What I want: persons who can spot the wrong sfx playing while fighting with half a dozen droids. Persons who notice if deck is even slightly wrong, be it wrong layout or droid difficulty. And you need to be able to complete at least a ship or two routinely.

What you get: chance to test "the most bestest Paradroid version 3v4r", with the largest selection of cheats available. Your name in history as deck/ship designer. Warm feeling, knowing you belong to the best of the best of the best.

If you think you are up to the challenge then apply with PM.

[edit: read the blog too]

Not to pollute the other thread any more I decided to post this here:

You will end up destroying less droids than that though, as game kills nearby droids if it can't allocate sprite for them. I might teleport such droids to random out-of-view waypoint instead, that would make ships appear more crowded. Nice on the bridge and cargo bays

Droid teleportation works just nicely, I haven't been able to make the game to destroy single droid because of lack of sprites. Routine needs to be made more intelligent though, it still has tendency to send all teleported sprites to same locatiion.

More fun:

Counts are six digits, so you will have to play for a while to wrap them...

That's a fantastic addition to the gameplay.
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Nicked directly from Paradroid'90

I'm considering adding accuracy bonus too, P90 grants 100*percentage when you complete ship.

Feeling good about myself, now! There should be no more droids stuck in the wall! Only one more item in the bug list, it will hopefully fix many of those once in a blue moon glitches you encounter under heavy fire.

Time to call it quits for this weekend.

Nice. Any chance that you could squeeze in a little congratulations message after you have cleared all of the ships?

First public beta - let me know what you think. There might be a bug or two lurking around, but couple of old ones should be gone. Check the web page for changes.

No, I'm not telling how to activate cheats

Edit: game over sequence lacks char animation, that's fixed already but I won't upload new version before I've fixed remaining bugs in second fire button routines.

Is this going to be a PAL-only release or will it run properly on NTSC machines too?
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It runs in VICE in NTSC, so just try it out. It might drop to every third frame more often than on PAL machine, but it's still significally faster than the original.

Edit: screen split is messy on NTSC, but otherwise everething seems to work just fine.

I tried the beta and I'm wondering if sprite collision detection is disabled by default because I can't kill or mate with any droids. Also, is there any documentation that explains how to enable/disable the built-in cheat mode? Perhaps my problem is because the cheat mode is enabled?

Crappy hardware sprite collision, but you definitely should be able to shoot enemies and transfer with them - unless there are multiple collisions and you are one of them, as in that case game ignores all collisions. Last item in bug list...

And as I wrote above I'm not telling how to activate cheats, that would spoil the game

I've now uploaded version with support for second button. To use it for transfers press it while the "Paradroid" logo is shown. In this mode first button is used only for firing and activating lifts/consoles. It should work whether the second button is connected to potx or poty pin. Tested only with potx tho.

Public beta with improved droid AI uploaded. There's not much difference when alert is green, but class 6 and above droids get more dangerous when alert status rises.

There are couple of known issues, like game teleporting droids into wrong half in extreme cases (code is already fixed to handle that, data isn't) and droids sometimes "jumping" when they get out of view, most easily witnessed by following them through doors. Bug reports are welcome.

Go and get it now! Collision detection is finally rewritten, smaller changes include some animation chages and alert bonus when completing a ship. Countless of smaller changes too.

It's still alive, I have just had hard time finding time to fit fast software sprite collision routine in the remaining space. Good news is that it now runs on old NTSC machines as well, only change needed was checking for it in the init routine and adjusting timer value for it. Easiest fix ever

I will upload new version some day.

Ooh, I'd forgotten about this! I must have a go now my brand new PC is up and running...
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I had time for a quick (15 minute) test of this yesterday. Plays very well!

My one suggestion is to get rid of the new flashing effect on the Lift squares. Since they flash white, and the character sprite is white, I thought it was the sprite getting corrupted at first Or perhaps change the flash to a different color.

Lift flash is likely to get removed, there simply is no good color for it and it eats ~50 bytes of code. Doing proper character animation would take 16*8 bytes of data and minimum 300 cycles.

Project has stalled because I figured that people would rather mount D64s with MMC64+RR, and I don't want to keep testing PR multiload with 1541 myself

Just got blasted by some 883 unit...again.

Is it just me, or do the droids shoot like crazy now?
Game seems much harder, but I like a tough challenge.
As I recall there was some kind of "radar" feature you mentioned somewhere for the 800-class units. Is it proplerly implemented?
Didn't work for me, although I remained stationary for 2 secs.

No future highscore saver feature then because of project stall I might guess? Pity.

Anyway, great work!
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Yes, I met all the prerequisites you mentioned.
I knew there were some droids behind that wall, still no luck.

What does the radar feature actually do?

I thought it would let me see droids behind walls.
Your answer implied that this would only be the case if I controlled the 999.
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Good news: I finally took sound fx routine and optimized it - ~200 bytes shorter code, 24 bytes shorter data. It's faster too . That was the last piece of code which I hadn't touched (although it was relocated earlier).
I also added high score load/save for all time high score, it should be compatible with any device.

Now I really need to fix the remaining bugs in the collision detection code and all off-by-one-frame-flicker caused by delayed sprite register writes so I can give you new beta.

That's good to hear. You've done amazing work with Paradroid Redux. I don't play the original version anymore.
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