LESBIAN HOTTIE

 

Suspect the brunette can't control her cheek muscles because she has such a speech distortion & she  always has at least some of a smile when serious.  A virus can do that but normally only temporarily.

The have 32 security cameras & their location isn't given anywhere.  They don't even reveal the nearest town or stores.  The location would reveal how good  or bad they really have it. Lions thought being 5 miles from the nearest town in a tropical paradise was bad, but vanwives look more remote & they've got extreme cold instead of daily thunderstorms.

Their 15 acres with abandoned cabin was $37k in 2019.  They were paying $1200/month in rent in Toronto before then.  The canadian dollar in those days was worth about 2 greenbacks.

They're making about $10k/month from the tube & probably another $10k from other deals.  They recently went viral & began making more videos.

They're kind of a revival for Xena fans.  They look like Xena & Gabrielle & have the same lesbian romance.  Like most tubers though, every vijeo eventually starts to repeat the 1 formula that works.

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Another round of microcontroller hacking emphasized what made lions always avoid retro computing.  The obsolete microcontrollers lions use are 8 MIPS.  The commodore 64 was .5 MIPS.  Trying to do anything on such a limited processor is absurd compared to even doing it on a 20 year old microcontroller.  There's no reason other than the contrived challenge & keeping the knowledge of historic times in circulation.  The world has chosen that particular computer as the benchmark for historic re-enactment.

Lions wrote glxgears for C64 to fulfill a childhood dream, mastering techniques of drawing high res, animated bitmaps.  The fact is lions wrote a full screen animation in LOGO by 1988 & there were libraries for 3D animated graphics by then. Interest had waned enough by then to remember nothing of the early fascination with it.

The other fascinations were writing a drawing program & a larger than RAM 2D side scrolling world.  At this point, the drawing program would be a simple spline animation tool with keyboard commands.  The side scroller for years favored either using an enhanced PETSCII character set or multiple character sets optimized for different sections of the world, but nothing was feeling warm & fuzzy.

The best idea might be compositing reusable bitmap objects of arbitrary size.  Roads, lakes, trees, craters & buildings would be made of bitmap tiles.  Large objects like lakes would be made of several objects.  Trees could be single objects.  That gives the best of character sets & bitmaps.  Tiles would have to be aligned on 8x8 blocks for speed & not masked within those blocks, eliminating the color allocation. Tiles would have to be cached decompressed in RAM & loaded on demand from disk.

The 1st step would be a PNG to bitmap converter.  Then a simple compositor would read a map file, load & composite the right objects in the current window.

The problem is no games come to mind which did this & the reason might have been how long it took to scroll the bitmap, decompress the tiles, composite the tiles.  Scrolling would entail moving 9000 bytes.  Instead of smooth scrolling, it might entail pausing when the player hit the edge of the screen & jumping over a full screen or a 1/2 screen.

It wouldn't be a very fun flight simulator.  Police quest did do page jumps when driving, but it required a very small 3 pixel player moving very slowly.  A practical test is required to see how fast composited bitmaps could be drawn.

The best way to achieve smooth scrolling might be storing the screen in 4 character sets, switching character sets every 6 lines.  Scrolling would entail moving just 2000 bytes.  Decompressing & compositing the tiles would still be slow.  Memory usage would grow by 1192 bytes.

Full bitmap world would only work for a walking player while a character set world would be required for a flying player.

Young lion wanted to take off from an aircraft carrier & fly over a city.  It was a fantastic visual for its time.  It would almost need a PETSCII variant.

The night carrier launch wasn't part of the story line but was in episode 17: Phantasm.  He only launched from the ground. The carriers were never attached to the ship when it was on the ground.

1 shot shows the carriers were offshore during the island scene so he could take off from offshore.

 

 

Only 1 short sequence right in the beginning showed the original zendraeti form & the coast line.

Some screenshots show how a high fidelity map would require ganging many characters together to create each building.  The ship would span many screens in order for the player to be to scale.  It couldn't use dedicated characters.  The player is small enough in relation to the map & the TV art was low enough in detail, it might work with composited objects in 80x50 bitmap mode.

This game could have used a smooth scrolling 80x50 map when the player was in airplane mode & a paged 160x200 bitmap mode when the player was in walking mode.  The walking mode would have detailed backgrounds while the flying mode would have rough backgrounds.

 A big question is if the commodore could do 160x100 multicolor mode by raster interrupting every 2 lines, flipping between 4 pages, & scrolling vertically to use just the top 2 pixels of the character set.  This mode would use 256 characters to define all combinations of a 4x2 multicolor area.  It would take 8000 bytes to define all 4 pages, the same as bitmap mode for 1/2 the resolution.  Scrolling would entail copying 8000 bytes.  80x50 might be the best scrolling mode.  Even 80x50 has to page flip every 4 lines to change colors.

80x50 looks pretty terrible from what limited demos are on the tube.  This idea seems to be hitting the same roadblocks it did 40 years ago.  The only way a 2D world can look good is if it doesn't scroll & that greatly limits it.  Anything using a character set is going to max out at petscii robots quality.

Another project which might use 80x50 is starship jupiter lander.  That could fit the entire world in a contiguous bitmap.  The shape of the world map is so important for collisions, it might be better sticking to high res bitmap mode & just not scrolling smoothly.  The original jupiter lander did have a magnified view & might have used a character set.

Honestly, a VT100 using ASCII art might be a better investment for a 2D side scroller.  A VT100 scrolling map has never been done.  Player graphics would be a problem.

Small rooms with 2.5D side scrolling seem to be the best compromise for the time, between 2D maps like petscii robots & a full 3D map like sim city. Pretty ambitious graphics but boring.  An area roughly twice as large as the screen is being scrolled around.  There are exits in the Z plane for moving between rooms. The player moves between Z or Y depending on location in the room & background graphics.

 

 Division into rooms seems unavoidable if tiles can't be composited fast enough to achieve smooth scrolling.  Lions still don't envy anything short of a full 3D representation of Macross island, even if it means coarse scrolling or paging.  There could be concessions like making the space ship just big enough for 1 fighter jet to take off, not drawing anything to scale.

 

 

 

A rough concept of a Robotech map was an enlightening experience.  The carrier was about the right size.  The rest needs to be twice as big.  A lone lion with a modern attention span in the subject would not be able to make a very high fidelity map.  The original background plates had about as much detail as PETSCII & things were definitely not to scale.  Anything better was purely imagined.

A multicolor variant of PETSCII would be the best solution.  It would just load tiles from disk & smooth scroll. It would be a very stylized, approximate world like the TV show.  As it was 40 years ago, the player would have to be designed 1st to scale the rest of it.  Multicolor mode requires 4 sprites to get 24x42.  That's the lowest that could even remotely resolve a battleoid.

 

For a sandbox world, the real art would be very large relative to the character size, so the player could fit in the streets & runways without occlusion, fit on the ships.  The concept was 5 screens x 4 screens.  It might have to be 10 x 8 screens.  A single commodore disk could store 85 screens of uncompressed character data with color, but this doesn't count a collision surface elevation map.  RLE compression would most certainly be necessary.

The workflow is trending towards freepaw sketching the world in the required dimensions. Then drawing the world with an 8x8 grid overlay, with reusable characters for large shapes, greeblie characters for metal seems, windows, port holes, checkerboard characters to add detail to the ground, higher detail segments like the battleship bridge, trees, waves.  Then use a program to generate the character set & tiles from the world image & an elevation occlusion map of equal size.

Text probably won't be possible without a raster interrupt devoting a horizontal section just to that.  Could otherwise imagine drawing the text in all 8 sprites on an edge of the screen, but no players would be visible under the text.

It seems only fair that an ideal robotech game would only be made using the tools of the time.

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9 weeks after the ankle tear, managed to do a sporty 16 miler again. It hurt like hell by the end but came back on the next day. Still nowhere near full recovery after 9 weeks. Managed to just avoid cramping, thanks to cooler weather. Haven't had any luck finding an electrolyte supplement which doesn't require a water bottle. The marathon distance might just require carrying a big old water bottle but the elites somehow do it with aid station cups. Gu & Nuun pills are baking soda.

The only advantage to the lion kingdom's 20oz Nathan is the spandex sack.  The spray nozzle has proven useless but might work in a race.  

For the lion kingdom to have any chance at 4 hours, it's probably going to have to be without camera.  The electrolyte & food situation requires the water bottle.

There is an overpriced 12oz nathan which could be just for dissolving tailwind.  Most water could come from aid stations.  That leaves enough room for juggling a camera.  Tailwind in the 20oz would be a good test.

The camera last time had issues with the paperclip falling off.