Overview Core Dump - Work In Progress Episode 67 May 19, 1998 : A million ways to die Never say never It's just unbelievable. I never comment too much on other sites. For once, I thought, I'll write something down... and the site changes at the same time. This is too weird. What am I talking about? Well, last time I talked about the Programmer's affair site - and darn they change the whole lot. I admit it's far better now. Let's hope there'll be even more entries soon! Dying in Core Dump I changed something a while ago, and after ludricous amounts of testing decided that it'll remain like that in the final game. When you die, you can restart at the last door you passed through. Quite unlike the promo, where you had to replay the whole lot. It works like this. When you pass through a door, the player information is saved internally in a buffer. If you happen to die, you can restart using this data. It also means that if you passed the last door with 25% energy, you'll restart at that door with 25% energy! You can only save to disk at certain points - but at those points your energy will be restored. So, in many cases, it will be better to restart from your saved game. But I hope this will encourage players to continue - imagine you've been playing for some time, and have progressed into some dungeon, where there's no save point. Now, on dying, you can keep on trying. But you have to reach a save point before turning the computer off... woooh exciting isn't it? About the promo I got a really nice E-mail last week, which I'll reply personally soon, but I just wanted to say something about a few questions which might be of interest to everyone. The secret item in the promo is NOT on the item list, and is actually very hard to get. A certain degree of luck is also required. It's a drone, or sometimes, it's an unidentified item. All luck, you see, and you can get this item from only one enemy in the promo! And chances are that you've never even fought it. It's a walker like the ones in the argonoid passage, but it's in an awkward place. Any guesses? It is not possible to get ID card 6 in the promo. In fact, there is no area to be accessed behind that door in the promo. In the final game however there will be a vast area behind it... Too Big? This Work-In-Progress section is getting rather out of hand. I ran it through "WC", a word counting utility for Unix platforms. All episodes are called "p0XX", where XX is the number of the episode. Such episodes do not include any HTML code for the upper and lower banners or anything, just the pure episode text. [Turtle] /home/cas/progs/pars/core cat p0?? | wc 3580 27339 156694 [Turtle] /home/cas/progs/pars/core That means: 3580 lines, 27339 words, or 156694 bytes. Nice. 3500 Lines of diary, that's already some typing. But as said before, it's nothing compared to the amount of code produced for such a game. "The things a man has to do..." Congratulations Yen-Ha! It's my girlfriend's birthday tomorrow (May 20) so there's a bit of a party - congratulations to Yen-Ha for putting up with such a twisted mind! Go on... Read the previous entry