Fairy Tale Adventure

[koaftder]

The author (David Joyner) has a blog:

http://viridia.org/

He doesnt update often, but i check it out every once and a while, Faery Tale Adventure was pretty infulential to me. The a1000 and that game montivated me when i was a little kid to persue the career i'm in now ( sadly i'm not a game programmer though... But according to stuff this guy has wrote in the past about the industry, i'm glad )

[koaftder]

wow, looks like somebody got on the swan and did a lot of save/bird totem action.

Ive been working off and on on getting the tile data out of that game. Ive been able to read/modify the map. The DOS and amiga vesions are very similar. The dos version has a map file, and each byte represents each tile. (one char per title) Tiles are twice as tall as they are wide.

On the dos version, the tile graphic data is in one file per spite... Ive tried and tried to extract the graphics data, no luck. Couldnt figure out how to do it with the amiga disc either.

USE on linux lets you pop up a debugger, now if i can figure out what addresses to dump, i might get that raster data yet...

[koaftder]

mr_a500 wrote:

The best advice I give folks is build your bravery before venturing out.

I've learned best way to build bravery is to head to the cemetary right away (after getting the hidden stuff in town of course). Stay inside the cemetary fence at the top by the gate. Once you kill one guy who has a sword or mace, you'll be able to stab them through the fence with it without getting hurt. Don't go too far from the entrance or you won't be able to search their bodies after killing them (bodies disappear if you move too far away). After you've killed about 30 guys, you'll be ready to leave the cemetary and kick some ass.

I'd really love to see a 3D version of The Faery Tale Adventure.

In Peter McGavin's Faery Tale HD patch readme, he mentions something about something about a Faery Tale sequel in development, but the link in the readme doesn't work anymore. I guess the development was cancelled.

There is some trick too about keys, which comes in handy in the underground mazes. Something like pause, then multiple takes.

There was a Faery 2, halls of the dead, i never saw it though.

Ive been wanting to do a 3d port of faery tale, thats what got me started extracting the map, got that down. Still havent gotten the tile graphics out though. OpenGL ive found is frustrating. Ive finally gotten to the point where i can draw triangles and stuff. Theres a ton i have to learn.

Id like to get to the point where i can take the mapdata, draw the landscape as flat surface, draw the mountains and stuff with simple poygons, etc, and use 2d bitmaps in the scene for the characters and plants and rocks and stuff. Somthing pretty simple on a wolf3d/doom level would still be pretty cool, and hopefully not to terribly hard to code.

Projects like these never get done. I saw a pretty good port of ultima underworld stygian abyss but it's like 95% done, and been at that level for years(to be fair, the guys did a wonderful job though)

The game sure was mezmorising though. I'll never forget the sounds the disk drive made in the different parts of the game. 20 years later and i still cant get the daytime sound track out of my head.

Ive beat the game in UAE, and the scrolling is btter in UAE and much less disk lag. Emulation is perfect as far as i can tell. It's not much fun on the a1000 anymore, guess i'm ruined.

[koaftder]

JLF65 wrote:
Just a few notes from my brother about the data layout:

The outside map is at 0x14000 and is 128x128 bytes. Each byte defines one of 256 blocks.

The inside map is at 0x18000 and is 128x32 bytes.

The definition of the outside blocks starts at 0x4000 and is 256 blocks of 16x8 bytes. Each byte selects a graphics set.

The definition of the inside blocks starts at 0xc000 and is 256 blocks of 16x8 bytes.

The graphics sets are 64 blocks of 5 bitplanes of 16bits wide by 32 lines tall. Graphics set code bytes are broken into four ranges: I = 0 to 63, II = 64 to 127, III = 128 to 191, and IV = 192 to 255.

If you plug in the above values, you find the world map is 32768 pixels by 32768 lines!

The various graphics sets are:

0x19000 - graphics set A (IV) = southeast mountains
0x1e000 - graphics set B (III) = graveyard area
0x23000 - graphics set C (II) = Marheim/Castle tiles
0x28000 - graphics set D (I) = basic terrain
0x2d000 - graphics set E (II) = basic buildings
0x32000 - graphics set F (III) = petrified forest
0x37000 - graphics set G (IV) = witch's castle
0x3c000 - graphics set H (II) = crystal palace/Azal/tombs
0x41000 - graphics set I (III) = snow/plains/misc terrain
0x46000 - graphics set J (IV) = north mountains
0x4b000 - graphics set K (IV) = southwest mountains
0x50000 - graphics set L (II) = citadel
0x55000 - graphics set M (I) = dungeon walls
0x5a000 - graphics set N (II) = basic indoors
0x5f000 - graphics set O (II) = caves
0x64000 - graphics set P (III) = castle/inn
0x69000 - graphics set Q (IV) = misc tiles

Using this info, you can render the nice maps you see around the net.

Insane! Thanks man, that covers loads of ground work. Farthest i got was the offset to the start location outside, and that each tile was one byte. I then i modified the map a million times to figure out what each tiles # was.