Repton Fusion

Widgets » Repton Fusion

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by johnnysaucepn

V1.2 Jan 12, 2007 1:41:09 AM

WARNING - this widget makes heavy use of canvas graphics and needs a fairly powerful computer to run.

Note: much faster in Opera 9.5 Alpha!

The return of the retro gaming favourite!

This is a hybrid remake version of the three original Repton games, including the original levels! It even includes working sound effects (a widget first?)

Explore and dig through level after level of diamond-hunting puzzle gaming - and better still, get new levels delivered straight to your desktop automatically! New episodes and levels will appear in the listing dynamically, and load on demand.

Repton is a side-scrolling action puzzle game, where the objective is to clear each level of diamonds by collecting them. To do so, you must dig through the earth, dislodging rock traps and eggs, caging lost spirits, opening safes and dodging marauding monsters.

Controls are: cursor keys to move, Space to pause, and M and H for Map and Help respectively, or use the buttons in the bottom-right of the widget. Remember to use the Map and Help facilities to find your way around.

Fi

Comments 46 posts

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hey Johnny, thanks for responding...yes it is just the top half. Theres nothing to kill the monsters with so eventually the 3 of them just run you down once there isnt very many diamonds left. And once you go through the only passage way, it gets blocked off by the boulder. Any strategy you can send to me to help out would be tremendously appreciated. Love the game and your version is awesome...incredible widget. Little frustrating in the tougher levels but still great fun. You can write me at:
Jebwebster@yahoo.com. Thanks a bunch in advance Johnny

JK

By JKropf, # May 7, 2007 9:12:58 PM

JKropf, is it just the top-half of the level you're stuck with?

I'm afraid there's no special trick to it, but I'll send you a PM with some advice.

By johnnysaucepn, # May 1, 2007 11:55:40 AM

Ok, I got all the way to giant clam and I'm stuck. is there a hint book or something to unstick me?

JK

By JKropf, # Apr 27, 2007 11:26:20 PM

Holy crop! This takes me back! I remember playing this when I was about 8 years old! I still have sketchbooks I designed levels in! I was in the middle of creating my masterwork when I left that school and back in the UK they didn't have computers back then in school!

Nice! I like the look of this better than the "updated" look at superiorinteractive, which looks weird (and lousy still, because although better res, the animation is still 1980s. Plus it's a bit much wanting £20 for a game that's about 20 years old!

Before this I was trying to get it working under PSPBeeb for the PSP, but never had any luck. I think I got it working under a PC emulator, and that made me cry with the retroactive memories...

Keep up the good work! If you're interested in having music, why not ask around here, maybe I could come up with something...they original tune was great, but annoying, and it still is with the superiorinteractive version...it just needs to have some oomph put into it.

BTW how are you getting around copyright? Since Superior hasn't gone out of business like I thought they had?

By labortius, # Apr 14, 2007 9:27:56 PM

Simple and nice game,

By yeeliberto, # Apr 11, 2007 7:09:56 PM

Wow that takes me back...

By mrd, # Feb 24, 2007 3:53:15 PM

More levels - the first half of Repton 3: Toccata. Four new levels, with the last four to come. Also with some new graphics! As long as you have v1.2, there is no need to reinstall.

Update 13 Feb: the last levels of Toccata are ready, however at least two of them are incompleteable due to fungus growing too darn fast! I don't think I can compensate without updating the widget code and making a new release. I may modify the levels (making them much easier!) for this release, and provide fixed versions with the next.

By johnnysaucepn, # Feb 12, 2007 10:36:53 AM

It's been a very long time since I played Repton. Not only is this Widget very accurate to the original Repton, it's very well designed. Great work!

By EJ902, # Jan 31, 2007 6:33:05 PM

Changes for v1.2 include abandoning the self-caching mechanism. It was a nice idea, and it worked well, but one of the things I built in at the start was the ability to reference other episode and level graphics by URL. They take longer to download than the XML files, which would reduce the benefit of caching. I could download each image, encode it as a data URI and cache it, but I'm not convinced it's worth it.

So I've switched to the Yahoo! library for AJAX, which handles browser caching much better, and allowed Opera to take care of things.

There's a progress bar now, that updates as it loads all the non-local images.

That means I can start uploading new image sets to the internet, without anyone having to download a new widget version. I've started enhancing the graphics, hopefully I can provide a first test set this weekend.

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 26, 2007 3:19:46 PM

OK, I think I get it now, thanks.

By grafio, # Jan 20, 2007 3:15:11 PM

I tested it again, and it is completable.

Sounds like you've just stumbled upon the most infamous sticking point of the game, the famed Repton Shuffle manoeuvre! Bottom left and bottom right corners of the map, yes?

I won't give the secret away, but it is a move than involves timing. Just remember that although Repton can't stand under a falling rock, it doesn't mean he can't affect its falling any other way. Is that cryptic enough?

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 20, 2007 1:37:02 PM

I think Octopus level is impossible to finish, could you check this? The problem is in the bottom part of the map.

By grafio, # Jan 20, 2007 8:23:08 AM

Thanks!

Yeah, you wouldn't believe how much time I spent making the gameplay as authentic as I could, from the order in which the rocks fall to the way the control keypresses are checked.

I did know about the problem with the pause/map buttons, I was pretty vague in the description above because I didn't have the time to check why they were misbehaving!

It's a pain that it takes so much CPU - it's just down the raw number of sprites it plots each frame. There is a technique to speed things up involving sliding windows, but it's quite complex and I didn't want to spend ages on that and not finish the game. The rest is as optimised as I can get it.

It's funny how, in this age of accelerated 3D and high-level APIs, that I find myself going back to my old-school 8-bit speed techniques!

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 20, 2007 3:33:33 AM

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

In addition to the above, I've made a better way to demonstrate it running on Firefox - just visit http://www.saucepn.f2s.com/repton1.1/ in your browser.

In Firefox, when I press the Map button, it shows the Map. When I press the Map button again to go back to the game, the Pause screen comes up and the game becomes locked.

No big deal of course, since this is an Opera widget, but thought you might like to know

As a player of the originals (at least some similar C64 games) even the Opera version is a little on the slow side, and I have a 2.8GHz with 2GB of RAM! Otherwise the gameplay seems rock solid. Good show!

By GreyWyvern, # Jan 20, 2007 0:55:30 AM

In addition to the above, I've made a better way to demonstrate it running on Firefox - just visit http://www.saucepn.f2s.com/repton1.1/ in your browser.

Because the script files are on the same server as the data, the AJAX level loading works fine.

It's a quick hack - your progress won't be remembered from session to session and the buttons don't appear to work correctly - but it's good enough for now.

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 19, 2007 2:51:19 PM

And here it is, v1.1!

Warning: since installing the new version involves starting a new copy from scratch, you will lose all your current progress. Make sure to save all the passwords for the levels you want to access!

Sound can now be disabled (thankfully!), I've made a few speed optimisations, and made the colour schemes a little more consistent and less bright. And it now says Pause/Resume instead of Pause/Restart, as Rune pointed out.

It'll now run as fast as it can up to 50 frames/second, which it what it should ideally run at, as opposed to the 30 frames/second cap the earlier version had. Let me know if this is too fast, as I don't have a powerful enough PC to handle it!

I've also moved hosting for the level files, so let me know if you're getting any lag loading levels.

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 16, 2007 2:56:45 AM

Yeah, that would be a better word for it, wouldn't it?

Next version then...

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 15, 2007 5:12:42 PM

Good stuff johnnysaucepn! Btw, the button should probably say "resume" not "restart" when you're paused, right?

By runeh, # Jan 15, 2007 3:38:57 PM

If anyone wants a demonstration of standards compliance and Opera's speed in Javascript and canvas operations, just extract the widget .zip file to a new folder, and save this file:
builtinlevels.js
into the repton/ folder, overwriting the one there. This should add a new episode called "Local" to the list, containing the first level only. Because this level doesn't require internet access to load, you should be able to open index.html as a normal web page, and it'll still work.

After testing this in Opera, fire up Firefox and load index.html - it should run perfectly, but much, much slower!

It also kind of works in Safari, also very slowly and with some problems with animations. I've not looked into why yet.

Have fun!

By johnnysaucepn, # Jan 14, 2007 3:15:08 AM