game-editor.com

OK. Now I am about to date myself again as officially prehistoric, but I do have a question about a VERY old game (circa 1980). It was called "The Wizard and the Princess" and was created by Roberta and Ken Williams of the now famous Sierra Online. At the time of its creation it was a blend of text and graphics. In fact, it was one of the first text-graphics games.

My question has to do with how the crude line drawings and fills were/are done. Or actually, how the crude technique might be applied using GE. If someone could even just get me started with some ideas, I would appreciate it.

In the game the lines that form the objects(buildings, rocks, snake, sun, desert plants, etc) are drawn on the screen using lines and fills. Then the areas are filled in. This happens as each frame(activation area) of the game changes. I think it would be fun to reproduce this effect, but I've never quite been able to figure out how to achieve it.

Here is a little more info on the game. The link shows the original first shot of the town of Serena, but it doesn't show how it draws:
http://www.vintage-sierra.com/hires/two.html

This game runs in many emulators now, so maybe some of you are familiar with how it runs and have some ideas about it.

TIA

Hi. I dont know exactly, But I can think of two ways to do it.

One way, the way old graphics programs used to seem to do it was to just draw pixels both ways from where a mouse click took place, and if the pixel drawing pointer encountered a pixel of a different color that what was drawn on first, it stopped there and drew the other way. when it hit two horizontal limits, it would draw on line above or below.

We dont have a read pixel function in GE, so you'd have to store the borders of areas if you wish to flood fill, and look them up as you go.

Now, I dont think thats whats happening in that old game(but I dont know it).

Another technique, that I have seen, but in a sort of screen saver, is to store a series of draw instructions, much like the old LOGO and turtle graphics. Instead of drawing everything out behind scenes, and blasting it all on screen at once, you draw real time, from the stored instructions.

It looks quite neat, if I understand what you mean.

Simplest, If you are doing this, would be to store each color as a series of y coordinate, and lengths. The canvas would be told: go to the 46th line, and draw thirteen purple pixels to the right. Once all the purple pixels are drawn, start over with the next color. Its slow, you are redundant in covering parts of the screen, but the illusion of live drawing is what you are after, right?

The nice thing about this is you could use a look up reference to a pattern and each pixel, draw one aspect of the pattern. for example, you make a series of small arrays

pattern1 = array[6] {56, 234, 87, 2, 3, 99}

Thats not a proper array, I know... so your pixel drawing routine looks up the current place in the pattern, gets that number, and then goes to a larger array of RGB triplets, and gets the actual color for that. You could put the triplets in the pattern array too I guess.

Questions, Confusions? Critiques? Lets hear 'em.

Hi 3FPete:

All of the options and ways to do a thing are incredible. Thank you for taking the time to try to explain this to me. Of course, I do have some questions...

Another technique, that I have seen, but in a sort of screen saver, is to store a series of draw instructions, much like the old LOGO and turtle graphics.

This sounds like the effect that is in the game, but how would I go about storing a series of draw instructions and then calling them?

The nice thing about this is you could use a look up reference to a pattern and each pixel, draw one aspect of the pattern. for example, you make a series of small arrays

pattern1 = array[6] {56, 234, 87, 2, 3, 99}

This confused me. Would you mind breaking it down as you would for a newbie?

Your answers always give me more 'food for thought'...

Sure. I gotta run and do something, but i wil come back and give you a hyper nifty way to do stored instructions!