Fully-furnished (-1)

Reached a milestone recently - every* room in the mansion is now furnished!

I've always been a bit anxious about this, worried that it'd be out of memory before I reached this point, and I didn't really have a plan B.  I guess I could have designed a smaller map, reduced the variety of graphics used in the rooms, or shrank the player graphics, or a combination of all of the above, but I really want this to be as close to the PC original as I can be (in a low-powered, low-memory, monochrome way).  As suspected, populating the caverns did result in a bit of a rewrite to fit everything thing in, but it's all there now, and if I have any memory spare at the end I can always add more variety, but for now every room is different and it actually looks like a game as you run around between them.

So, time to move back to the actual nuts'n'bolts of the gameplay.  I've just finished reworking how the food is handled in the game, so it restores after a given amount of time.  Doing this has actually opened up the possibility of compressing the map data - although I'm not sure if that'll be useful at all, but it could be - maybe each floor of the mansion could be stored separately and compressed?  Will probably have a play with this idea, see how much memory it all currently uses, and how much I might save, as I *always* need more memory in this game.  The funny thing about compressing data is that it doesn't always save you memory - because you need not only space for the compressed data, but also somewhere to decompress it to.  So you could have 2 sets of 3K data which don't need to be in memory at the same time, and say each set compresses down to 2K, but since you also need 3K to store the uncompressed version in that's 7K in all - so you've actually lost 1K!

Next up though I plan to sort out the health system - so that the starting amount, the amount lost over time, and that regained by eating food, matches the PC version as much as possible.  There's a bit of optimising to be had here as well regarding the drawing of the player's health in the bottom-right, so I might be able to claw back a bit of speed there, which would be nice.

* Well, nearly... there's one room which hasn't been done yet, and that's the room belonging to Mr. Melkhior himself.  But that's a special case which I need to have a think about...