Status Line 1.1 Released

First, a thank you

I cannot thank everyone enough for the wonderful reception of Status Line 1.0. Twitter, Reddit, itch.io, Hacker News, IF Community, and Lexaloffle visitors have sent lovely messages and goodwill over the past days. I've made some great, new connections in the Pico-8 and IF communities and am excited to keep pushing forward toward the final goal: v5 compatibility.

Status Line 1.1, a small quality of life update

With this first update I want to address some pressing issues that were nagging at me, especially typographically. Here's a before/after of Moonmist that illustrates the improvements clearly. Word-wrap is a bit smarter, and the system handles upper/lowercase input/output better (didn't quite work around P8SCII quirks the first time around).

In this example from Tristam Island we can see the improved status line. Now, after displaying the full score, as much of the current location name will be displayed, rather than the previous arbitrary truncation.

Finally, to drive home the upper/lowercase handling more concretely, here's a before and after from Hitchhiker's Guide where v1.0 fails to understand "mixed case" and v1.1 handles it smoothly.

v1.1 Changelog

• Fix for comma being separated onto a new line by itself (notably in the openings to Planetfall and Moonmist)
• Handles upper/lowercase text on input and output more consistently and more in line with average player expectations
• Slightly smarter status line displays as much of the location name as possible without truncation
• Preference menu items display indicator of position in option list
• Unified menu handler functions into one builder function
• Drastically simplified word-wrap logic
• New color schemes: plasma (reddish theme) and invert (homage to classic Mac?)
• Player-selectable cursor: block, square, bar, dotted, underbar
• End of game message changed from "End of Text" to "End of Session"
• Improved splashscreen

Some Pleasant Revelations

Seastalker and split-screen

Initially I thought Seastalker needs special handling to display its sonar image. I had never played it and based this assumption on v3 opcodes and screenshots from other platforms. I postponed research on this until after the release of v1.0.

I played some of the C64 version to see how it handles the sonar, and found to my surprise that manually viewing the sonar with a separate command, rather than having a persistent one on-screen, was just "how things worked."

Build R18 S850919 seems to work perfectly. In fact, I think it looks neater than the C64 version?

This game is playable.

The Lurking Horror and sound effects

Like Seastalker's split screen, I misunderstood how this game handles sound effects. I was under the impression that everything was a variation on the "bleep" sound (so-called in the documentation), but I was wrong. Interesting sounds are samples which are non-trivial to bring over to the Pico-8 (plus, I'm not certain copyright laws would let me). Beauracracy uses the bleep tone for certain things, but that's a v4 game so I'll look into this as I add v4 support next.

This game is soundless (as are other 8-bit versions), but playable.