Empires [ASM, 83+ and Compatables]

[Technoman]

First of all! YEAH NES emulator!

Second, no, I'm not in New England, I'm in North Carolina. The state nobody knows anything about.

[merthsoft]

North Carolina is a state? Just kidding...

[Patori]

There's a NORTH Carolina? I thought there was just I south Carolina... Like there is only a west virginia, but no east virginia... We american's are Dum.

[Technoman]

East and West can be seperate but all North's have a South. That's the rule to remember. Like North Dakota has South Dakota.

[Patori]

its mind boggling!

[Technoman]

Back to the topic: Work on Empires continues, I'm working on making the file set up correctly. I'm also working on creating, loading, and saving the resources. I'm even writing a function called LoadObject which takes an object equate in A and saves that into the appropriate table slot in memory. However it still has some major errors. But it's a work in progress.

[Patori]

good job. Keep on trucking!

[Technoman]

Also, I figured out an equation that will figure out filesize

1031 + (8 * [Characters in Name]) + ( (MapXDIM * MapYDIM) / 2)= Approximate File size

The 1031 comes from tables of data:
;The first 500 bytes represent 100 resource units
;The percentage of these spaces used depends on resource settings.
;

;The next 100 bytes are farm units
;The next 200 bytes are units
;The next 200 bytes are buildings
;
;The second to last 16 are two bytes for each players resources. This is so
;saved games and scenarious can choose how many resources the player starts with.
;These numbers are loaded into ram before starting the engine and updated on save
;The last 15 are unit counts before the map. This is used for compression

[Patori]

so... 5 bytes... what vars for each unit? can we see a struct var for these?

[Technoman]

EDIT: This is displaying well because it was meant to be in NotePad and not a forum but it's the best I can do.

Code: Select all

Here's what I've come up with:

X coordinate  V   Y coordinate	S   Own Action  LO    Type      Speed
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1   1 2 1 2 3 4 1 2   1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Max = 127     1   Max = 127	1    3  |Max 15| 3   |Max = 31 |  7

HP		  Resource Count
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Max = 255	  Max = 255

5 Bytes per unit/building 

**X coordinate = The X coordinate for this unit

**V = Valid Flag, Tells the calculator that this unit is no longer valid and it can use this space for a new unit

**Y coordinate = To the Y coordinate for this unit

**S = Status Flag, Tells the calculator that this unit can take damage or not, this could be used for cheat codes, cut scenes, plot characters, etc.

**Own = Owner indicator, indicates who owns this unit

**Action = The action of this unit, Mainly used for AI so it can continue making units carry out actions appropriately so we get a real time effect.

**LO = Left over, could be used for cheat codes, could also be an animation slide.

**Type = The equate for this units type, it could be a building or unit.

**Speed = Movement speed for this unit

**Resource Count = The amount of potential resources this unit has, this applies only to mines, trees, farms, etc....

NOTE: LO is no longer left over, it will be used as a version identifier which will be used to prevent loading map files and units from earlier versions of the game on older versions.

[Patori]

ok, looks ok, confused about numbers though...

[Technoman]

The numbers under the underscores are the max value I can store in that area of the byte. The numbers above are a running number of bits I've alotted to each section.

[Jim e]

I thought it was quite understandable.
You sure you can do this with 5 bytes, what about special actions or timing.

[Technoman]

Yes, I have simplified action equates and I'm pretty sure I can do all I need to if 15, maybe 16, 0-15 = 16.

1. Move
2. Attack
3. Defend
4. Gather (Same as farming)
5. Repair
6. Convert
7. Flee
8. No action
9. Building (Same for researching, construction, or creating a unit)

Not quite sure how moving will work or attacking but it will probably be code controlled.

[Jim e]

You see that's what i'm saying what if you need data to till the progression of an action.

moving from one spot to another. I think some padding bytes would do it, say 3 for a nice round 8.