TROGBlog

The footsteps are perhaps a little too quiet. And too fast.

 

8045 is my best with this binary.

I still get screen bounce sometimes when walking into walls. Otherwise, the arrow cutscene is nice though the delay after it seems a little long. And, of course, the effect when winning is (to put it mildly) quite feeble.

 

As for footsteps, are you just turning the DC output on for one step and off for the next? If so, I'd expect that might produce variable results with different machines, television sets, etc.

 

Turning the output on and then off a few scan lines later can produce clicks which will vary with the amplitude and with the number of scan lines involved. It's also possible to "soften" the clicks by changing AUDVx as a several-step process. On the other hand, if you're already having occasional scan overruns you may not have time for that.

8045 is my best with this binary.

 

8215 for me. I had the Wumpus position right; I wonder if my player was a little too low so the shot hit the wall instead of going through the door?

Hey guys. It's been a few days since I've worked on this, and I'm ready to jump back in. The next release will most likely be 8K, which will take some code rework. I've never done a multi-bank cartridge, but after doing some research, it looks like it won't be too difficult. (At least, no more difficult than every thing else related to 2600 programming. ) My plan is to place all the kernels in one bank and everything else in the other bank. The final game will have at least 6 unique kernels. The current game has 4.

 

vdub_bobby, you may be right about the footstep volume. I'll wait until there are more sounds in the game before I focus on volume balancing. As for the speed of the footsteps, that's a compromise. I'm using a mask to activate the footstep. Adding a bit to the mask makes it twice as slow, which seemed too slow. The footstep rate is actually very close to Haunted House. If you go back and play that game, you'll see what I'm talking about. I figured that since your player is smaller than the player in Haunted House, faster footsteps made since from a physics perspective. The ideal footstep would be between the slower and the current version, but I didn't think it warranted a lookup table vs. just using a simple mask.

 

supercat, any screen bounce in the game is entirely my own laziness, and will be cleaned up. There should still be tons of time left in the vblank. I'll try to hunt down the bounce and eradicate it.

 

Don't worry about the winning noise. It's only a placeholder. The actual winning scene will have it's own bit map, possibly an animation, and definitely its own music. That's one of the reasons I decided to move to 8K. 4K wouldn't do it justice.

 

The pit scene will also have it's own animation. (Think little pitfall guy flailing as he falls into a pit full of slime.)

 

I'll post the source next time so you can see more of what's going on. For the footstep sound, I'm turning on white noise for 1 full frame, then off for 7 frames, producing ~8 steps per second. If I use a creshendo / decreshendo, I don't think it will sound like a footstep. It should be a staccato sound. I'll hunt for a Haunted House disassembly and see what they did, for comparision.

 

As for the shot logic, you can't hit walls. If you shoot down, it will go to the room below it, regardless of where you are in the room when you shoot. The only exception to that is if you accidentally run into the target room while trying to shoot. That will be fixed when I clean up the shooting user interface.

 

2600 programers might notice a bit of perfectionism that I put into the arrow shot scene. The arrow moves from off of the right side of the screen, to off of the left side of the screen, without any sprite wrapping. This required black playfield masking on both sides of the screen, timed with the movement of the arrow. (I'm assuming there's no way to turn off wrapping for an Atari sprite.)