Games in Education research

Futurelab has reports on research about teaching with games, including surveys on students' and teachers' attitudes towards gaming.

Information Literacy Game

The game I have been working on is just about ready for some serious play testing. We will be rolling it out to students some First Year Studies classes to get feedback. After some tweaks and fixes, etc. we should be ready to roll it out to (hopefully) much acclaim in the Spring Semester.

If you would like to try it out, go to this link.

XeO3: C64....

Not a bad evenings work! I've managed to get the sprites converted over as well! Although at somepoint I guess I'd have to get them redrawn since they are only 16x16 but still, it looks great with the added colour! I'll probably release a C64 teaser in the near future as well, lets see if any C64 guys get interested :)

XeO3: Surprise Surprise!!!

Well, in only 2 days, I've done the main part of the port to the C64! Although there are no sprite graphics yet, and no multiplexor, its running through the game and its paths. Alien Bullets are off a bit for some reason, but that should be an easy one, unfortunately because the Plus/4 one has been designed to run in 2 frames, the C64 one runs a bit quick. I can slow it down to 2 frames as well, but I'm not sure I want to yet. Past experiance says that when you're PLAYING the game, you dont notice, and 2 frames gives you a lot of free time to do cool things. Because of Hardware Sprites, I can however move the players ship every frame, which will help make it seem like's going quicker than it is... I could also scroll the screen by 1 pixel a frame as well, but I dont think thats gonna work becasue sprites that are supposed to be attached to the background will judder - I think.

I've just been thinking, if I move the VIC bank to $4000-$7fff, then I'll be able to use more or less the same memory map, and use Luca's SID music as is (since it sits at $1800 - currently right in the middle of my sprites!) It would be nice to use his music, as it helps round out a demo.....

XeO3: C64

I'm having fun with the C64 just now while Luca gathers together some sprites for me to use, but I've hit my first snag.... The MCM on the plus4 uses differnt bits than the C64! Damn. So, I've done a bit flipper to swap bits $01 and $10. This lets the colour RAM on the C64 do the bright colour (since in MCM on the C64 you only have a choice of 8), and the 2 full colour registers then make up the rest... This will work fine for the game graphics, but......... The panel has some HiRes graphics in it...Damn, damn.....

So looks like I'll have to do a character index and tell it the ones I WANT to swap...bugger. However, once thats done it should just be a matter of importing Plus4 graphics and using them directly! Initally I'll do a port routine for the Plus4 sprites as well, then I'll get them resized. The C64 sprites are 24x21 (or 12x21 in MCM), while the Plus4 ones are 16x16 so there quite a bit of extra space there! The reason for the odd sizes is simpky that it lets the C64 have a sprite every 64 bytes, making 256 in a VIC bank.

I think I can get the whole thing up and running (without sprites) pretty quickly, then I'll need to get a multiplexor going... and then that "should" be it! :)

(in theory....) Imagine doing a "dual" retro release!! How cool is that!!! Now... if only I could persuade Russell (Kay - Lemmings PC programmer) to write the spectrum one...Mmmmm.... That WOULD be a complete rewrite though...

XeO3: bits and bobs...

Sound is interesting.... you can work away trying to get perfect pitch and volume and then when its working just the way you want, you can sometimes make it really course and never notice the difference. I put keys for volume control into the game, and all the work spent on the ADSR (a whole day of it...) is reduced somewhat to a whimper depending on the volume. Now, when playing back on the actual machine TED sounds are far FAR louder than Solder's SID chip addon, so I need to set a volume of around 2 or 3. This means all my ADSR values of 7 down to 0 are now just 2 or 3 down to 0. Not a lot... But they do still count, because if you dont use ADSR at all, it sounds terrible... weird.

I have to confess, I've been playing with some C64 code tonight.... I found the source to the Armalyte Multiplexor on (Lemon64), and thought I'd go through it... and perhaps get it up and running. However, this has lead me to look back at my Blood Money multiplexor (which itself was based on me hacking Armalyte - although I wrote it myself once I had the gernal idea), and its not bad either... theirs is a bit larger with the loops unrolled a lot, but mine wasn't too bad at all. Anyway, I think with very minimal work (and a working multiplexor) I can get XeO3 up and running pretty quickly on the C64. I'm kinda half waiting on Luca to do some more sprites now anyway, so I've an excuse to play a little... well... thats my reason and I'm sticking to it! It will be a little harder to get .PRG's onto the C64, although my MMC64 will help a bit, but a download cable would be much better.....

So, after looking through the source, I've started to macro it a bit more to make it easier to follow - for the sort at least, I may well write my own multiplexor bit again... but I suspect I'll try and get something running first. The great thing about doing a C64->Plus4 or a Plus4>C64 conversion is that being 6502, it'll just run - I won't have to rewite it all the way I used to do when doing a port. This means I get to do all the fun stuff and dont have to do ANY of the boring stuff again!!! Great!!!

XeO3: Sounds....V2

Weel, I've gotten 2 channels...almost - but good enough I think. Basically, I now have 2 full effects playing and both use ADSR envelopes, however channel 1 (Square wave only channel) will now check to see if its ADSR value is bigger than channel 2's sound. This means that either channel can get louder if sounds overlap, but you don't really notice that much, and having 2 channels is much nicer.

I'm also starting to feel the pinch, and memory is becoming tight. I've had to do my first code shuffle since code space was over running, so I've moved lots of local function variables into the games DATA area, which I've now expanded by 2k to make room for it. This isn't something thats gonna improve, it'll just get worse. It also leads me to wonder what the hell Im gonna do for a front end! Theres just NO space left for one, let alone character sets and all. I'm not a big fan of "loading" front ends since this is really bad news when you first start playing a game and get killed a lot, long load times don't make for a fun game.....

Speaking of long load times... I'm looking at the memory map and ralise that I'll need to load 3 seprate files per level; it would be much nicer if I could make it one big one, load times would drop quite a bit. I'll have to see if its possible to shuffle things around to be able to do that.