toot_toot wrote: ↑Fri Feb 08, 2019 5:06 pm
Go back and play Nightshade, Gunfright and Martianoids and you can tell it's the same people behind them (there's also an editor for all three by Matthew Carrier, maybe he'd know more?!?!?)
Hmmm....
Sadly, I have no knowledge of who wrote the games or further tidbits...
The reason that I wrote all 3 editors for thse games was down to pure luck with finding the Nightshade map data, decoding how it was stored and how thing were done. I found them when messing around with SGE, a graphic editor program, I was looking through the mess of data and saw what looked like a map of the game so I poked a few random values in the area and found that it either crashed or created a new house where it shouldn't be. After writing down a lot of values to decode the house type and the door structure a map editor was written in Basic and compiled so that it ran a bit quicker - the screen redraw was slow.
Each house in the map takes 1 byte, this is referenced to a set of data tables that has the door exits + house type + upper floor type + antibodies.
At the time of writing the editors I had very little knowledge of writing machine code or understanding what it did. It was just a lot of trial and error to make it work properly.
The great thing about the Nightshade game code is that the map can be made a lot smaller by filling the map with brick walls and creating a 5x5 play area with a few houses of each antibody type to kill the nasties. The game code will plonk all 4 main weapons with the 4 main nasties in that area, the hero and a few of the normal nasties. The game will play
as normal and is a lot quicker to complete. I enjoyed the game back in the day.
Gunfright was the same, just a smaller map size. I do recall writing the map editor from fresh but kept it in the
same style as the Nightshade editor. The problem I had was not knowing how the cactus locations were stored, this is why they are hard-coded into my map editor.
Martianoids, again the map stood out with SGE and after a few weeks of messing around, that map editor was created.
Exploring the outer boundaries of the map, placing more cone things and even walking through the actual game code
was possible with a few pokes - it does crash the game though. It is a horrible and dull game to play too.
I also decoded the map to Cyberun, but the editor would've been (at the time) a huge pain to write directly for the Spectrum.
The entire map (from what I remember) is about 400 bytes. The problems were that the platforms, fuel dumps,
collectables and the laser beams (in the sky) were hard coded somewhere else and I couldn't find them.
I do recall writing a few bits on the Amiga with Amos to edit the map. I put a z80 snapshot of the game into a databank and then edit the map, moving tiles around that poked to the databank area. Once completed, the z80 file was saved and could be loaded into an emulator with the new map. As with my Amiga stuff, this editor has been lost to time.
Cyberun, what could've been a great game was destroyed by being killed every 5 seconds. The game required pokes just to get anywhere, and a few hours to collect the rocket parts, then another few hours to go around the map again to collect the crystals. 3 lives - impossible!
All my handwritten documentation/notes for the all the editors has been lost to a huge clearout that I done a few years after writing them.