improvements in the village.


I'm thinking about replacing the entire map engine. Game is also going to be renamed to First Fantasy: Mana Force, as tribute to the fact it would be the first ever CSE RPG and also in reference to Final Fantasy series :P

Will there be sub programs in the final version? They always annoyed me so I tried to write my programs without them.

There will probably be some, unless Kerm or tr1p1ea fixed the appvar utilities in Celtic2CSE (DCSE wouldn't let me set appvars for some reasons, only sub-programs). Early versions of the game will be split in as many sub-programs as the original since the plan was to do the optimizing later, while later versions will try to merge as many as possible (within the extreme 84+CSE RAM constraints). Making an RPG this large in hybrid BASIC in just 1 file is impossible.

OK, cool. I'll make sure to download if I ever get a cse or ce.

Glad to hear. :D It won't be Reuben Quest nor Illusiat 13 in terms of features and gameplay but since this game was often overlooked in the past due to how long it took before an English translation happens (11 years of wait), this remake will probably help getting it more known :P.

Also, the game is now officially rebranded. See below:
(https://img.ourl.ca/ffmf.gif)

I also made it so that it turns the screen black after selecting something in the menu. It looked weird before because the game would freeze for 1 second then the HUD appeared above the title screen or something.

Doing fade ins/outs with Celtic2CSE text is a major PITA because you use two values ranging from 0 to 255 as opposed to RGB values from 0 to 31 (or 7) :banghead:.

Well, it looks really good anyway. How's it doing on file size right now and how big do you expect the final version to be?

Thanks. :D The size right now is a bit larger than the original (I think it's approximately 18KB) because of all ClrHome commands that got replaced with 9:prgmMFCH (custom screen clear that does any color rather than just white), the extra color commands and some adjusting for screen size differences. However when I replace the map engine I think size will go down significantly. I think I'll use strings instead of matrices too so it requires even fewer RAM.


EDIT: It turns out that if you use identical values for Celtic text colors, then you end up with xLIBC color palette. So it's better than I expected I guess and should make it easier to choose colors for stuff I guess.

Good news!

I finally managed to figure out how to erase the screen much faster without the glitchiness that ensued last night:

(http://img.codewalr.us/ffmffast.gif)

Basically, last night I tried to erase the screen using drawfilledrectangle instead of an Output command through a For loop. It was originally innefective because I got the dimensions wrong. Now I got them right (although I have to work around certain glitches as you'll notice in the gif above, which involves Output() drawing stuff 1 pixel off. The glitch is basically an horizontal line that is being left behind below the HUD. To work around it the text I display at the top of the screen must fill the entire screen width, resulting in minor file size increase. This won't be a problem anymore in future versions, though, if I decide to no longer make village menus full screen.). Using draw shape is made possible by the fact that Celtic2CSE colors are not just limited to the ones on Cemetech wiki and that using the same value for both parameters basically gives you the xLIBC palette.

Anyway, notice the big difference O.O

Wow this looks way more smooth (in terms of color) than an Basic Games I have seen for the CSE. I will be sure to try this out when it is realeased!

Thanks. My goal was to make the most out of Celtic2CSE's det(12 command. I wanted to use as much ASCII as possible for this game in particular to keep it truer to the original so I have to be creative with colors. The village turned out better than I expected, though. It reminds me of some early NES or Atari 7800 games.

Not much work on this last week, but a few minutes ago I just started moving walking/map code inside the main program. Some code will remain separate for now (and archived) due to lack of RAM. The ending was also moved to the main program for the time being. This eliminated one sub-program. The main file is over 10 KB. I will soon write code to launch the map data, the in-game menu and battles from archive.

Can't wait! :D

Thanks. :D

Some more work has been done tonight on this, although more backend stuff. I scanned the entire game for which real variable was actually in use in-game and what each list used were used for, because it has been 13 years so I needed to make sure. Back then, I used mostly real variables to store game data, sometimes missing one or two, so I didn't take any chance and included all the ones from A to W in save files. With tonight's update, variable H and P are no longer included in game saves.

However, in longer terms, there is still A LOT of work to be done, because look at how the game was setup in early 2002 (the lists were added afterward):

[spoiler]A=LV
B=Current HP
C=Current MP
D=Job equipped
E=Enemy HP
F=Current Mana
G=Gold
H=
I=Dungeon 1 completion
J=Dungeon 2 completion
K=Dungeon 3 completion
L=Dungeon 4 completion
M=Dungeon 5 completion
N=Dungeon 7 completion
O=Enemy LV (dungeon-wide)
P=
Q=Enemy HP
R=Enemy ID/random encounters
S=Damage caused
T=Item 1
U=Item 2
V=Item 3
W=Item 4
X=Animation/For loops/temporary vars
Y=Animation/For loops/temporary vars
Z=Animation/For loops/temporary vars/Getkey
Theta=Animation/For loops/temporary vars
|N= Char Y pos in room
I%= Char X pos in room
PV= Y position in dungeon
PMT= X position in dungeon
FV= Dungeon ID
L1(1)= Char Y pos in room (copied to |N once dungeon map data is loaded)
L1(2)= Char X pos in room (copied to I% once dungeon map data is loaded)
L1(3)= Y position in dungeon (copied to PV once dungeon map data is loaded)
L1(4)= X position in dungeon (copied to PMT once dungeon map data is loaded)
L1(5)= Dungeon ID (copied to FV once dungeon map data is loaded)
L6= Temporarily used to copy loaded save data into its respective set of variables.

Former vars:
L2(1)= Battle mode (was removed in color remake)
L1(6)= Game difficulty (now only normal difficulty is available. Besides, even in normal mode it's not that hard)[/spoiler]

I might also expand the intro with some prelude text like in early FF games. New Game + mode (like in Chrono Trigger) was also scrapped since this game is now part of an entirely different series and there wasn't any point in this particular game to start a new game + other than doing dungeons in any order and the ending will most likely be expanded a little bit, since it was basically non-existent in the original game.

I saw your post about the text on Cemetech. That animation looks pretty cool!

Thanks. :D Did you check the other screenshot I posted in the other topic on CodeWalrus? It shows the text centered like in the NES game.

The latest screenie looks magnificent! :D.

Yup, I just saw that one. Again, I can't wait and if you need a beta tester just PM me!

Thanks. For now I should be fine, but if I add many extras then I might need some help to test the final product in case some bugs slipped by. Plus since the amount of experience and gold changed, the difficulty was changed as well, so I might need help to make sure the game is well balanced (it was meant to have some grinding though)

It appears that Celtic BufSpriteSelect sprite routine does actually support drawing outside the regular graph screen boundaries. Basically, instead of the screen boundaries ranging from (0,0) to (320,240), they range from (-27,-46) to (269,170). I'll see what I can do with this. I might actually be able to sneak in some sprite-based menu borders in the game while still keeping it full resolution. :P

Ok, so menu border idea scrapped, because it was a bit too slow to be worth it. Now I worked on reorganizing some of the game routines so that I can launch them separately and get rid of some Lbl and Goto commands. It should also hopefully make it easier to switch to any point in the program, such as when you die. The title screen was altered a bit too: The copyright is now in a single line, as I felt it was too big and intrusive before.

You may want to use a list for the dungeon completed or you may be able to store the maximum dungeon into one variable. I'd use a list for all the player stats but it'd be very easy to hack.

Edit. Wow I'm behind on this thread. This was supposed to refer to the variable list on the previous page.

No problem. I will most likely use a list, since the game isn't linear. The rest will also be moved to lists in future builds.

Thanks btw :D

UPDATE: Dungeons are underway! :)

They are far from finished, though, so they're not full screen yet and the only battle-related thing that is complete right now is the battle intro animation (it will just glitch out after the screen goes black):

(http://djomnimaga.codewalr.us/ffmfdungeon.gif)

Also, since neither jsTIfied nor WabbitEmu emulates the TI-84+CSE 3-bit color mode properly, I decided to use screen inverting like in FFII and III for the NES instead for the time being in the battle intro.

Looks cool :o

Thanks :D I hope to be able to make dungeons full screen soon.

That looks damn cool DJ, nice to see this progressing.

Yeah, this seems going in the right direction. Shame that we can't get such results on Prizm BASIC though.

Mmmh... Parsing...

Quote from: Eiyeron on March 15, 2015, 09:33:23 AM
Mmmh... Parsing...

To TI 84+ (Monochrome) Basic :P

Quote from: Eiyeron on March 15, 2015, 09:33:23 AM
Yeah, this seems going in the right direction. Shame that we can't get such results on Prizm BASIC though.

Mmmh... Parsing...

On the PRIZM, however, you can use colors on the homescreen with the Locate command. On the 84+CSE we need a third-party lib. The only PRIZM downside for this game would be that there would be no background color behind text, so it would just be the letters that would be colored. From experience, it's still possible to make something look good, though, not only because the colors available are good but also there are many more characters not available on the Z80 calcs.

Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on March 15, 2015, 10:10:32 AM

Quote from: Eiyeron on March 15, 2015, 09:33:23 AM
Mmmh... Parsing...

To TI 84+ (Monochrome) Basic :P

Er, FF:MF already exists in that form (as Mana Force), and the French version came out almost 13 years ago: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/453/45377.html  :P

i 'd try it out, if i knew french :(

There is an English version as well. The French version is actually outdated compared to the English one, since I stopped maintaining it. The English one came out in 2013 and fixes bugs, replaces most magic spell names and other stuff (eg Fire 2 was changed to something else), while the CSE remake expands the story, replaces more stuff, increases difficulty and gets rid of some unimportant features to accomodate the smaller CSE RAM. Also, unlike the 84+ versions, the CSE version is no longer part of its original series, hence the name change.

Ooh cool =D i'll try it out one day :3

Keep in mind that it's very ancient in terms of DJ code quality. Just the map engine is like 6 KB :P

Lol wow that sounds huge. :P

Indeed. If I rewrote everything I bet it would be halved.

Also not much progress this weekend due to being busy and yesterday's internet outage. By the way text will be added before and after battles with possibly an animation when you get a new job/skill set.

Hehe, optimizing old code is quite fun! :p And yay for updates!

Nah it isn't. :P At least for me. In some cases, such as Mana Force, it takes weeks before I finally understand my old code and in Metroid II's case, I had to rewrite everything because I just was unable to figure out what my old code did. :P

That's the fun in reverse engineering! :p YOu gotta find out what's happening and how it's happening! ;)

I never had luck in reading other people's code or my older code, tho. Nowadays this is why sometimes I just write down what variables I use and for non-BASIC stuff I also comment my code.

That's a skill you actually have to learn, it's really not easy at all to bend his mind to shape it to the thoughts of someone else.

Oh, trust me, I did try to learn it. My learning abilities are severely impaired when I have habits to change, though (blame autism?). So I pretty much gave up on it (same with ASM/C/etc)

Anyway, back on topic, since this is part of a new series where future games will most likely use a battle layout like Reuben Quest, do you think for this MF remake I should change the battles to use a new layout or should I stick to that Mario RPG perspective?

We have already talked about your languages issues and i'm not forcing you againg.

But back on topic, I've got an idea : do the reverse thing : you have a assembler engine done by someone else (say by Soru, juju, me whatever) and you are in charge of the Basic script. Games like FF use sort of scripts to manage battle events or things like that.

THat will probably be what I'll do with FFII. Since it will most likely have a 84+CE version due to the CSE being discontinued, I'll most likely need an ASM walking engine since in BASIC that would be too slow compared to the CSE.

UPDATE: Skills for the Mage, Wizard and Dark Paladin have been implemented, although there are still some display issues going on. The magic animations were enhanced with colors as follows:

(http://img.ourl.ca/mage.gif) (http://img.ourl.ca/wizard.gif) (http://img.ourl.ca/dkpaladin.gif)

In addition to that, the battle layout was stretched to fit the screen.

EDIT: All magic skills for the Master job are implemented as well. The final spell was entirely replaced with something epic :P.

The last animation is quite long (the appearing pixel one) but the result of all animation is very good. Nice work DJ!

Thanks. :D I might actually shorten the lenght of the animation you are talking about. I also need to investigate on that display glitch with the Wizard magic sets for Fire/Ice-based magic, because ice and fire becomes green for about 0.25 seconds when the screen fades back from red/blue.

Also I notice that the animations that uses 3-bit mode aren't easily visible so I might scrap that and just use different effects for them.

By the way, to keep data to a minimum, enemy colors are dynamically chosen like their HP and other stats. The color for regular enemies is chosen based on their ID and the dungeon you're in. I made it so that enemies in the Fire Dungeon have brown, red, orange and other similar colors. Bosses color are entirely based on the dungeon.


Also I think I just rediscovered a bug from 13 years ago that allows you to fight the first boss over and over. I am unsure, though, and this wasn't an issue in the original game but since I wanted to add animations and text in this version I would prefer that this doesn't happen anymore. I'm gonna have to track the bug down. >.<

Working on full screen maps now:

(http://img.codewalr.us/fsmaps.gif)

Collision detection will be a major PITA I think, though, because due to the way the new map engine is done I need to rely on xLIBC pixel test, which only tests half of the screen at a time. I'll need to make sure that when Yam is walking on the right side of the screen that the xLIBC GRAM is set to pxl-test on that side of the screen. Hoping it works as intended.

The reason why the map engine is set akwardly is because I want the floor to be a different color than the walls, so I cannot just display a fullscreen string of characters in one go. On the other hand, the way I am doing it now is a bit faster than in the original game.

Major update since last post: Full-screen dungeons are done. The map engine was almost completely replaced. Instead of using a second matrix for the current room, pixel-test is being used via xLIBC and the map is drawn using concatenated Str1's. Result: The map engine is now over 3 KB smaller (although that space gain was quickly lost via many enhancements to boss events). The map engine is also much faster now.

See screenshot thread for new eye-candy!

Very cool. 3kb of optimization is very good, its nice to see that space going towards boss battles.

Thanks. Also on top of that, in the oriignal game about 4 extra KB of RAM was required during map loading because of how large matrices are. Now no extra space is required beyond the main matrix that contains the dungeon layout because individual rooms no longer use any data.

That's very impressive. 7kb was the amount of archive left on my calculator so I understand what a big difference it makes. Good luck on further optimization.

Thanks again. That said archive was never a problem for this game compared to RAM. Not that the game had troubles running right now, but requiring this much RAM just for a 2002 RPG remake that still looks similar to the original would have been weird. :P It also makes it much easier to debug.

This is shaping up real nice DJ :) it looks amazing :D

I do not have a new screenshot, but there will most likely be one soon since I am editing the menu program since yesterday. Also, most in-game text was changed to lowercase now. In addition to that, most dungeons, as well as 1 magic spell, were renamed. Instead of X-Flare it is now called Omega.

Also, the shop now shows how many of each item you got.

Sounds cool. I like how it is coming \/

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on March 24, 2015, 12:20:05 AM
(http://img.codewalr.us/fsmaps.gif)

The in-game menu is finally done!

(http://img.codewalr.us/menu.gif)

As you notice it's very different from the original game: Instead of a TI-OS menu (that screwed Celtic up anyway) where you select options and where you always land back, you now land straight in the item section. But here's the major difference: Now you can jump straight from one section to another using the left and right arrows! :D

And of course, other changes occured beforehand including replacing Disp commands, removing stuff made redundant by the HUD and getting rid of Lbl and Goto's. The only sub-program that still uses Lbl and Goto's is the battle command select one.

Wow
This looks so amazing
How have I not noticed this before?

Why are you updating the whole HUD? Can't you just update the part it needs to be?

Quote from: Duke "Tape" Eiyeron on March 26, 2015, 08:14:04 AM
Why are you updating the whole HUD? Can't you just update the part it needs to be?

It doesn't look like he does to me but it may be my phone lagging. It looks like he just hits two of the options in succession.

Yeah doesnt look like it to me either :/

Quote from: CKH4 on March 26, 2015, 12:14:15 PM

Quote from: Duke "Tape" Eiyeron on March 26, 2015, 08:14:04 AM
Why are you updating the whole HUD? Can't you just update the part it needs to be?

It doesn't look like he does to me but it may be my phone lagging. It looks like he just hits two of the options in succession.

Depending of what I need to update I will either update the first  half, either the second half or both.

.1->X:prgmMFCH //updates the first half
.2->X:prgmMFCH //second half
.3->X:prgmMFCH //both
0.01->X:prgmMFCH //displays battle sprites
4->X:255->theta:prgmMGCH //erases lines of text 1 through 4 with white (X can be a value from 1 to 10 and theta a value from 0 to 255)
4.1->X:255->theta:prgmMFCH //erases lines of text 2 through 5 with white (X can be a value from 1.1 to 9.1. It doesn't matter what is the decimal part as long as there's one)

The reason why I am updating an entire half at a time is because xLIBC text is transparent and displaying a small rectangle between each part of the text one by one would be a major PITA. I could always try but I am not certain it would improve much, other than reducing flickering. I wish that xLIBC had an option to overwrite the background for text.

Update:

All Lbl and Goto instructions have now been eliminated from the game. The last program that still had them was the battle command selection. I still need to do some testing to ensure that everything is operational, though.

Great! When is an expected release?

Thanks. I don't know yet. A demo  is entirely possible, though, considering the basics are done. But I would prefer polishing some stuff first and release a full game since not that much needs to be done. I'll also need to play through the game to ensure that it's not too easy nor too hard. And obviously the final version will have extra boss event animations.


As for progress, I have managed to shrink down the game to 5 sub-programs:
(http://img.codewalr.us/ffmfsize.png)

Basically, prgmMFBM is both the battle and in-game menu now, while prgmMFCH involves anything related to HUD, map or battle layout rendering. Those used to be roughly 7-8 sub-programs. A slight speed drop occured by merging stuff into MFCH but it's not that bad.

I dont think a demo is all that good of an idea
Leave us waiting and dying
EDIT: besides, theres the non color version right?

Yes but there are quite a lot of changes since that version came out. :P

Well, that makes sense xD

On a side note, for damage and dynamic enemy stats I was considering replacing them with static data or with dynamic stats from one of the Illusiat games. Also, some enemies might become immune to certain elements or even regular attacks (in the original game, only boss 5 is immune to regular attacks)


Also, the final boss event sprite is now pink and dungeon 3 now shows the floor you're on on the walls to clear up confusion. That dungeon has 99 straight rooms so people might have thought it's an infinite path.

Would it be possible to split numbers by, for example 21642 and like divide that by 1000, and do whatever to get 21, and yeah, blah blah blah
(sounded better earlier when I thought of it)

Could you make the sub programs into AppVars for the sake of cleenlyness? Or am I not getting the idea of AppVars right? :P

You can't run basic from an appvar (Well, you can theoretically, it just takes some ASM h4x)

Nice to see you got it this small. :D

Quote from: Unicorn on March 27, 2015, 06:00:42 PM
Could you make the sub programs into AppVars for the sake of cleenlyness? Or am I not getting the idea of AppVars right? :P

If you can figure out how to do it with Celtic libs then tell me, because on the DCS wiki there is absolutely no documentation about how to convert an appvar to a program nor copying code from an appvar to a program.

Quote from: jamesguessis on March 27, 2015, 04:32:42 PM
Would it be possible to split numbers by, for example 21642 and like divide that by 1000, and do whatever to get 21, and yeah, blah blah blah
(sounded better earlier when I thought of it)

You might need to rephrase because I don't really understand what you mean. Sorry D:

Quote from: Streetwalrus on March 27, 2015, 11:10:55 PM
Nice to see you got it this small. :D

Thanks. To be honest I'm really surprised at the size. The game was about 25 KB large just a week ago or so when I still used the old 16x8 map engine. Considering the many extra commands required to clear the screen in this version of the game (since I can't use ClrHome) and the extras, I am surprised it went back under 18 KB so far. I'm betting it will grow much larger soon, though, as I add new features.

Nevermind
Its too hard to explain
I believe it would work though
Just no idea how

On a side note, I forgot to mention something about this version of the game: Unlike in the original, now when you defeat a boss, you automatically exit the dungeon you were in afterward, just like after most boss fights in Final Fantasy and Star Ocean series. That way, you no longer need to backtrack all the way back to the start.

As always, you can save your game anywhere, but when reloading your game you will restart at the village like in Zelda, Illusiat 8 and Illusiat 9. That remains the only way to exit dungeon 6 (Labyprog).


EDIT: Another thing is that I am trying to fix a balance issue that made the original game render early magic spells obsolete just 1 dungeon after acquiring them. First of all, the original lacked any elemental property whatsoever,  so I'm gonna fix that by adding fire, ice, bolt, holy and darkness elements. Also, another issue is that the second job is basically an improved version of job 1. In the remake, the stronger set of magic will simply have stronger elemental properties, so that instead of taking half damage vs certain elements, enemies will just take 0 damage vs that magic set. So in certain dungeons or vs certain enemies, having the weaker set equipped might be more ideal. For non-elemental magic, the issue is that many spells will remain redundant even after the changes above, so what I'm gonna do is that certain spells like Mini will ignore enemy defense or have damage that is entirely based on your HP or MP.

To take advantage of colors,  when you completed 5 dungeons, the village will now have different colors, sign of something bad about to happen and that you must complete the final quest soon. I cannot test if it works ATM, tho, since I'm on mobile.

Ok, so there have been some changes regarding what magic spells are available in the game and the behavior of one item, as an attempt to make battles more varied and more challenging:

-The Blitz spell (Level 2 lightning magic) has been replaced with Poison. This spell will work against every enemy 100% of the time, but it won't cause a very large amount of damage.
-The Flash spell (Level 3 lightning magic) has been renamed to Blitz. It remains identical to Flash.
-The Aura spell animation was replaced, because the old one was too hard to see.
-Display issues with Flare and Blizzard have been fixed
-Enemies can now cast Poison and Psy, depending of the dungeon you're in. They have no max HP so with the Psy HP absorb spell they can stack it up beyond what they start the battle with.
-The herb item now heals poison. It still heals 500 HP, but by healing poison it will at least not be obsoleted late game.
-When poisoned, the text that says LV and your character class in the HUD will turn red and say poison instead of your class.

Elemental properties and new damage formulas have yet to be implemented, though. See other thread for new screenies!

Updates for tonight (finally):

-All offensive magic spell damage formulas have been replaced
-Strong against element properties implemented. Tier 1 elemental spells will cause half damage to enemies that are strong against and no extra damage if enemy is weak against. Tier 2 spells have much stronger elemental properties, so they'll deal 0 damage vs enemies that are strong against, but unlike tier 1 spells, if the enemy is weak against that element, they'll take twice as much damage (except with the Aura spell).
-Potions now heal 7000 HP instead of 5000. At 5000 they were pretty much worthless late game, especially considering how much money they cost compared to walnuts (that lets you heal 100 MP and use two Cure spells that almost heals all your HP).

I need to test for balance, though, now.

It isn't really a port anymore nor a remake, it's absolutely an upgrade, you could almost take this as a new game (if we opt out the story and the map)! :p

Quote from: Duc "Scotch" Eiyerom on April 01, 2015, 08:22:59 AM
It isn't really a port anymore nor a remake, it's absolutely an upgrade, you could almost take this as a new game (if we opt out the story and the map)! :p

I agree
And this upgrade is absolutely amazing

Upgrade would probably not be the word, as it would just mean the game going one version up while remaining the same overall. I would say it's a blend of a remake and a new game. The same dungeon and village layout remains, as well as most elements from the original storyline, but a lot of things were changed, such as magic behavior, enemy/item balance, etc.

Basically, if someone had made a walkthrough/strategy guide to beat the first game and find secrets, then battle strategy would probably not work with this version and vice-versa.

And thanks :D

It's like a sequel with the same story, I suppose.
Anyway, looking really great!

Nah it's more a rebranded game starting a new series, I guess. For example, if there was to be a FFII game it wouldn't have anything to do with the 2003 Mana Force 2 game.


Also some updates:
-Enemies in the first dungeon are now level 1 instead of 2 and each level requires 1 extra experience point.
-Fixed bug causing regular attacks to ignore enemy defense.
-The first enemy has been nerfed
-Same for the first boss
-When equipping a mage-based job, your attack power is lower. For example, mage causes 1.5 times less physical damage, wizard twice less, dark paladin 2.5 times and master 3 times.
-You now start the game with 20 gold.
-Bargainer has now been replaced with thief, to prevent people from equiping the job just to buy cheap items then unequipping it back immediately afterward. Basically, instead of making items twice less expensive, you will now get double the amount of gold at the end of battles.
-It is now possible to switch back to the Fighter job. That job was useless in the first game, but now that mage jobs reduces your attack power, you might want to switch back in some occasions until you acquire the Warrior (double attack power) or Thief (gets twice as much gold in battle) jobs. Also, the fighter job is now the only job in the game with which regular attacks never miss.

Another big update: The 6th boss (the one that was harder than the final boss) has been entirely reprogrammed. He now uses Mini, then when he has less than 8000 HP, he starts using Poison as well. But his Mini attack causes over 8000 HP damage, meaning that you can pretty much do nothing during the entire fight unless you figure out a strategy around this. Like all enemies in this dungeon, the boss is immune to all elements, so only regular attacks, poison, mini and omega will work. This fight is a major example of how this remake now incorporates strategy elements. He gives the thief job, which doubles the amount of gold you receive per battle, as well as 9999 exp and 9999 gold.

You need to beat at least 5 bosses in the game in order to access the final dungeon. There isn't any reward if you get all 6 jobs but I guess if you finish the game with 9999 gold, LV 99, 9 items of each and beat all 6 bosses, then you sort-of 100%'ed the game.

Yay looking amazing!</English>

Quote from: tr1p1ea on April 02, 2015, 03:39:39 AM
Yay looking amazing!</English>

Lol the French news was an April fools joke so you can stick to English from now on. :P But thanks.

Right now I am still editing stuff as I play through the game. Everything seems operational so far, but some of the early dungeons or bosses were incredibly hard, while the 4th boss was too easy. Dungeon 5 is where you can start grinding for levels easily, but it's really in dungeon 6 that you need to do it for a while. That dungeon serves no other purpose, so it's best that you just wander around in every room twice or three times to get ready for the final dungeon. In the last three dungeons, the experience rate suddenly skyrockets so you'll level up much faster.


Once I have played through all dungeons, only two things will remain to be done, then hopefully I can get this game on ticalc.org. :)

Nice! Looks like you're gonna win the CSE RPG race. But I don't mind, if I were to rush Solius it would turn out like Source Seekers. XD
Contrary to what you said on IRC (yeah I saw that), I'm trying to take Solius a little slower, because when I rush a big project I tend to make mistakes. This is a much more worthy CSE RPG, worthy of the "First" title like so many Youtube commenters crave :P . I can't wait to put this on my calc so I can have an excuse to take it everywhere now. "I have my calculator because I'm playing an RPG on it!"

Aah ok. Good luck with your game and please make sure to backup often. I use SourceCoder but I make frequent copies on my two hard drives. If you screw up with xLIBC this can crash your calc.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 02, 2015, 06:05:03 PM
Aah ok. Good luck with your game and please make sure to backup often. I use SourceCoder but I make frequent copies on my two hard drives. If you screw up with xLIBC this can crash your calc.

Thanks! I will definitely remember to back it up. I think I'm actually due for a full RAM + Arc backp. By "this"

Quote from: 123outerme on April 02, 2015, 05:00:01 PM. This is a much more worthy CSE RPG...

I meant FF:MF. Just to be clear. :)

The game has grown quite a bit in size tonight. This is the result of the final battle aftermath being implemented. In the original game, once you beat the final boss, Yam says he got him, then the game ends abruptly with the worst possible ending imaginable. However, in the remake, you're still not done in your quest yet.

So yeah, the ending is underway right now but I cannot share much due to spoilers. You learn about Yam's origins, though.

A new job has been added as well, which lets you use all 4 first jobs simultaneously in battle (basically, all 16 magic spells, split between 4 options in an extra menu).

Once the final battle is 100% done, I'll be able to finish the entire ending, which will be short but at least present. :P And I still need to test the optional dungeon for balance issues.

Game is now 23.3 KB with 6 sub-programs (soon to be 7). This should end under 30 KB. With just elements from the original game this would have been under 20 KB easily, but the new additions and story expansion led to the file size skyrocketing. Hopefully people won't mind if they want a calc RPG.

Also due to the way the new map engine works, I could probably implement even more stuff such as NPCs or map objects if I wanted to. I would probably just need to use decimals in the map data with iPart and stuff.

Also, for the final job that lets you use all magic, it will only let you use a set of magic if you have the job that they come with. For example, if you skipped the 4th game boss then you will not be able to use the 4th magic set.

It's out! File available in the downloads section at http://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=375.0 and uploaded on ticalc.org!

Thanks for the support guys. Make sure to report any issue if you find any (it shouldn't, but we never know)

Its on Cemetech too?

I still need to upload it there. I had to go eat some food since it was kinda late. :P

Congrats for the v1.0! :D

Thanks :D

Yay, I can't wait to play it.

Just as an head up: archived calculator files still takes RAM. So even if you do a RAM Clear before installing the game, you should still delete some archived files like GB ROMs and unused highscore appvars so you have enough RAM to run the game. It's kinda like with Gemini 3D right now, but not as bad RAM-wise. I'll see if I can fix this in future builds.

How much RAM? because the only thing i can think of that''s using RAM is the VAT table

Me too, IIRC it's only for referencing them in the VAT.

Yeah and that takes only like 14 bytes per item or something like that. Hard to fill your whole ram with

Yeah, but one penny unspent is one penny earned.

Yeah it's the VAT that is the problem. Unicorn had like 150 sub-programs, appvars and other files in his calculator archive, which is why he didn't have enough RAM to run the game even after a RAM clear.

But don't worry, I just fixed that issue now. Here comes Version 1.0.1 :D

Changelog:
-All sub-programs renamed to shorter names. Please delete the old ones.
-Now only 1 sub-program has to remain in RAM (MF.8xp, which used to be MFCH.8xp)
-There is one more sub-program now, resulting from the split of the menu and battles.
-Ending text is now faster.

Hopefully this should reduce RAM issues now.

Download: http://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=375

Das me!
I actually deleted all of my files, and I still couldn't run the second and third dungeon. :/

I played it for a bit yesterday, and it was quite cool :D
After the third battle or something i forgot which way i was heading though  ;D

Haha yeah that's Mana Force for you. :P It's worse in the first dungeon and the final one, though, because most other dungeons go in one direction. The final dungeon and dungeon 2 have a lot of dead-ends, though (sometimes you only reach the end of the path after 5-6 rooms)

I wonder if anyone will ever beat the boss in the 7th dungeon :trollface:

So yeah, if xLIBCE and Celtic2CSE become things, then a CE version of this game would use just 2 sub-programs. A lot of xLIB stuff would have to be edited, though, since xLIBCE most likely won't use the same GRAM buffer layout used in xLIBC. I am still not 100% sure if an HP Prime version will ever happen, but if it does, then the HUD, text boxes and menus would be graphical, with borders like Final Fantasy and the game would most likely use 160x120 resolution. I am also unsure if an actual HUD would be used. (It's possible that outside battles it won't show up while walking, only when stopping moving)

There is now a "sprite" sheet available for FF:MF:

(http://img.codewalr.us/ffmfsprites.png)

Although they are mostly just ASCII characters from the TI-OS, I made this so that if the game is ported to the HP Prime it is still possible to keep the same graphical layout. The text boxes and magic animations will most likely be different, though.

If I decide to enhance the graphics, then I can simply replace the sprites with graphical 12x20 ones (some are actually different sizes) then add an option to switch between old and new graphics.

Cool! So there's gonna be an HP Prime version maybe?

Or a PC version :P

Quote from: Unicorn on July 27, 2015, 04:13:14 AM
Cool! So there's gonna be an HP Prime version maybe?

Yep, but there will be some differences, most notably the HUD, menus, text boxes, the copyright, magic animations and perhaps some other minor things. There will also most likely be scrolling or Zelda-like map-to-map transitions.

It's also possible that the final battle background will scroll like in Final Fantasy IV (it was static in the CSE version of FF:MF due to speed constraints)

Oh yeah, scrolling would be nice! :)

Indeed! Maybe some of the background graphics effects could be made cooler too, since the prime is more powerfull

Yeah a full on sprites version?

My ideas were to have some wavy screen effects for fire animations and perhaps other animations with gradients or lines animations. I might also use MacBernick's translucent circles routine for some magic animations to have stuff like on the SNES.

Very cool sounding :)