About Me: Sorry, but I haven't yet shared the information about myself that would typically display here. Check back later to see if that changes, or if I instead choose to remain an enigma.

So I trashed Dragon Wars, writing and organizing the maps. Nailed down a few fun cheats too, accepted at GameFAQs nonetheless. I was shocked to see 14 cheats on the update page. I'd sent in 4. The backlog was ~80 or so before it got cleared. So 66 of 80 cheats were rejected. Puts some of my cheat rejections in perspective.

Also tuned my map editor. You can now delete squares and walls with 1 button push instead of having to reassign a wall/icon value of zero. I was cranking through maps at the end.

There's so much that is easy to design the basic coding for--drag drop cut paste, undo, bookmarking favorite icons, even inserting text. There's so much that's cool to see, that demystifies what commercial apps do, but then you realize there are so many details.

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Well in the previous post I thought I'd go in for Choplifter, but instead I tweaked my map maker. It isn't as user friendly as I like and only puts out a 24 bit bitmap and not 4 or 8 as I'd like but I can edit that with MS Paint if I have to.

I made a dry run with Dragon Wars, redoing some maps that were frankly pretty ugly, and it went well. It's weird how much simple stuff you put off til later as you get used to something new, a lot of bugs you know are there but you will have to deal with.

I also found a few things I left out of my FAQ. There's a funny semi-cheat where you can get easy fights with rats consistently and another where you can restart the game, zapping your items, so it allows you another one-time chance to give a player druid magic.

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Well--that was exhausting. I don't know if it was a bug in the game or what, but there was one square where you were SUPPOSED to be able to search for a door but you couldn't. Which was very, very uncool.

I decided two uncools made a cool, though, and I found a way to hack into the game to turn the wall into a door or empty space. You can't fiddle with the save files on the PC but you can futz with the maps.

Of course my work was not over then either but I did manage to write maps and even find a silly cheat for an easy and replenishable fight at the start of a game.

Now I have a choice of what to write up next.

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About Lode Runner. A fun read even if you've never played.

8 of 20 levels in Uukrul done. Feels like I'm more than halfway there. The first few mazes wound back on themselves but I have no extra programming to add, and some of the later mazes are either half filler or wide open spaces. There are far fewer possibilities for teleports.

I just completed an interesting maze where you had a big 5x5 hall.

Doors led to:
* sub-maze you couldn't leave that wrapped about itself endlessly
* doors that wrapped to the other side of the 25x16 map
* standard weird teleports and spinners
* a small spinner puzzle that lead to one of the eight stone hearts you need to win the game

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So I thought I'd get through a lot more of Uukrul on DosBox, but I in fact got bogged down in the first 2 areas. The maps wind around quite a bit and there are all sorts of quasi-teleports that really just make the 25x16 map branch out to a more irregular shape.

You see, when I said 1 map a day, I thought cheating was going to be easy. Just mess with the save file, find where the gold/stats are stored and pow!

Well it took me a while to get exasperated enough to cheat, the game being pretty good, but I still got a Not so fast my friend.

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So anyway after getting sick of updating(I did push Ultima III through) I looked at some games I'd been playing for a while, or I'd meant to be playing, and two struck out at me. Champions of Krynn and Dark Heart of Uukrul. Apparently both are rather good.

The first defied emulation(I had trouble creating a save disk,) and the PC version is somewhere in my newly cleaned place I can't find it yet. I poked at DHoU and found why the maps I made of it were rubbish. They were a few lines of code from NOT being rubbish, and I fixed that. Without having to touch that map generator I like so much but can't quite bring myself to potentially dismantle as I improve it.

So my goal is 1 location a day to map. There are 20 total. This with all the other projects.

8 comments

This was not a good game, but fortunately in the 5 years since I wrote a guide for it, emulation tools got better. I got better at using them. And most importantly in general, but least relevant to this post, Origin got a lot better at writing them, as you should go find out for yourself with Ultima III and especially IV and V.

And I sent in a revised version of the FAQ. I kept the dungeon maps but the town maps went. -14k. I listed out all the other game guides that needed editing. They are, potentially,

Ultima III
Demon's Winter(FAQ needs beefing up)
Phantasie 1/2/3
Questron/Questron II
Wizard's Crown
Eternal Dagger
Rings of Zilfin
Legacy of Ancients
Legend of Blacksilver
Wasteland
Magic Candle I/II/III, Bloodstone

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