Xuel's Blog

very good looking game. im not sure i understand how you preshifted enemies. 4x2 means 4 horizontal and 2 vertical shifts?

 

anyway, it resulted very nice.

i believe you are also switching ingame charsets to achive enemy animation effect. so you are preshifting i.e. 6 frames of 1 enemy into 6charsets, right?

Thanks!

 

The enemies are preshifted to 2 different horizontal positions and 4 different vertical positions within a 3x3 block of 8x8 ANTIC mode 2 characters. This means that they can be positioned on a global 4x2 pixel grid by drawing the appropriate characters into the appropriate screen ram addresses.

 

Yes, I forgot to mention that the engine continuously cycles between eight different character sets every four frames. Each character set contains a different enemy pose preshifted to the 4x2 grid. Unfortunately this means that all enemies must have the same pose at any given time and the debris animation can't start with an arbitrary pose at an arbitrary time. The star movement is partially baked into these character sets so that only two slots are devoted to them. Every slot is precious given the 128 character limit.

Thanks for explanation. now it completely makes sense. it is surprising that 2 horizontal positions are enough to make fluent movement...

This is probably caused by fact that whole screen scrolls horizontally, so that rough horizontal movement of enemies looks quite fluent.

i assumed that charset cycling by looking at explosions/debris. it is quite obvious, but still looking good... also fact that debris is not preshifted does not lower the way it looks.

 

I'm looking forward to play this game.

I hope you are going to finish it this year and it will not remain unfinished for long time... like games by morons.

Awesome game. Can't wait to receive ABBUC's floppy.

I'll spread the news in Italian language forums.

50 fps looks great !

 

Great job guys!

Hi.

Thanks for your comments.

 

Hmmm I also opened a Topic at Lemon64 but it seems that C64 guys don't want to say anything and I was curious to get comments from other Machines.

I just played this on real hardware for the first time last night (XEGS), and it is the best pure side scrolling R-type like on the machine. Atari Blast is great too.

 

Just one question, I know this is already pushing the limits of the machine, but could the multicolored (5 color) 40x24 character mode be used for a more colorful experience for the enemy, or would that take up too much screen ram?

Don't get me wrong, I love it as it is, and it's a model for re-makes of all kinds on the 8-bits (side side side scrolling shooters).