4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons came out last week. Although I will never be the tabletop gamer my brother is (who plays and runs games weekly), I still enjoy it a lot, and I've been looking forward to the new edition.

This sentiment has not been shared by the gaming community as a whole, though. The community is rather polarized on the subject, and many vicious threads can be found on various gaming forums attacking the new edition as simply a corporate grab for more money. Others say the game is too "simplified" and that characters are too powerful, and that the borrowing of ideas from massive-multiplayer online games was a mistake.

The truly hilarous element, though, is how the older gamers sound so much like the war gamers that grumbled when war games were the dominant hobby and role-playing was the upstart. Resentment, anger, and dismissive patronizing comments were rife then, as they are now.

My feelings on the matter are that the game's primary purpose is to provide fun and entertainment for the players and the game master. Anything in the rules system that detracts too much from this should be questioned and if deemed unsuitable, discarded. Sacred cows in the rules should not be preserved if they are in the way.

In particular, I feel that the days of a tabletop RPG trying to simulate reality should be left behind. Most of the older rules systems do this because of their war gaming roots. But these days, computers are far superior at this task than any single person would be. A computer has the time to keep track of thousands of variables and counters, a human being would not.

Instead, I feel tabletop gaming needs to focus on the elements that the computer can't do. In particular, interactivity. This is the Holy Grail of most gaming, and there are very few games that even get close to it. Interactivity means the not reacting, but interacting with the player, and such things simply don't happen. The computer can never replace a human being for true interactive storycrafting.

The new edition actually has a lot of good streamlining and an even more varied encounter system. It is NOT a cakewalk either; any player who walks into it thinking it's easier will be in for a surprise. A lot of the changes really don't become apparent until you actually play. And it may not be for everyone, of course. Unfortunately, trolls are always hungry... whether they dwell under bridges or on forums. :)

This gave me some thought about my CRPG as well; I realized that I should consider simplifying some of the game's elements myself, to cut down the amount of memory-expensive controls it would require. In particular, I was originally intending to offer a lot of flexibility with level advancement. But when I gave it some thought, I realized such flexibility would probably offer little extra to the player and just take up room for other things.

I may want to actually scale back the class/skill system to something really simple... and then add back to it once I have an actual working system in code. I wanted a more complex character system than Tunnels of Doom or Legends had, but sometimes you only got so much memory to work with.

Still inching back into game design mode... I found an error with my battlemap editor, which was screwing up the tail end of maps. That's fixed, but now I need to consider making a monster editor... I can always hack something together for test data, but the combat engine will need something to chew on. *sighs* A lot of work to even get a basic framework going...

In other news, I recently aquired some old TI equipment from a fellow 99'er in my area. His name is Hans Quennet, former USAF. He had it in his garage for quite some time (20 years), and his wife wanted him to get rid of it. I told him I'd be happy to take it and make sure it got to good homes. (And before you ask, the P.E. box is spoken for, and does NOT have anything exotic like a Myarc HDFC. All authentic TI cards.)

I must admit I felt quite a bit of nostalgia firing the box up. That musty smell of old electronics really gets the blood going! Of course, I do have my own P.E. box in my parent's garage back home, so I'm hardly deprived... but all the little notes taped to the computer and box are heartwarming to see, I remember doing similar things myself!

The little monitor there is particularly cool. It's a small comfortable size, and very similar to the old TI monitor in form, although it also has a B/W switch. Very nice! I think I may hang onto that.

The 'phat lewt' included several TI consoles, including one missing a space bar and in dubious operating shape, a beige/cream TI, one that's pretty shiny new with the cables still in original cardboard packaging, Hans's personal unit (in photo), and one that looks all right. All the black/silver ones have the mechanical keyboards instead of membranes that I can see, which is good news.

Software-wise, a small stock of base TI cartridges, nothing exotic of the later Triton/TM Direct days. Disk software consists of the E/A disks and TI-Artist (copy) with TI Artist's Companions 1 and 2.

I spent an hour or two chatting with Hans, and he's earned his ribbons as a 99'er. He spent a lot of time writing BASIC and XB programs, including a Scrabble game that he managed to optimize very effectively for speed. To which a friend asked him "How does it know it spelled the words right?" which was an annoying revelation for him. :)

He also told me a story about how an Apple store guy has shown him a fractal plotter, and scoffed when he mentioned his TI. Hans took that as a challenge and converted the Apple BASIC program to TI-BASIC, and left it to run overnight. In the morning, he'd gotten a fracal curve on screen (courtesy of CHAR defining) and he took a photo with a camera to show the guy, who was quite blown away. "You did this on a TI?!" he said incredulously. A dream moment for any 99'er. :)

I also found, while doing some eBay shopping, that I have a place in town here that buys and sells vintage and modern computer equipment. It's called RE-PC, and they would probably be any vintage guy's place to shop. I saw several old systems and some software; the only TI stuff I saw of note was a copy of Narovine's Console Writer and Database cartridge... Not much else TI, although they just sold a P.E. box on EBay for a nice chunk of cash. If you live in the Seattle area and are into hardcore retro-vintage computing, check them out.

RE-PC Home Site

I've been inching back into the CRPG work... mostly thinking about combat. I may need to write-out the entire battle engine in pseudo-code first, and then do an honest assessment of whether or not I have the memory to do what I want. Things have a way of taking up a LOT more space than you initially thought. I'd probably also go back to the idea of making the engine run in a stand-alone format for testing and refinement, and then integrating it into the travel engine.

In the mean-time, I've also been doing something more creative but of lesser priority.. the title screen.

A good title screen is something you tend to remember about a game. Ultima boasted some lively animated ones, and a lot of Apple II games made it a point to have a VERY good title screen, something that would draw people in if viewed in, say, a computer store.

The TI's bitmap mode is actually very capable of generating some fantastic images, despite the color limitation of 2-colors per octet. (That's 8-bits horizontal.) There's even some very good utilities to convert images to TMS9918A bitmap format (Usually called mode 2), thanks to some overlap from the MSX crowd, who have done more of this sort of thing than 99'ers over the years.

I wanted a nice landscape picture for my title, but also something that wasn't proprietary. So I went with a piece called "The White Mountains" by Thomas Moran, a famous painter of American landscapes in the late 19th century. It's pleasing, and it's public domain.

Converting it to the TI bitmap mode, though, has proven to be a real challenge. Just a straight computer conversion looks like absolute crap. This isn't surprising, since the 15-color limitation is going to wreck havoc on a watercolor piece with a number of hues and gradients.

Right now, my solution has been to convert the images to something slightly closer, around 256 colors, then I have separated the background and foreground objects, and rendered them into black and white. From there, I can individually apply color to bring certain objects into better detail. I also want the piece to have a "black" background to go with the game. I may need to dither the background part a bit to lessen it, as the two combined at the moment make a royal mess that's hard to distinguish...

I eventually plan to put the game's title into the background, hopefully making the letters both stand out and flow with the picture... somehow. I'm not sure how well that's going to come off as yet.

Well, my brother's wedding is over, and it went very well. The only thing that didn't happen was my parent's apple trees hadn't bloomed yet... blame all the cold snaps we've had. The cherry crops were wiped out by them, so expect high prices on cherries this year.

The photographers put up a bunch of "candid" as well as posing shots at a particular URL, so I've provided it below. I'm the guy with the blue tie against a black shirt. Man I need to lose some weight...

Game news has been sparse of late. I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft with a friend of mine, and just found a pretty decent guild with some good people. I don't think MMO's will ever fully replace the classic single-player CRPG, but they have their strong points... games are always more fun with friends!

My Brother's Wedding Pictures

It has been awhile since I posted... My CRPG work is sidelined at the moment, as my new job is consuming a lot of my "coder" resources, and I've been playing more games.

I'm all for pushing on and finishing things, but it's also important to take breaks. If I was getting a paycheck for this kind of work, that would be different. But with hobby projects, sometimes it's good to take an extended break. Fortunately, I've set it up so I can easily pick back up where I left off with a minimum of trouble.

My brother's wedding is this upcoming weekend, at which I will be the best man. It was set in late April so that we could have the ceremony in my parent's apple orchard, with the trees in full bloom... we're hoping they will be, anyway! The weather in the Pacific Northwest has been very odd the last few weeks. It appeared like a normal spring, but we had snow fall last weekend, on both sides of the mountains... this is definitely out of pattern. I'm sure global warming is to blame somewhere in there.

In CRPG-related news, Stu has finally completed Gates of Delirium. The success of the posts has lead the host site, Armchair Arcade, to propose the idea of calling such activities (playing through old games and blogging the experience) as a 'slog'. Stu's next project is another obscure title, the Color Computer 3 game "The Seventh Link". Let's hope this one is less tedious!