FBXL Social

Especially near the end where you might have a Pentium, that's a lot of power to play with even without assembly or a library.

Actually, in retrospect I probably could have sped up the jrpg engine even more by spending more time optimizing the sprites to write to each of the planes at the same time as the background, reducing the number of plane switches, but unfortunately it was always something with a limited time span. If I really wanted to get that project done in retrospect I probably should have focused at that point less on polishing up the engine and more on completing the story and gameplay. The engine was already perfectly fine for the RPG I was hoping to make, but it was more fun making crazier and crazier features on the existing engine. Who does transparency and shadows and weather effects on pureqb? A dummy who doesn't want to finish his game, that's who.

I'm working on a replacement for that game engine in Freebasic, but my eyes are bigger than my stomach and so we will see if I ever even get into a point of having a basic gameplay slice in front of me, let alone finishing the game. And by the time I actually get to building the game I might already be finished my second book, and at that point I can't really say for certain that the original story that I created will look much like the sort of story I would like to create.

No, but I was heavily involved with qbasic around that time. I was working on quest for a king which is one of the class (I'd like to think) of pureqb games that were really above and beyond in terms of what it did. The dos version is still up along with FBXL magazine (which was previously qbxl magazine but I failed to renew the domain)

https://fbxl.net/oma/qfak/index.html

I think I tried playing it in dosbox -- the dos version -- and it really is product of its time, it doesn't really want to run in an emulator.

Here's a (low quality to make it work ok over the fediverse) video of some of the engine at work. I managed to get just enough cycles out of dosbox to get it to run at full speed.

The first bit is a slice of the gameplay from the first section, the second is from a cutscene where I had the shadows and rain active.

Doesn't look like much today, but most games on QB back then used tile*tile scrolling or pixel*tile scrolling, you'll notice the scrolling here is fully pixel*pixel, full screen, and has some neat effects like transparency -- the message box just darkens the spot it's in rather than drawing over it. I didn't actually change the default palette either, I created a lookup table and would read the current pixel value, look up the darker version, then write the darkened value.

The wavy water effect was particularly interesting. I've added footage showing it on its own.