Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

RetroRomper wrote:Maybe its just the fewer number of games (and thus the exposure each gets), but ACK creations appear to be much more perky and seeped in a wonky, interesting topic (this and the Haunted Mansion game based on a DnD module come to mind) than many text games (especially those from the XXYZ awards).

Sure, but how many are finished? I mean, the petermolydeux guy on Twitter has a lot of good idea as well, but he's not making finished consumables out of them.

ACK community, I implore you.... finish your wares!!

Projects can be quite a challenge to see through to completion. That being said, I have every intention of finishing what I've started... One of the key things I'm finding is to make sure that your features and plans aren't beyond your abilities to implement. And outlines are terribly underrated. *grin*

RetroRomper wrote:Maybe its just the fewer number of games (and thus the exposure each gets), but ACK creations appear to be much more perky and seeped in a wonky, interesting topic (this and the Haunted Mansion game based on a DnD module come to mind) than many text games (especially those from the XXYZ awards).

Sure, but how many are finished? I mean, the petermolydeux guy on Twitter has a lot of good idea as well, but he's not making finished consumables out of them.

ACK community, I implore you.... finish your wares!!

So many unfinished projects.. I so wish we could get together and help each other finish all our WIPs.

Maybe its just the fewer number of games (and thus the exposure each gets), but ACK creations appear to be much more perky and seeped in a wonky, interesting topic (this and the Haunted Mansion game based on a DnD module come to mind) than many text games (especially those from the XXYZ awards).

Interesting that - maybe a different audience and so a different set of creators? I'm going to spend a bit of time looking into the WIP games games and see what has been completed and try out a few from that pool as well.

I'll probably write an article! Will be vaguely interesting for all of us!

Has there been any more progress made with this project ? I would LOVE to see it finished ! I remember making a Crush Crumble & Chomp adventure back on my old C64 using the Adventure Construction Set. The only problem was that only some buildings could be destroyed due to the limitations on the amount of creatures and special spaces you could put in a room. Mine was designed for two or more players. The world map was a map of a city and suburbs. The monsters each would start out at a separate location and have to go around gaining special powers and attacks before hunting each other down and fighting to the death. The multiplayer feature that ACS had was fantastic for this. I'm disappointed that it's not a part of the ACK, but I AM glad that ACK is here anyway, though.

rld - You're right, it sounds like it'd be much easier to achieve what I wanted with those new commands. I'll give that a try soon.

A couple thoughts on the things you are trying to do in this game...

For the fleeing civilians, you should just be able to use creatures for this. The latest patch (v0.7) lets you fetch a creature's type value from the map, so you should be able to implement an 'Eat' macro like:

GETADJ X Y
get creature's type from map location x,y
is it a 'fleeing human'?
No - exit macro
Yes - remove creature from map and add to HP

For the fires, you could try doing this with a step macro that runs as follows each turn:

pick random location on map
is it a 'fire' tile?
No - exit
Yes - pick an adjacent location at random; if it is a tree or building tile, replace it with a fire tile

I agree !! This needs to be finished !!!!

Oh man, jj you gotta finish this!!!

Blacklight wrote:I actually DID this back in the 80's with the old ACS ! I made a whole bunch of non moving creatures that looked like buildings. Army squads, tanks, helicopters, and even the Mad Scientist were in there. Not to mention I also created traps that triggered air strikes and nuclear blasts.

I remember that I made the world map an actual map of the world and it was full of cities (those were the doorways from the world map to the individual city maps). I set up random military attacks on the world map.

When you started up, your monster was in his "dressing room" that had like 5-6 one way doors, each taking you to a room where you would pick up your starting powers. Then you were deposited on the world map in some area.

I also set up areas in cities that would give you extra powers and bonuses as well.

This was a LOT of fun with multiple players as we would fight through cities, grabbing power ups and then we'd hunt each other and meet for a giant monster showdown.

I also made a sequel based on "Monster Island" with the military surrounding the island and the monsters having to fight each other and find their way off the island.

I wish I still had my old C64 and disks.

That all sounds great, Blacklight! It's a shame those disks are lost. I agree that multiple party members in ACK would open up a lot of possibilities, but when I discussed it with Chris previously he wasn't excited about it design-wise *and* I think it would require an immense overhaul of many aspects of the ACK engine.

If the step-macro for creatures gets added to the Mega-patch - I think I could continue in earnest. I could use it to more easily deal with the things that were bogging me down (people movement & fire movement).

Of all the projects that were started for ACK, THIS is the one I REALLY want to see completed !!!

Wow. I guess the only good thing about spam is that it bumped an old thread that I missed the first time around. :)

Not only do I still have my old Commodore and all my old disks, I also have all my old game manuals and stuff, which I have been slowly scanning in. If you want to check them out or reference them, here are the scanned in manuals for both The Movie Monster Game and Mail Order Monsters.

http://www.robohara.com/scans/index.php?file=software

Wow,

Thanks you so much for inviting us...
I really hope i feel free in there..
Thanks a lot.. :smile: :razz: :wink: :mrgreen:

I actually DID this back in the 80's with the old ACS ! I made a whole bunch of non moving creatures that looked like buildings. Army squads, tanks, helicopters, and even the Mad Scientist were in there. Not to mention I also created traps that triggered air strikes and nuclear blasts.

I remember that I made the world map an actual map of the world and it was full of cities (those were the doorways from the world map to the individual city maps). I set up random military attacks on the world map.

When you started up, your monster was in his "dressing room" that had like 5-6 one way doors, each taking you to a room where you would pick up your starting powers. Then you were deposited on the world map in some area.

I also set up areas in cities that would give you extra powers and bonuses as well.

This was a LOT of fun with multiple players as we would fight through cities, grabbing power ups and then we'd hunt each other and meet for a giant monster showdown.

I also made a sequel based on "Monster Island" with the military surrounding the island and the monsters having to fight each other and find their way off the island.

I wish I still had my old C64 and disks.

Contact me offline about this -- I'm curious what you're trying to do, if there's some way to do this via new macro commands that would have general usefulness, we can approach it from that direction.

The stall in this project (outside of obsessing over non-ACK projects) is that I really want to have fire that spreads, like in the original CC&C. I see a way to do it, but it will require some gnarly, lengthy macro-ing, and will have to be done for each screen (room) differently. It might also just be too slow, even if it works. But I'll attempt to get up the gumption to try it with one screen, and see how/if it works.

Thanks, Chris, just emailed you a copy of this project that shows the spell problem, and another possible bug I just discovered.

No, there doesn't seem to be a trigger available for when terrain is destroyed -- only 'if attacked' as a action trigger, and the 'replaced' field for putting a different object there once the terrain's destroyed. It'd be great to have a separate 'when destroyed' field (like the npc death one) that could call a macro.

I'll check out that spell bug -- if you can bundle up the demo and tell me how to reproduce it, that would be great.

There are ACK triggers for when terrain objects are destroyed -- at least there should be. It should be able to run a macro as an action, with the action triggered by being destroyed. Correct me if that doesn't appear as an option and I'll fix it.

OK, this has been on the backburner since I last posted about it, but yesterday I took another crack at it. I figured out a good way to "turn off" a "fleeing people" path once the monster grabs a person from that path.

Also made it so houses can be either attacked by smashing claws or set on fire by fiery monster breath (previously it was one or the other). Added a cop-car, properly tweaked to be the wimpiest foe of Gohzilla. Added lazer eyes (ZAP!) for Gohzilla.

Limitations:
- There's no way to have fire spread - ACK has no way to test 'adjacent objects'. I might have fires die out after a random # of turns, though.

- There seems to be a bug with spells that 'allow the player to fire a weapon'. I was using that for both fire breath and laser eyes, and sometimes the spell just did nothing, besides deducting the expected number of MP. I don't think ACK has any 'spell failure' modeling, so I'll be sending a bug report to Chris. So now, Gohzilla has claws / fire breath/ zap eyes all as direct weapons -- you must READY one of them to switch between them, which is kinda clumsy, but it's working.

- There's no ACK trigger for when an object is destroyed, so there's no way for Gohzilla to rack up points for demolishing private & public property like the monsters in C, C & C did. Only killing/eating annoying human foes can gain points.

Given some of these limitations, I don't think it will be possible to do a full C,C&C-like game in ACK, but I think I can still make a fun demo that shows how to do non-typical scenarios in ACK.