Alternate Reality X - Update, March 2016

Since the start of the year I've managed to get back up to speed and into the process of continuing the development of my Alternate Reality remake. This is based on Philip Price's unfinished series of games originally for the Atari 8bit range of computers. Originally only the City and the Dungeon scenarios were ever released.

I've gone back to my original project goals to regain my focus over the last couple of months and this has been a big help. These are:

• Create a full port of both The City and The Dungeon for modern systems
• Move your characters seamlessly between scenarios 
• Provide a quick, easy to use alternative to emulation
• Expand upon the original scenarios to include new quests, locations, encounters and items
• Provide the option of using the original or updated graphics and sound

The wording here might differ slightly from my original webpages but the key goals are still strong messages and still feel very relevant to my current thinking. These will be my key focus over the coming months. I'll not be losing sight of these again or heading off on any other tracks where my Alternate Reality project is concerned.

I've released two updates for ARX during March 2016 so far. Whilst both are only small updates I've now got an established development and release process which means I'm not losing time because I'm disorganised. I'm making use of Google Drive to keep my ARX files accessible online regardless of location so I can contribute free time to development. I'm also freezing any updates to the development environment and multimedia library I'm using - what's there currently is more than capable of seeing my Alternate Reality project through to 100% completion and my current build is fully Windows 10 compatible. As I'm now (and sticking to) using SFML and Code::Blocks (it's quick and light to install compared to Visual Studio) again ports for Mac OS X and Linux are achievable (at a later date).

At a high level the main areas I'm going to be looking at over the next few weeks and months are:

• The core engine - specifically remodelling items, encounters and tweaking the display
• The City - What is required to make the City 100% complete?
• The Dungeon - What is required to make the Dungeon 100% complete - starting with level 1?
• The Arena & other scenarios - Bit by bit expanding the Arena content but also laying any groundwork which might be required for future expansion into other scenarios. 

My plan is to expand these key areas into more smaller, achievable items in the next week or so. I'll publish these plans online with everyone so you can or point out anything I've overlooked.

I'm really keen to get feedback from players whether that's bug reports, general comments for improvement or ideas for new features - content or story. Email, Facebook, the Blog and the forums are different ways of helping to develop ARX so I'd encourage you to make use of them if there are things you'd like to see. I try to  read all the comments and the feedback and suggestions I receive really do help determine what I work on next and how items are prioritised.

Alternatively if you like my what I'm planning or the work I've completed to date then you might consider making a small donation via Paypal (link in the right hand panel of this blog and on the webpages) or as a patron on Patreon. These are a great help for my website costs, occasional small hardware additions that help development and the odd book or software licence I buy.

As I've mentioned previously my planned approach is more frequent but probably smaller updates. I'll be tackling some of the bigger items mentioned above in the next couple of releases which I think will help take ARX to a whole new level. Thanks for your support.

Designing Alternate Reality: The Arena

One of the things that has struck me when play testing my current build of Alternate Reality X is that there are still numerous places where the player comes across the entrances to the unfinished scenarios - The Arena, The Palace, The Wilderness and Revelation (there aren't any for Destiny).

As I'm planning changes within ARX to better support the City and Dungeon, it's helpful to think ahead as to how the other scenarios might develop and what features and content they may include. I thought I'd collect my ideas here as the beginning of a design document for Alternate Reality: The Arena. I see the Arena and the Palace as quite tightly interwoven in terms of features and story so there might be some cross over here. Through your trials in the Arena you can obtain fame and fortune, increasing your social status and gain initial access to the Palace.

Entry to the Arena can be gained through an unsuccessful enounter with a gang of slavers, as a spectator or persuading one of the local lords to support your entry to the Arena with the goal of becoming the Champion of Xebec's Demise and receiving the royal seal which grants access to all areas of the City (including the Palace). Whispers in dark taverns mention other, more secretive ways of entering the Arena.

Starting with the Arena map we have two areas available - one on the City level and a larger area within level one of the Dungeon. There are also a few "Arena Pits" on level two of the Dungeon. These two areas provide ample map space for the Arena scenario and interesting content.

The upper level houses the Great Arena itself as well as smaller Arena pits and shops which support the day to day running of the Arena. Both commoners and nobles visit the Arena from the City to watch the games whilst fighters seek their fame and fortune or meet their fate on the bloodstained sands of the Great Arena. Combatants can also move around with a degree of freedom between events looking for ways to improve their skills. A successful Arena fighter will make use of the weapons masters and trainers that have forged a living selling their services within the walls of the Arena.

The lower level of the Arena houses the darker side of the Arena where the poor souls who have been press ganged into slavery as Arena fighters live as well as housing the exotic creatures and traps that feature in the most deadly tournaments and games. Few have lived through the legendary Trial of Kings, a fiendish maze of traps and ferocious monsters that only the strongest and most cunning can hope to survive.

CRPG DEV - The 2016 Update and future plans

January 2016 has passed but I hope you had a good Christmas / New Year or holiday.

I'm sorry for not posting anything for such a long time. I've found it difficult to focus and use my time well to make the significant updates to Alternate Reality X which I've wanted to despite putting in some serious hours. I started some major structural changes as well as trying to make the code fully object oriented. Looking back I tried to change too many things at the same time and my experience of full object oriented coding isn't really good enough. I should have stuck with the style I'm familiar with rather than what I thought I should be doing.

The SFML media library I use also underwent some other changes which broke my 3D view code as it relied on some no longer supported OpenGL functions. I've considered going back to a previous version of the SFML library, though I'd prefer I was using the current version.

I've given it a lot of thought and planned out some more realistic short term changes to ARX. I'll stick with my procedural style and concentrate my efforts on the areas that really need attention to allow progress to be made with the game. With the New Year I've given a lot of thought to what I want to achieve this year - professionally and personally - and making significant progress with ARX (and CRPG Dev) is high on my list.

I'm now working on a simple 0.72 release (as my past official release was 0.71). Once I've fixed the 3D view I'll make this available - the purpose of this will be to update ARX to the latest version of SFML and also make use of the new Visual Studio 2013 build. I'm no longer using Code::Blocks as my development environment as I'm trying to improve my coding and many of the tutorials and books I've been studying use Visual Studio.

I've lots of plans but I'll not say anything more about those just now until I've proven that ARX is still ongoing with a couple of new releases. So hang in there! 

Thank you for your past support and interest in what I've been doing - it's really meant a lot to me. So with that I'd like to wish you (a belated) all the best for 2016.

Alternate Reality X - Modifying the display

Example Dungeon screen (672x480) from the Atari 800 Emulator

As mentioned previously I was investigating a possible move to using SDL as an alternative to the SFML media library. Whilst I'm not a 100% certain I'm going to stay with SFML it's looking extremely likely. The main reason for this is that I understand from what I've read that unlike SFML, SDL isn't able to easily mix it's native graphics with an OpenGL view. One of the things I found useful with SFML was that I could limit my use of OpenGL to just drawing the 3D City / Dungeon view whilst using SFML's 2D functions for everything else. The disadvantage I've found with SFML is that a number of people have had issues with the OpenGL support and video drivers on their Windows machines. There are a couple of changes I can make which might address the problems under Windows and flag up the possible impact on gameplay at start up for the player.

I've been spending some time trying out the City and Dungeon using the Atari 800 emulator (version 3.0.0). This emulator seems reliable and hasn't yet crashed on and lost my emulator settings which I found to be a problem with Atari 800 Win Plus. One of the first things I'm doing is making some changes to simplify the display options to make Alternate Reality X look more authentic and make best use of the original Atari 800 graphics as I didn't like the way some of them appeared when stretched by my multiple screen options. In practice this is likely to mean more limited screen display options (at least for the next release) but will hopefully make for a better Atari 8bit look which most players are apparently using when playing ARX. I will still be leaving in the support for alternative media but it's not going to be a focus in the next few releases. 672 by 480 pixels is likely to become the base resolution for the game from the next release with options to have black borders or not. This will give you a very accurate, double sized version of the original and will allow me to match the display very accurately with the original versions.

One of the benefits about my investigations into the SDL media library was that I've been reading a SDL game programming book and this has made me rethink some of the ways the game programming could be improved to make better use of the features of C++. These would probably simplify development, improve my code reuse across multiple shop type modules and reduce the risk of crashes due to my ill informed programming techniques. These are general C++ game programming techniques - just as applicable to a SFML game as a SDL one.

These might seem like very trivial points for me to be focusing on but having the display "look right" for me will make a big difference to me. Release 0.8 is now under development so watch this space.