SpiceWare's Blog

Ah, you fixed it!.

 

If shifting the title over 1 pixel is what helped it, well, it sure looks good to me!

That's looking quite cool. I also totally love the SpiceWare logo, very clever design

This is looking great!

Great work, Darrell.

Back from Wisconsin, had a great time visiting my brother for his 40th. Found out that a friend's in town for work this week, so it'll be a few more days before I resume work on Frantic.

 

Thanks, I've been using that SpiceWare logo since the 80s. When I first put it into Medieval Mayhem, the extenders weren't quite as long due to the 48 pixel limit, so I initially extended them using the missiles and eventually decided to use the playfield as well to make it extend the entire width.

 

Originally I'd planned to use GRP0 for the player and GRP1 for all the robots - during the long drive (24 hours up, 21 back - we were towing a U-Haul with my brother-in-law's motorcycle on the way up) I got to thinking it would probably be better to use both sprites to draw everything. Anybody done flicker w/both sprites before? If so, any pointers?

Anybody done flicker w/both sprites before? If so, any pointers?

 

IIRC Manuel (Cybergoth) did a unique semi-intelligent flicker routine for Star Fire which used a partial bubble sort. There's probably even stuff in the Stellalist archives. I did something similar for my (unfinished) Lode Runner style Supercharger game (although it's been a long time since I've looked at the code, and it used a RAM bitmap for the player sprites).

Hmm - so I'd sort it based on a "frames since last displayed" descending, followed by the Y value. Then walk down the list and put the 1st object in P0, 2nd object in P1. Next object would go into either sprite based on Y not overlapping the height + reposition scanline.

Hmm - so I'd sort it based on a "frames since last displayed" descending, followed by the Y value. Then walk down the list and put the 1st object in P0, 2nd object in P1. Next object would go into either sprite based on Y not overlapping the height + reposition scanline.

 

Yep, that's kinda the thing Manuel did, but the sort wasn't a complete sort, but just one pass. (Or maybe two, one in each direction.) The idea was to keep the number of cycles required down while still achieving a decent result.