Rybags' Blog - July 2009 - another game mod

RSS Bot · July 17, 2009

Did a little more looking at Pole Position + voice. Not a great amount of progress. I feel it should be an easy one, it's just that annoying bug that's discouraged me from finishing it.

Another sidetrack. Now working on a game mod. Improving some of the graphics of an old commercial game with interlace mode.

But that alone's not enough. Rather than these boring, non animated objects, imported them into Photoshop and spruced them up.

Double the resolution, bit of editing to take advantage of the extra rez. Then make 15 extra rotations of each at 22.5 Degree increments.

Photoshop kinda sucks at bitmap. Disables rotation and lots of other features. Seems that Gimp is happy to rotate stuff for you in bitmap, even turns out better than Photoshop. Ended up just sticking to photoshop. Got all the graphic assets done, and had to fix the mess it made by hand.

All that remains is the coding part. Shouldn't be more than 1.5 - 2K worth. Of that, probably half will just be near identical blit stuff to move the character definitions into the character sets.

4 character sets, 2K for each because we're using interlace. Bit of a waste though considering only 10 characters are actually being used. Total of 16 objects to animate and move data around for. Has the potential to use a ton of CPU if everything wants to cycle at once.

Made decision to do animation for 2 charsets per frame - halve the potential workload. Should be fine... the animation doesn't even need that speed. Would probably get away with 8 frames per second. Animation speed will be unique for each object anyway.

Hoping for a release on Sunday or Monday.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=6270