Vector War XI - Preparations & Discussions

[Peer]

Nov 1, 2021 2:05:40 GMT -5 hcmffm said:

Oct 31, 2021 23:52:41 GMT -5 playvectrex said:

playvectrex - web wars - 16
playvectrex - get the beer - 5
BTW, I got to level 7 (which I guess is drunkenness 1 level 2) on Get The Beer and it only said level 5 so I reset it... I thought I noticed a few times it reported the wrong level. So then I was resetting it every play to make sure it wasn't messed up.  Something to look out for ;-) 

Thank you for this hint, playvectrex . Can other players confirm this? What is the maximum level with drunkenness 0?

I had the same yesterday late at night, but I was too tired to investigate or report. Seems to be a bug in the game. I am afraid the programmer is currently out of reach, and I probably won't have to time to try to fix this myself. Is the reset thing a workaround that fixss this?

[fmml]

Noticed the same issue that level highscore wasnt shown properly.

[Peer]

Did not do much testing, but it seems to work if you do a proper console reset before each game.

[Chainsaw]

I didn't notice this bug with "Get the Beer", it always counted correctly on my machine, even if I played it several times without reset, or even if I played other games before (and reset only with Multi Cart). But I also will keep an eye on it, and if the problem occurs, I will try to remember what I exactly did / try to reproduce it.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - Contains information about later levels. Don't click if you don't want to read information about a later level.}
PS: Reversing the left/right controls in a later level is a ... good idea. Also I'm amazed how many ideas / level variations are in this game.

PS 2: Yes I know, Gyrostronomy / Gyrostrology are also games full of ideas, and they look very complex. But there I don't want just starting, but reading first the story and manual as it was recommended. But it looks absolut impressing already on a "first view". Great work!

[hcmffm]

Thank you all for your thoughts and options on USA Zombie Apocalypse and Get the beer. Below my decisions on how to proceed.

USA Zombie Apocalypse - decision
Beating the game will result in 5000 points - regardless of your actual score. In all other cases played and displayed score is taken. I'll check all screenshots that have been posted so far and will adjust the scores in the next update of the highscore list.

Get the beer
Thanks for checking and your feedback. I'll post the advice to reset "Get the beer" once you lost. This is a bit cumbersome but better than a wrong score.

Chainsaw : Interesting to read about "Get the beer" and its variety. Confirms that it was a good choice. Perhaps you can edit your post and add the forum tag "Spoiler" so that people cannot read more unless they want to get spoilered.

[Chainsaw]

OK, I did this with the spoiler function. But we also have this problem in the Vector War generally. Thanks to me, all know now the 20 creatures of Web Wars - or I saw all treasures of the game Big Blue, but for me it's no problem. It can also be motivating to get them all :-)

[hcmffm]

Nov 1, 2021 16:51:24 GMT -5 Chainsaw said:

OK, I did this with the spoiler function. But we also have this problem in the Vector War generally. Thanks to me, all know now the 20 creatures of Web Wars - or I saw all treasures of the game Big Blue, but for me it's no problem. It can also be motivating to get them all :-)

Thank you, Chainsaw for adding the spoiler tags. In general players should be careful with spoilering details of games but sure enough playing is fun nevertheless. And screenshots of the trophees must be taken as photoproof - so no way around spoilering.

[hcmffm]

I forgot to point out and thank "Shattered Screens" for donating a copy of their VecRibbon. Thank you very much, Fell, Scarlet and Ash for this beautiful prize!

[hcmffm]

Sven of vectrex.be has contacted Darryl and me via mail. At first, both VectorX and I thought that this might be some spam but soon after I knew that it was not. Sven is a very dedicated Vectrex fan and even though he just registered and started his website vectrex.be it contains already a full browser-based Vectrex emulator with quite a number of Vectrex games. Worth while visiting the website - just make sure that for Vector War you must play on real hardware.

Besides his Vectrex hobby Sven is in the beer business. He decided to combine both things and donate two boxes of beer (16 bottles in total) for the Vector War. How you can win it: The two boxes of beer go to that player in Vector War XI...
...who has the highest score in the game "Get the beer" and...
...who is located in Europe and..
...who likes beer or has parents who like beer.

Here's a photo of what you might get:



I guess a prize winner will be found and then drunkenness of this person might be even higher. Thank you very much Sven for donating this unusal prize!

[playvectrex]

Since Pole Position is kind of a long medium length game, when you reset for a crash or bad performance, the intro tune is a real killer for your morale to play again  It's fun the first few times... but then gets annoying.

I've made a simple binary hack that changes the intro tune pointer from the game's long tune, to point to the BIOS "dun da daaa" simple tune. $0FEC was changed to $FD0D in the header code. No game code was changed.

Here is a diff of the two binaries to show only these two bytes changes:


hcmffm  do you think we could allow this binary of Pole Position to be used in VWXI?

playvectrex.com/gameroom/gce/pole-position-short-tune.bin

[hcmffm]

Nov 2, 2021 14:44:29 GMT -5 playvectrex said:

... hcmffm  do you think we could allow this binary of Pole Position to be used in VWXI?

playvectrex.com/gameroom/gce/pole-position-short-tune.bin

Thank you for asking and not just hacking and using it, Brett. Changing the tune means a significant change in the game: Motivation without the tune will be much higher. Honestly: Your change/hack is fine and people can use this binary if they want. ATM, I don't intend to pack a new ZIP archive, though.

[playvectrex]

Awexome, thanks Helmut

EDIT: I'm going to play a couple dozen times and just make sure the game feels the same, but I don't see why it wouldn't.

[playvectrex]

So I ran 3 more or less perfect games with 22 seconds left, total time 248.8 and the scores were:
77,300
77,400
77,250
So the randomizer seems to be working just fine still

[Chainsaw]

My best score was 77050 with 249.4 but there I made at least 2 mistakes (touching the roadside, hitting an oil slick, or braking down a bit). Interesting that you got different scores with the same time. Is it maybe the quantity of passed cars as somebody wrote, or maybe a player loses score when he is touching the roadside or braking down a bit? Or does even (crazy idea) the time of the qualification round counts? But 78000 is awesome!

[Chainsaw]

By the way: I see here awesome great scores in Galaxy Wars, f.e. over 60'000 at first place.
Is it correct, that everybody should play with only 3 lives, and not more?

And is it correct, that everybody should play the mixed mode (Galaxy Wars / Space launcer mixed levels) or is it allowed, to choose only Galaxy Wars?

Anyway, I think over 60'000 points are possible with 3 lives for a practised player, I was just asking, not that the rules were changed anywhere in the thread, and I'm playing only with 3 lives.