Acorn World - now there's a name from the past. The final show was cancelled in 1998 when Acorn closed its workstations division - now it's back thanks to Dave Moore and the Retro Reunited team. The show, held over the weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, offered a range of vintage games consoles and bizarre Acorn hardware hacks. The Acorn scene was mostly 8-bit oriented although there was some RISC OS coverage too.
 

Gareth Moore wrote in to let us know that, as foretold in the forums, the "Brits Who Made the Modern World" series is a big rip-off of the book "The Backroom Boys". No, wait, that wasn't it.
 
The final episode airs on August 22nd at 7:30pm on Five. Go on, guess what it's about.
 
  12 comments in the forums

 

I figured it was about time for another oldschool review. This time I'll be talking about LASER, a game written by Mike Goldberg (and his cat) as part of his series of graphics programming articles in Acorn Computing magazine. The game was released on the subscription disc for the February 1994 issue of the magazine, along with a level editor so users could make their own puzzles.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

Game over, man
 
The competition is nearly at an end, which can only mean one thing - tomorrow's article will be the conclusion, and will (hopefully!) feature a copy of the game to download.

...and here it is.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

Next time I'll be talking about monster AI. I'm not going to be creating an Einstein, but I will be able to talk about a few of the basic features I'm hoping to implement.

But before I talk about monster AI, I might as well take the time out to talk about the time system that the game will use. Also, I don't have much other material for this article.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

Next time I will be tackling combat. Having never written a roguelike combat system before, it will be an interesting exercise in deciding how mechanics such as strength and armour class will work, and attempting to get the numbers right first-time to reduce the amount of balancing required.

Forsight, there.
 
Combat is an important aspect of all roguelikes. But having never looked at a roguelike combat engine in detail before, I don't really know much about how they work. Monsters have strength, dexterity, and armour class attributes, but how do those translate into how hard the monster hits with a weapon?
 
Note that a lot of the values and equations presented in this article aren't set in stone yet, and will require tweaking during play-testing. But hopefully I'll be able to shed some light on the different aspects of combat, and the thought processes involved in creating a balanced combat system.
 
 

Previously, on Bob and Trev: Resurrection...

...

Yeah, looks like I forgot to write anything to lead onto this article.

Anyhoo, this article will be discussing visibility and pathfinding. Both are important aspects of many roguelikes, and both have some important implementation issues to try and overcome. Line-of-sight algorithms are a popular topic on rgrd - right now I can see two threads talking about LOS algorithms, and know of at least one other that talks about them.