🚀 go-pugleaf

>
>Sprite editing: I will distribute DM256 sometime next week (sorry for the
>delay, but we just got a new dog and time is at a premium).  It's a sort
>of cheap dpaint clone with fairly good handling.  If I have time this
>weekend I will try and put it in a package with Mr. Slagel's xblt02 and
>Egg's Xlib xmode packages with appropriate C++ .libs and header files.

	Hey, neat.

>
>Adv. gGmaes: what is lacking in the vast majority is story.  Story, story,
>story!  What sense is an adventure game without the adventure?  Graphics
>alone don't make a game emotionally gripping.  Sure, the Guardian in
>Ultima7 was threatening and a good bit of atmosphere <but> nothing yet has
>compared (to me) to the death scenes in "planetfall" and "stationfall"
>where floyd dies.  No graphics--gripping stories.
>

	Well, 2 approaches. You either make a game for your own enjoyment
(i do things just to see what i cn do) or else get serious about a game,
at which point realize that everyone has their own forte - hire someone
to do mindless programming and hire one of those poor starving liberal
arts students to write a story.

>
>Tiled backgrounds: I am curious about the possibility of animated terrain
>in a tile-type adventure game a la Ultima7.  The idea I had was to create
>a animicon structure containing a pointer to a bitmap and a pointer to the
>next animicon such that calling animicon.draw() would draw the bitmap and
>advance to the next Icon.  Will this work, and will it be fast enough for
>any sort of scrolling?

	Well, experts, will it? I don't know. Seems neat, but then
your going to have to rebuild that structure every game, because you
can't exactly write pointers out to a file and have them be reusable.
	I also don't know how you plan to implement it. I guess it
could be done, and make coding easier, but probably not any faster, 
except minutely so if your icons are already on order, whic they shouldn't
be if you have a decent sized game.
	Keep in mind that most speed is wasted in block transfers to the
screen memory. Most other code is just negligible unless your using some
kind of on-the-fly nterpreter and strange memory manager. Write everything
but graphics in unoptimized fortran and you still get a decent game.