More Boulder Dash!

[TobyLobster]

Wow, had a quick glance over at it - an impressive achievement!

Thanks.

[raspberrypioneer]

My disassembly of Boulder Dash is now complete. It is available in both Beebasm and acme formats. https://github.com/TobyLobster/Boulderdash

Had a chance to compile the asm and it works perfectly. As a bonus, the python SSD creation within this is great too!

I checked the differences that Bill introduced and got that bit disassembled (used an online disassembler: https://www.masswerk.at/6502/disassembler.html). I probably should have just asked him but the changes were fairly minimal and mostly just in one place in the code.

I slotted that code in replacing the bytes for the difficulty settings, which we don't use in the new create-your-own caves version. That works too! I did a hex compare of compiled and Bill's version and all in order! I think I can just about make sense of what it's doing and starting to add some more meaningful labels and comments.

Thanks again for the disassembly. I don't know how you did it!

[TobyLobster]

My disassembly of Boulder Dash is now complete. It is available in both Beebasm and acme formats. https://github.com/TobyLobster/Boulderdash

Had a chance to compile the asm and it works perfectly. As a bonus, the python SSD creation within this is great too!

I checked the differences that Bill introduced and got that bit disassembled (used an online disassembler: https://www.masswerk.at/6502/disassembler.html). I probably should have just asked him but the changes were fairly minimal and mostly just in one place in the code.

I slotted that code in replacing the bytes for the difficulty settings, which we don't use in the new create-your-own caves version. That works too! I did a hex compare of compiled and Bill's version and all in order! I think I can just about make sense of what it's doing and starting to add some more meaningful labels and comments.

Thanks again for the disassembly. I don't know how you did it!

Great to hear that you got it working, and have successfully integrated the changes.

[raspberrypioneer]

I've extended the work done by billcarr2005 for loading caves held in separate files to include the cave parameters and means that each cave file is a single, standalone cave and contains everything needed to use it with the game engine.

I've also added the code needed to create the caves for all difficulty levels from the original game via the pseudo-random approach for plotting boulders, diamonds etc. This was developed by Peter Liepa, the original creator of the game and unfortunately the coder of the Acorn conversion, Andrew Bennett, wasn't able to get hold of this algorithm back in the 80's. The cave files hold everything needed to play the original version. It's possible to mix original caves with newly developed ones by just swapping round cave files.

I thought this would be worth adding into a repository. See https://github.com/raspberrypioneer/BoulderDash for more details.

It includes a couple of other programs, the main one being a Python-code cave file generator. This creates caves from ready-made Boulder Dash cave format files (BDCFFs) developed by fans of the game. It produces an SDD file ready to play with and makes it easy to generate even more Boulder Dash games in case you haven't had enough of them!

[Cybershark]

Yes indeed, Raspberry and I have been having a lot of back and forth and labouring away behind the scenes. For one thing we've both now created 3 new sprites sets each. On my end I've updated both my cave and sprite editors. Changes are:

Cave editor:

• Added all the parameters for level randomisation
• Added support for a "null tile" - as per Raspberry's level spec - and the original game design - if this is placed in a cave it will be overwritten by a (pseudo) random object.
• Improved handling of Rockford's start and end positions
• Cave naming feature - thanks to a few spare bytes in Raspberry's new cave format
• Decluttered (and prettified) the parameter section
• Text descriptors added for the sprites
• Set more sensible minimum values for parameters
• Added ability to speed-increment/decrement parameters with SHIFT+up/down

Sprite editor:

• Upgraded the whole screen layout - display is now much less cluttered
• File handling errors fixed
• Addition of horizontal and vertical sprite flip feature
• Annotated redundant sprites
• Added an animation feature - to show how sprites animate in game (a la Repton 3 editor)
• Added a tiled viewer - shows how sprites look next to each other
• Merged disc cataloguing with load/save
• Improved Help page

Front end:
Ability to change number of lives

The only thing that we still want to add to the cave editor now is the ability to see how the random generated objects will appear for each of the game difficulty levels.

Cave editor, before and after:

Sprite editor, before and after:

Download here:

BoulderDashEditingSuite_120424.dsd

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