I mentioned above that armor works by (armor value + Protection spell value). If you are Parrying, also add the point value of your shield, but only once per combat round. You can therefore block up to 41 points of damage (11 points for God Armor, 10 points from Protection IV buff, 20 points from God Shield) once per combat round, and 21 points thereafter.
I'm also going to list things I want to fix, because I don't have it all in one place yet:
- The current RNG isn't a good one and is slow. (Technical detail: it's a linear congruential generator with a = 125, c = 0, m = 2796203, which at least does throw away lower-order bits properly like many programmers back then failed to do. The problem with this is that dividing by an integer greater than 65536, that isn't a power of 2, on a 16-bit processor is glacially slow. Passable on 32-bit mainframes back then, but not on a 16-bit home computer. Changing this to be a = 64389, c = 1, m = 4294967296 should both be faster and be a better RNG. A xorshift RNG would be even better; it's possible to write on a 16-bit computer but it'd be much more work. PC only, don't know enough about Apple ][ to look at that.)
- The RNG isn't seeded properly; this is why the game often doesn't act quite random when you start the game up. (Technical detail: the game uses the number of centiseconds on the clock and calls the RNG that many times. The clock on a PC back then was only accurate to ~5 cs at most. This also causes perceptible slowdown whenever you enter a town. Fix to use whoie system clock, once only -- this will still be vulnerable to clock attacks, but it's hard to defend against a modern attacker on DOS anyway. PC only, don't know enough about Apple ][ to look at that.)
- The game doesn't correctly tell you the number of experience points needed to reach level 2 for a brand new character. (Both Apple ][ and PC. The way the game does the calculation, it's making the assumption that you are level 0 if you have 0 XP -- what it actually tells you is how much XP is needed to reach level 1, which you already are.)
- The way the game rolls starting stats is absurd, rolling 1d20 instead of 3d6-with-loaded-dice. (PC only.)
- When calculating average party level, the game can only tolerate up to 15. Elementals and undead are level 20 and may cause strange errors if that pushes average party level to 16 or higher. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- When the game picks an item to sell out in a shop, it never picks MAGIC 10 because of an off-by-one error. (PC only.)
- There are 45 items that can be randomly placed in shops -- this is level-dependent. However, only the first 15 ever appear. (PC only; can be more than 15 if the level averaging bug above also happens.)
- Aging bug #1: if you add a character in town, he always ages 4 fortnights (the fortnight is the base unit of age for your characters); this should only happen if the character isn't in the same town. (PC only.)
- Aging bug #2: outdoor travel ages your characters twice as fast as should happen. This happens because the game converts days to fortnights by dividing by 7; the division should be by 14. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Sprites have a shorter lifespan than apparently intended. (PC only -- comparison with Apple ][ calculation.)
- Magical armor requires more Strength than the manual suggests. (PC only.)
- The mystic's score calculation doesn't quite work right. (Both Apple ][ and PC. On the latter it's definitely a "whoops forgot to initialize variables to 0" bug.)
- Anyone other than Fighters get fewer spells than they ought to, especially if they are Monks or Rangers. (PC only -- comparison with Apple ][ calculation.)
- There's no reason to limit characters to 255 hit points. Hard to fix on the 8-bit Apple ][, but I don't see a reason not to change this to 999 on the 16-bit PC. Only Fighters and Rangers can easily break the 255 cap, which helps game balance anyway.
- Casting Transportation forces you to redistribute gold and removes any elemental from your party. This isn't necessary and exacerbates the autosave bug. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Swimming 10 miles in the ocean is faster than walking 10 miles on grassland, somehow. You can swim faster than the best Olympic swimmers while wearing heavy armor. You can't get random encounters in water, either, so that's another advantage to swimming everywhere you can; I can make swimming take much longer. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Appleton should be a town on the map, not an inn. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Inns have a chance to increase maximum MP even when it shouldn't; there's an off-by-one-error in the percentage roll. (PC only. It makes more a difference than it sounds, because sometimes character resistance rolls are made against maximum MP.)
- Pools don't give you enough stats if you have 13 Luck. You should get +2 for 8-10 Luck; +3 for 11-12; +4 for 13. There's a rounding error in the way the PC version does math with 13 Luck. (PC only.)
- The bridge near Northford has a fight with WARRIOR (#57). If you make a table of monsters (they're in tiers of 12 monsters each), you can see that the game has a concept of a trollish monster, except there's a off-by-one error here; this should be TROLL (#56). Bridges are expected to have trolls, right? (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Outdoors fixed combats (like that bridge combat) don't set up combat surprise properly. (PC only.)
- A random outdoors encounter where the monsters hear the party, but the party doesn't hear the monsters, causes the monsters to try to surprise the party. If that fails, this should result in a standardized outdoors combat, but instead starts a combat using an invalid value for the first monster. (PC only. The invalid value will always be 1-49 so it will result in a valid-looking combat, but this is what causes outdoors combats in low-level areas to sometimes be dangerous.)
- Any Healing spell sometimes has no effect. (Apple ][ only.)
- The Binding and Weakness spells have each other's effect. (Apple ][ only. You can actually see the mild hack made to fix this in the PC assembly code.)
- Sleep only cancels monsters' action for the current turn; it doesn't actually put monsters to sleep. (PC only.)
- Mindblast and Flamebolt don't quite do their full damage. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Player Mindblast spells are irresistible. (PC only -- PC monster Mindblast, Apple ][ Mindblast, and Phantasie III Mindblast all do properly allow resistance.)
- Monster friendliness is not properly reset after battle. (Apple ][ only.)
- Monsters should get an attack bonus against sleeping characters. (PC only.)
- There are some places where the Apple ][ version calculates 2 ^ X. The PC version changes these to X ^ 2. X is always 0 to 4 so this actually doesn't have too much of an effect, but I'm inclined to change the PC calculation to the Apple ][ calculation anyway.
- The monster Sleep spell might say that it put a dead character to sleep. (PC only. At least it doesn't raise the character from the dead.)
- The monster spell that "reduces party armor" actually has the effect of the Weakness spell. (Both Apple ][ and PC. Will probably fix the text, since your characters don't have an armor-reducing spell either.)
- That same "reduces party armor" or "weakness" spell also has a randomized magnitude on PC. That doesn't happen on Apple ][ and it's sort of contrary to what the manual suggests, probably will fix.
- Monster melee damage is reduced by 1/3 on the PC version compared to the Apple ][. This is deliberate, but I don't see the reason for this; this makes it too easy to reduce melee damage done to 1.
- SAPPHIRE C and SAPPHIRE D are reversed. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- The Priest monster can cast Quickness II, but the way monster Quickness spells work, this actually weakens them. (Both Apple ][ and PC, probably will fix by changing to Quickness III.)
- Fire Elementals probably shouldn't be carrying around random scrolls. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
- Higher-level dungeon traps are actually easier to evade. (Apple ][, haven't looked at PC.)
- Dungeon random encounters are too frequent. (PC only. They're supposed to be common at first and decline dramatically in frequency during a single visit, but that decline doesn't happen on PC.)
- Dungeon random encounters should be similar to dungeon fixed encounters. (PC only.)
- If the monsters are demoralized enough to try to run away, it wakes them up. (Both Apple ][ and PC. Miiight be a feature, not a bug.)
- The calculation for checking if monsters successfully flee checks terrain -- even in a dungeon, where it shouldn't happen. (PC only.)
- The chance that you find an item after combat is 1% too high. (PC only.)
- Maybe I can fix the 655,360 XP cap per expedition. (PC only, would be tough, but that limit is annoying isn't it?)
- The PC fully supports lower case, I can convert most of the SCREAMING there to lowercase.
I haven't analyzed placed dungeon events on the PC yet (either in general, or in any specific dungeon).
Probably not going to fix because they'd be complicated:
- There's no exit to DOS. That part is easy; the hard part is reversing the strange memory allocation. (PC only.)
- Autosave corruption bug: yeah, autosave can corrupt your saved game. I might yet figure out an easy way to fix this, but I don't see one, and in the meantime I can just tell people to not use autosave. (PC only.)
- The game doesn't handle the clock rollover at midnight gracefully. (PC only. Don't start your game just before midnight, that can screw up the calculation the game does when it calculates your computer's speed. The game can also freeze during combat at midnight, but you can break that particular lock just by pressing any key.)
- Monster Evaluation has strange effects when cast on some special outdoor squares. (Both Apple ][ and PC.)
I don't think this is actually that many bugs, incidentally. It's about what you can expect when you deeply analyze pretty much any game.
Hey Harlin,
I don't know if you're still working on that project, but in the event that you are...
I really thought things over after the failure that was the Phantasie Memorial Set fiasco of last Christmas, and beside the updated sounds/graphics from P3 (and even basic ones from P1) both on AtariST, the feature that I miss the most from the old games is the keyboard shortcuts added in Phantasie3 (AtariST).
Basically almost everything could be done with keyboard shortcuts, shaving an insane amount of time (and mouse misclicks) in the total length of the game. So if you're still working on this... How would you feel in adding said shortcuts?
For the town it was these :
A ) Shop at the Armoury
B ) Enter the Bank
C ) Cast a Spell
D ) Re-Distribute Equipment
E ) Examine Characters
G ) Trade an item Between two Characters
I ) Rest at the Inn
L ) Learn some Spells
M ) Consult the Mystic
N ) Create a New Character
O ) load a Game
P ) Purge a Character (Permanently)
S ) Save the Game
T ) Training
U ) Use Item (Potion/Scroll/etc).
V ) View Party (Party Status)
X ) eXit the Town
+ ) Add Character to the Party
- ) Remove a Character from the Party
? ) Info - About Game (Gives game name, version info, and limited credits)
Most question/confirmation screens was "ENTER" or "(O)kay" for accept, and "C" for Cancel (instead of Escape for more modern games, but C is good too).
In the overmap/wilderness it was these :
C ) Cast a Spell
E ) Examine Characters
P) Party Status ( Gives the current expedition info: Days out, XP, Gold, and the items found breakdown)
U ) Use Item (Potion/Scroll/etc).
? ) Info - About Game (Gives game name, version info, and limited credits)
( + ) Fast Speed
( = ) Normal Speed
( - ) Slow Speed
In battle main menu these where (monster screen) :
(F)ight, (T)hreaten, (G)reeting, (B)eg for Mercy, (R)un Away, (M)onster names, Party (H)ealth, (+) Fast Speed, (=) Normal Speed, (-) Slow Speed.
Once you get into the fight to issue commands to characters :
You needed to click each character to get the next line of choices, but I would recommend putting number 1-6 to select the character (it might already be like this in dos version tho, the 1-6 I mean)
(T)hrust, (A)ttack, (S)lash, (P)arry, (L)unge, Fire (B)ow, (M) Aim Blow, (C)ast Spell, (1) Move Back, (2) Move Middle, (3) Move Front, and finally "(F)ight!" to begin the round.
-> Upon selecting an action that gives the choice to pick which row... In Phantasie 3 there only 2 rows so they used the standard "Enter" or "(O)kay" for row 1 and (C)ancel for Row 2. In P1/P2 those could be 1, 2, or 3 respectively instead.
Also when Distributing, it's not in, not even in P1 thru P3 on the AtariST, but would be nice to hit 1-6 to give an item to a specific character, or (S)ell.
And finally on character creation, allow all classes for all race would be super nice, and when generating a new character, instead of just OKAY and CANCEL, please add (R)EROLL ?? Pretty please? Would make creating a minotaur, sprite, or w/e monster I want MUCH more convenient.
I think getting those shortcuts are more important to me than even the enhanced graphics and sounds... Obviously everything makes the game much better, but getting keyboard shortcut would make the game play much faster and be far more interesting to me.
Just felt like putting this out there.
Regardless of if you're still working on it or not, thanks for reading !
