Does anyone use Mega Patches?

Chris H.'s Ultima / ACS-style game development system!

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Admiral Ackguh
Posts: 137
Joined: Sat Nov 03, 2012 11:26 am
Location: Canada
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Does anyone use Mega Patches?

Post by Admiral Ackguh »

I'm just curious about this. I use basic ACK (3.251) with no patches, but plan to develop further games with them. Is anyone using the Mega Patches for any projects?
- A:A:

joebonk
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2012 3:16 am
Location: las cruces, nm

Post by joebonk »

I use it. I think the reason is to have as many possible inclusions to the game as possible. But my favorite is the Tile swap. Every town and dungeon I make has it's own tileset. I may have 50 tilesets by the time Abyss is done. The only problem I am wondering so far is coming into a savegame how do we have the correct tile set loaded? The default one will be in use when the game is first started. Maybe an hourly macro will always force reg = (what region you are in). This would allow for the few minutes you first start to be wrong but not too long it would get corrected.
Does any one know how to get the tileset loaded at first game start?
I was thinking using the "Set a custom key to run a macro" and tell players if the tileset is not the right one to just hit that key to get it loaded.

rld
Posts: 223
Joined: Sun Jan 25, 2009 2:17 am
Location: Dallas, TX

Post by rld »

joebonk wrote:Every town and dungeon I make has it's own tileset. I may have 50 tilesets by the time Abyss is done. The only problem I am wondering so far is coming into a savegame how do we have the correct tile set loaded? The default one will be in use when the game is first started.
There's a patch feature that lets you set a macro
to be automatically executed following a saved game
load. To use it, you need to

1) Set bit 13 of the Z variable to 1; that is, set Z to
the value (8192 + (your old value of Z)).

2) Set the high byte of the T variable to the macro you
want to call. To do this set T to
(256 * (macro number you want to call)) + (old T)

For example, if you aren't using the T variable for
anything else, and you want to call macro #10 on
game restore, set T to:

(10 * 256) + (0) = 2560.

Then, in macro #10, you just need to set the
tileset appropriately based on what region you are
in.

joebonk
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2012 3:16 am
Location: las cruces, nm

Post by joebonk »

rld wrote: 1) Set bit 13 of the Z variable to 1; that is, set Z to
the value (8192 + (your old value of Z)).
Thank you rld for that. It is greatly appreciated. If z was never set would that be zero? or (8192 + ((0))
... if Z was not set to anything before. Sometime it seems a variable isn't even zero if not ever being set. I don't think a variable even has a measurable figure in a macro if it hasn't been set to anything yet. Maybe I'm wrong.

I think there should be a Mega Patch Thread. And/or a hACK thread. Would would be cool is if we had a question about achieving a new trick of hack and if somebody knew how to edit the data files to achieve it. I know some Hacks need files altered to get new options to work.

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