The Bottom Row of a Cave

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Sendy
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The Bottom Row of a Cave

Post by Sendy »

A design note: I've been using the Lord Diego FX kit to make caves.

However some of my caves relied on objects in the bottom row (where the titanium wall usually is). Although it won't show up in the Kit, when the game is compiled you'll see that the bottom row of the cave is ALWAYS titanium.

So now instead of having a fun compiled game to play with, I have to re-design these levels and re-compile the whole shebang. I just thought I'd warn against this to save trouble.
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RTADash
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Post by RTADash »

Sorry about your misfortune. :(

Neither the BDCK or FXkit scan the bottom or top lines (i.e. the horizontal borders) of the cave, so objects placed there don't interact properly, and if rockford or an enemy moves there, it is stuck forever.

Or do they interact properly in the FXkit? I've never actually tried placing something down there...

However, I didn't previously know about the DLP titanium wall-izing the bottom line of the cave, but It's the same effect considering this line is already ignored, and rendered useless by the BDCK and FXkit.
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Post by Sendy »

I make sure nothing moving can reach the borders. So that effect is entirely visual. Sometimes I also make borders out of wall in the FX kit, usually when there are no moving enemies (and hence no way to blast out of the perimeter of the playfield).

One playable element I used on the bottom border was magic wall - for destroying large quantities of boulders in a couple of levels. It should be easy enough to patch over.
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Post by Sendy »

Oh and the top line came out fine by the way. Both in the FX kit and the compiled game.
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Post by RTADash »

I guess the bug (if it is one) is not as bad as I thought. :D
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Post by LogicDeLuxe »

When a cave is saved, it encodes the game elements into 880 nybbles, ie. 440 byte, which in theory covers the entire cave including its borders. It appears that the programmers were slighty off when writing that routine, ie. encoding the line in memory which is actually right above the top most border and at the same time miss the bottom border.
It seems that this routine wasn't sufficiently tested, like anything else in the PLCK.

Like most things in PLCK, you can overcome that limit by just using CLCK instead. :)

Actually, it shouldn't be too hard fixing this bug, though it would break compatibility to old caves, and since the advantage is very limited, nobody ever seemed to care.
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