ZXombies: Dead Flesh

[catweazle]

Hi John - re: your previous comment (0x5e26: ld ix, 0x5e38 must be 0x5e26: ld ix, 0x5e50) - is that still an issue? Its working ok for me on ZXSpin & Fuse, although my speccy is in the attic so I've not tested yet on real hardware

Cheers!

[John]

In some emulators, accelerated loading ignores the block type and loads the header. In general, this is an emulator error and on a real machine this will work correctly.

[Admin]

This is actually a very good surprise! Very interesting concepts like escorting the survivors, different type of zombies, freedom to move in different levels on the screen, breakable stuff, and also 128K music, well done! I have rescued 2 in my first go, will try later

I just have a question, looks like there is a little incompatibility with the +2A models, right? As in the menu the main title appears corrupt and with weird colors.

Congrats and thanks for participating!

[rmartins]

Very nice game ...
Lots of action, and zombies

Nice walk animations...

Nice to have options, readily available at any momment, during play.
It also works as pause feature

I personaly would prefer the person to follow us a little bit closer.
Sometimes the person gets stuck on sharp corners, apparently because it follows us from too far (my own guess).

After some more play, the horizontal follow distance seems fine, it's the vertical follow distance, that could be one position shorter. Sometimes it looks like we are stearing a big rig truck, by having to do large radius curves, to pass ome corners.

I'm not sure I got exactly how levers work.
There seems to be a count down, but "action", does not always trigger it, or I'm not sure exactly how to do it.
We just need to be standing there and pressing "action" ?
Or do we need to move while pressing "action" ?

TIP:It would nice if the lever had a couple of intermediate frames.

Cool game, with nice Graphics and SFX.
Congrats!


NOTE: I got a crash on the third lever, the one on the bottom of a screen, with 2 RED explosive barrels, and some horizontal yellow sand bag walls.

EDIT: Standing and waiting, seems to always work, but takes ages. Hard to stand still for so much time, when the pace is crowling with zombies, and you are out of amunition

But some levers, don't seem to work. I'm probably missing something.

[jerri]

Please fix the loader

here is a wrong adress

5E26 DD21385E ld ix,5E38 here is a wrong adress

5E2A 111100 ld de,0011
5E2D 3EFF ld a,FF
5E2F 37 scf
5E30 CD5605 call 0556
5E33 DD21505E ld ix,5E50

5E37 11C8A1 ld de,A1C8 <<it kills this part of loader
5E3A 3EFF ld a,FF
5E3C 37 scf
5E3D CD5605 call 0556
5E40 C3505E jp 5E50
5E43 00 nop

[John]

Jerri, the loader is not written correctly, but it works on real machine. In this case, the problem is in the Unreal and Spectaculator.
You know what it means ld a, 255 in the loader?

[catweazle]

Thanks guys! I have fixed the loader now & updated the .tap, looks like I forget to relocate the address when I had to change the entrypoint to the game.

I've repro'd the +2A paging issue, looking into that now also. Cheers for the heads-up.

About the lever pulling: the idea is that you have to hold down ACTION key when over the lever, and the activation delay is deliberate to add to the zombie-survival tension!

[rmartins]

I also noticed, that I sometimes, seem to get stuck, because our brain is counting with the fake perspective, so if my feet can pass, I should be able to pass.

This is what a player assumes, but the issue is that the full player sprite needs to fit.
At first it is was not obvious, but after a few tries, I found that to be the reason.

I understand, if this is being done, to avoid color clash with the surroundings.
Just not sure if it's very intuitive, for a normal player (non programmer).

For example "Robin Hood" allows the head/body to overlap with scenery, exactly to avoid this.

[catweazle]

Thanks for the feedback!

One of the reasons I didn't want to make the buddy survivor follow any closer, is because I'm XOR'ing the sprites to the screen - and as soon as we get an overlap with 2 sprites things start to look messy..  When the baddies overlap the player this is ok, since that's usually pretty brief.  but I did experiment with closer survivor following, and it didn't look very good with him overlapping the player much of the time.

Regarding the fake perspective.. yeah I totally agree, and I remember Robin of the Wood well - one of my favourite 128k-enhanced games.  That game did it really well, but I don't think it would work too great with the attributes & graphics of this game.  It would add quite a lot of extra complexity to the sprite routines too, as your feet would also need to pass behind the roofs of buildings in the opposite situation - so the code would have to detect and clip the sprites here.  I think the forced perspective is just a quirk of the game!  Also, the mismatch in size between the sprites and the buildings.. a bit of artistic license is being applied, lol! 


I've not managed to reproduce the crash bug which somebody reported, it must be extremely rare.  But I'm currently trying to track down a glitch with the explosions which causes some attribute blocks to sometimes be left behind.  Its a tricky one, but doesn't impact gameplay.

I am completely stumped as regards the +2A/+3 paging issue, which causes the 'ZXOMBIES' logo to become corrupted in the front-end and in-game pause screen.  It must be some +2A/+3 incompatibility since it works ok on the (emulated) toast-rack.  I have ensured that the paging mode remains in Normal mode instead of Special, and it's especially odd since the paging of the 128k music in bank 4 works fine.  I will continue to investigate, but if anybody has any clues I'd be glad to hear (might open up a thread on WOS about it).  Again, it doesn't impact gameplay thankfully 

Cheers!
CW

[catweazle]

Hi guys,

I've just updated ZXombies:DeadFlesh to V1.2 and this fixes one of the main complaints about the game: that the survivor would get stuck on scenery when following the player.

The new version fixes this by improving the survivor AI so that he can find his way around obstacles. It really improves the gameplay, so thanks to everyone for the feedback.

drive.google.com/open?id=1ausdZ4owVvkGJqMuyYecINUw_xMDjKBY

CW

[catweazle]

Updated again to v1.3 - this fixes a nasty bug where AF' was getting corrupted under interrupt, and causing glitches in gamecode which used the shadow AF reg. Most usually resulting in glitchy explosions, or sometimes a crash when exploding barrels. Glad to have solved that one

Also made some minor map tweaks.

[catweazle]

Updated to v1.4

Fixed the +2A/+3 paging issues. turns out that the ROM load routines require the value at 0x5b5c to be correct, regardless of whether you are using the default basic interrupts or not.

[rmartins]

Nice bug hunting ....

[catweazle]

V1.5:

+ switched on sdcc's "optimize-for-speed" toggle, which may help save a few cycles here & there

+ fixed zombie spawning to partially repopulate screens not visited in over some time

CW

[John]

v15 Taking a bullet leads to freezing. www.dropbox.com/s/7ley1c9icuda2i3/zxz15_b1.sna?dl=0