SpiceWare's Blog

I still don't have much time for the next 2 weeks so I can only play for about 2 minutes tops. Anyhow I found a bug. I tried out Fight mode and when I shot the green ship I would explode for a frame or two as well. Probably just switching between drawing P0 an P1 on different frames or something.

 

 

The explosions look good, but I think they need to sped up a little.

 

 

Jeff

I have a request for 2-player alternating mode: that both players could optionally use player 1's controller (in case someone only bought 1 Starplex controller, for example).

Thanks for the bug report, I've tested and see that it does occur. It doesn't occur if player 2 shoots player 1. The P0 and P1 switching occurs automatically (you can see that in Stella using fixed debug colors). The graphics that are being shown are garbage data, so that tells me that the sprite image index has the wrong value, which should help me track down the problem.

 

There's 8 frames of animation for the explosions, and each frame is held for 4 screen frame, so the duration is just over half a second (32/60). If I change that to 3 screen frames we'll be just under half a second (24/60). It's Nathan's call, so I'll send him a test build to see what he prefers.

 

Good idea, I only have 1 Starplex myself How should we denote it in the menu?

Good idea, I only have 1 Starplex myself How should we denote it in the menu?

 

Maybe like this?

 

 

Or this?

 

They both look good, though I like how the second one keeps the selected options right aligned.

Nathan liked the faster explosions, they'll be in the next build.

 

He also spotted a bug with the sprite drivers, the large asteroids were sometimes drawn w/out the shift data so they appeared extra chunky. The bug was introduced with the fix to correct premature player reuse. I've already fixed this bug, it'll also be in the next build.

Have you ever thought about randomizing the explosions? Each explosion could send individual particles in different directions.

that would be cool, but I'm running out of ROM for ARM code. What might work would be to have a few different medium explosions (since it's used for so many objects) and randomly select from them whenever an object explodes. Not sure if there will be ROM space for that though, will know more towards the end of the project.

The explosions look awesome - I really like how this game is turning out.