DA2 Alpha 11, Updates so soon!
Just a quick update this time to fix a very important bug. Like with any classic role playing game, the more you walk along in a dungeon, the more likely you are to be attacked. To make sure the process isn’t completely random, the first few steps are free, then each additional step increases the odds of a random battle. In DA2, these steps are measured in pixels. Well, with the old, clunky DirectX 7 version of DA2, a step was measured in multiple pixels to improve game speed. Multiple pixel stepping is no longer required with SDL, and apparently this broke my old random battle code. You could walk the entire game without a single random battle. That’s no fun. Needless to say, this was the bug that forced me to release Alpha 11 just three days after the last release. This will teach me to playtest inside a dungeon instead of in a town where battles do not occur.
In the short interim, I was able to fix the scrolling color issues. Not elegantly, but that’s life. Briefly, back when DA2 was just 256 colors, I could take some of those colors and rotate them in a sequence from dark to light. This gave magic items in the game the effect of glowing and pulsating with an aura. Just to remind you that magic items are cooler than regular items, right? Now that everything is in true color, there are no color palettes to rotate. Locking textures and hunting for pixels to change seems really dumb to me. I also tried a lot of different blend modes and masks, but this didn’t quite have the desired effect. In the end, I just duplicated the bitmaps for all the items in question, bumping the appropriate pixels in each, and now magic items are a series of 8 sprites that animate during the game. Simple right? I never would have dared this a few decades ago with QuickBasic; memory was too precious then. Funny how easy it is to dispose of now. All the new sprites I added are probably only a fraction of a high-res texture in a 3D game. And so DA2 continues trudging on, bringing the 80’s to modern gaming.