Crazy Solitaire

[DusanStrakl]

After a long while I wrote another game. This time it classic Solitaire game and I pushed the graphical capabilities of Commander X16 a little bit. More about how it is done is available on my blog:

https://www.8bitcoding.com/p/crazy-solitaire.html

Some screenshots:








You can also try it here:
Try It Now!

[Daedalus]

Nice!

I also like the way you included a link to a blog post about how you made the game. Everyone should read that, it contains great advice on how to approach the project and write it in a modular way. (Basically, it says use a Model,View,Controller style without actually using those words.)

When I first saw the screenshots, I wondered how you did the "Cascade of cards bouncing off the screen" effect, but after I read the blog... it was "Of course, tiny tiles." When I played the game, I could see where the cards were wacky at the corners because tiles can't be transparent over themselves, only the underlying layer. As such, the tiles can have no transparent bits. But that's barely noticeable in the final product.

[DusanStrakl]

Thank you Daedalus,

I try to keep my code organized in any way makes sense for that particular project. It is especially important in Assembly programs where there is a lot of lines of code but at the same time it is always trying to find balance between readability of the code and performance.

[doslogo]

From DusanStrakl's blog: One thing that surprised me the most was that Commander X16 is able to handle all those graphics manipulations very quickly. I was concerned that relatively narrow channel between CPU and VERA will be a bottleneck but it works very quickly and I didn’t even need to optimize the code too much.

It feels almost surreal how much Commander X16 can accomplish with assembler as the starting point. I began my project with your tutorials as inspiration, and it still blows my mind to see how much things can be done in one 1/60 of a second!

Great work here!

[Roy Eltham]

This is well a done solitaire! Played a bunch.

[Xiphod]

Very enjoyable rendition of this classic game, and a very polished software on this system.

(for those not aware, Dusan also did various other early X16 titles - check out CrazyLander, it's still very excellent; he's one of the masters of this system )


One small thing I noticed- I selected "show 3 mode" and when you click on one of those 3 cards, it always shows 3 (meaning when you select the top to move it, the "4th card" is revealed in the stack of 3). I can't recall if this was already mentioned in the Discord (as maybe being expected/normal gameplay). Just it flickers and didn't seem consistent as it was when playing "for real" with physical cards.


And one other tiny thing- didn't some other versions have "animated cards"? (or am I thinking of FreeCell?) Like the King would blink or the Jack would pull a sword once in a while? something like that, little subtle things). Someday I'd like to examine the code and see what would be necessary to incorporate something like that (just to gauge on if the design makes that adjustment semi-easy, or would it be a major impact?)

[ahenry3068]

Very enjoyable rendition of this classic game, and a very polished software on this system.

(for those not aware, Dusan also did various other early X16 titles - check out CrazyLander, it's still very excellent; he's one of the masters of this system )


One small thing I noticed- I selected "show 3 mode" and when you click on one of those 3 cards, it always shows 3 (meaning when you select the top to move it, the "4th card" is revealed in the stack of 3). I can't recall if this was already mentioned in the Discord (as maybe being expected/normal gameplay). Just it flickers and didn't seem consistent as it was when playing "for real" with physical cards.


And one other tiny thing- didn't some other versions have "animated cards"? (or am I thinking of FreeCell?) Like the King would blink or the Jack would pull a sword once in a while? something like that, little subtle things). Someday I'd like to examine the code and see what would be necessary to incorporate something like that (just to gauge on if the design makes that adjustment semi-easy, or would it be a major impact?)

I'll do a big DITTO on everything Xiphod said here. I learned a lot by picking through Dusan's earlier code on here (and also took inspiration from it). Solitaire is another very well done Game and very polished.

[Xiphod]

Another observation: the score sometimes increments by 5 after just clicking the bottom facing card of a stack (not always; but seems if there are multiple facing cards in the stack it always increments by 5 after just clicking the card).