Little Steps

This took me much longer than it should have. I wanted to get the graphic fade in/fade out functions done.Because I'm not using color palettes I thought I would be cheeky and try my own implementation of fading in and out the graphics. Nermal has the following API functions. 

void FadeBlack();
void FadeIn(int mapnum);
void FadeOut();
void FadePunchIn();
void FadePunchOut(int newmap);
void FadeWhite();


I thought I would be clever and just cover whatever is being displayed with a transparent blank bitmap and then turn the opacity up with the alpha channel to fade to black/white/whatever. Turns out ROE preloads the graphics to the screen with all the colors turned off. Then it turns on the colors without page flipping. When I use my opaque bitmap method, I overwrite the graphic on the screen.

The upshot is I can fade out and fade to black, but I can't fade in because I overwrite the graphic that was there. I will need to mix the original graphic and the alpha on the fly. I'll wage that battle later as I sunk too much time into this is the first place.  I just turned off the faders for now and marked them a TODO. (CGA doesn't use them anyway).

(Also The TODOs are just reminders that the Nermal function is not all the way implemented yet. Most often it's just single argument being ignored that is used later in the game. When I come across the need to use that argument, I'll come back and refactor)

I spent the rest of my evening fleshing out some of the other required functions to get the title sequence going. Not done yet, but getting closer.

Clock timers work, which is what the title sequence is based on. The master INT 1Ch timer (used for mater event handling) does not yet, but that will be handled by an ALLEGRO_EVENT event handler.

Things will be a little slow until my "Day Job" winds down later on this week.