+CyranoJ Posted June 23, 2011 Share Posted June 23, 2011 Anyway, I think I should probably try and remember where I put the Jag so I can try out the reference version! You can grab Project Tempest here, and run the game on that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 1024 byte charsets definitely make it easier, see attached (not scrolling yet, just cycling through the char sets to scroll the parallax layers). Please excuse terrible "programmer art"! Nice - how do you guys crank this stuff out so fast?!? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Jag version has that innermost void also scrolling, adding that would make an improvement. Graphics in that part need to be darker, so I reckon just background + lowest luma for that part. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Do the tiles have to be linear? In that size they will always look like patterns. Particular the big stones could be build on repeating chars where no graphics content is changing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Simon, have you checked NTSC? If this comes to real live you should dev on NTSC as target system as our US guys should have a chance to play the game, too... PAL could have additional bits and pieces then... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted June 24, 2011 Author Share Posted June 24, 2011 Hi guys, this is GREAT that there's actually interest in an a8 port of our game. Please know that if you want to go ahead with it, you have our blessings. Jose, you don't need to rip the artwork from emulator screen grabs - just download the source code - all the assets are in there Thanks, just download the source code. It's great and there's also the Music '.mod' there if any of the A8 Musicians wants to give it a try. Is there any P.C. program that I can Load these Images/Tiles and get them in 16shades/luminances of GTIA and save it into '.xex'? For example this one:PARA1.bmp (I get them first in 4:1ratio and them would need to convert them, lets say, into A8 colour0 Luminances 0->15 GTIA Mode.) Greets. José Pereira. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Photoshop. Gimp should be able to do it, it's free, Photoshop = $$$ I reckon it's worth a try doing a GTIA mockup, but not sure it'd work well for the game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted June 24, 2011 Author Share Posted June 24, 2011 (edited) Photoshop. Gimp should be able to do it, it's free, Photoshop = $$$ I reckon it's worth a try doing a GTIA mockup, but not sure it'd work well for the game. I think it can look good. I Load that Tiles to PAINT and have them into 4:1 and also design the Metalic Platforms in 4:1 using the Lighest Luminances and it could be like this: -> BACKGR./PAPER colour: (0,0) -> PLATFORMS: (colour0,Luminances15/14/13/12) -> MIDDLE SCREEN LAYER: Luminances 1,2,3 -> ROCKS: there are 8Luminances left: 11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4 (and increment Luminance nº in sides direction) But even if I use GIMP it is possible the coder get the A8 16Luminances from there? The best is that you can have other Gfxs. with other A8colours for other Levels. Probably two Multicolour 8pixels wide sprites would be just what we need and if we use Missiles as 5th Player they will 'OR' GTIA Luminances, but I don't see where they might be usefull Only Thing a little difficult is to get those Rocks good in the Intersection with the other Parallax Layers (as we are not overlapping, each layer independant of the next one) Edited June 24, 2011 by José Pereira Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Creature XL Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 if we use Missiles as 5th Player they will 'OR' GTIA Luminances, but I don't see where they might be usefull As a blue water-fall in the background Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sack-c0s Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 See here (especially from 3:08 to 8:25): level 2 of NES-game 'battledragon'/'battletoads 2'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5dHArZkNfo OK, it is horizontal "3D-scrolling" floor tiles, but I'd be surprised if they didn't use a font-flipping trick here. I think this is the easiest method to do the vertical multi-parallax scroller in the background, with a minimum of CPU-usage. Just use normal Antic 4, no PMG needed (perhaps for the player-sprite itself). Possibly some double-buffering trick will help for only moving the platforms, after a scrolling-cycle must restart. The nes/mastersystem have more flexible scrolling so I'd suspect the X scroll is being split to fix the scoreboard, then to position the rd pipes, again for the main game background and then every line according to a lookup table to do the floor effect, with the last scroll position being left to position the posts at the bottom. I don't think any graphics redefinition would be needed to do that to be honest - just clever choice of the initial graphics. I like that consoles make these effects nice and easy if you're creative, but they're a pain to do on 8-bit computers... on the subject of downfall again - I'm quite impressed how fast this seems to be coming together. I was expecting to sneak out a reasonable looking but playable version whilst everyone debated various complicated methods of getting the most colours onscreen that ended up coming to nothing but happily I've been proven wrong. nice work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted June 24, 2011 Author Share Posted June 24, 2011 if we use Missiles as 5th Player they will 'OR' GTIA Luminances, but I don't see where they might be usefull As a blue water-fall in the background That is my first thought (even at that early ANTIC4 P2&P3 underlay) but then the Missiles will OR colour0 Lightest Luminances used in Platforms. Will this not be a little difficult to code because you would need to constantly erase Missile pixels each time Plaftforms pixels overlap Midddle Layer. Is it possible? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
analmux Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Fixed the graphical glitches and attached the source so you can see what it's doing...[scroller version 5] Good job. It already looks very interesting. However, if you already use 16 kB of fonts, and use a CPU-mimimal font-flipping routine, then an idea for next step could be the following: use fluent 3D-animation of the rocks instead. See the video of battletoads 2 I added some posts ago. Rotate the floor-effect 90 degrees and add some textures. Should also be possible I think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted June 24, 2011 Author Share Posted June 24, 2011 nice work And just saw your Post at the ST section. CyranoJ bless/permition to people get DOWNFALL to all Plaformms. Great... Will you try ST or a MasterSystem version (as I see your EdgeGrinder SMS porting ) Greets. José Pereira. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sack-c0s Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 nice work And just saw your Post at the ST section. CyranoJ bless/permition to people get DOWNFALL to all Plaformms. Great... Will you try ST or a MasterSystem version (as I see your EdgeGrinder SMS porting ) Greets. José Pereira. I might give the SMS a go. I'm trying to keep the code for edgegrinder flexible though so I can use the assets as a testbed and reuse the scrolling/shooter engine stuff as much as possible afterwards. I'm interested in adding tile reloading for parallax, so maybe downfall might be a good testbed for that as according to the SMSpower forums I'd be hitting the theoretical maximum amount of tiles that can be reloaded in the blanking period to do this how I want. But first theres the small matter of the dayjob... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irgendwer Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 I've just created some tiles. The right side is now just a copy of the tiles on the left side, which I would abstain from doing so (light source etc.), if my artwork is considered to be included. BTW: Since the platforms are topmost, I think they should move as fastest layer. Otherwise the impression of depth is IMHO corrupted... fd.g2f.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Irgendwer... no - platforms don't need to move as fastes layer as it is more important that they move as different layer and not same speed like one of the layers which disturbs the effect at all. look on some arcade shooters where the clouds move slower than the ground etc... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simonl Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 I've just created some tiles. The right side is now just a copy of the tiles on the left side, which I would abstain from doing so (light source etc.), if my artwork is considered to be included. BTW: Since the platforms are topmost, I think they should move as fastest layer. Otherwise the impression of depth is IMHO corrupted... Very nice, how many chars are you using for the platforms? (Can't load up g2f and have a look at the moment as I'm on a Mac) I have 4 spare chars at the end now after doing the title logo so up to 7 including the ends would be fine. As far as the strange parallax is concerned I think the official explanation is that the camera is tracking slightly faster than the platforms, which are also falling but not as fast as the player. Or something. It may be breaking all the laws of observed reality, but you must admit it looks nice analmux: re the Battletoads scrolling I agree this would look good but it doesn't fit with the level compression I'm implementing (as I'm trying to avoid any rewriting of the screen buffer or having too many versions of each line), so I'm afraid that's one for another day. Any volunteers for porting the mod file from the Jag version to RMT? Pretty please? Anyway, will post an improved version showing progress this weekend. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simonl Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Simon, have you checked NTSC? If this comes to real live you should dev on NTSC as target system as our US guys should have a chance to play the game, too... PAL could have additional bits and pieces then... I was planning to make the NTSC version my revenge for the PAL version of WaveRace on the N64 Don't people in the Americas and Japan have faster reflexes anyway from not playing the bad ports they send us? The screen height may have to come down a bit, but apart from that I'm not sure if it's worth the effort of using fixed point maths to make the scrolling, parallax etc. x% slower (i.e. use additional bits of precision with different factors for PAL and NTSC to track the counters and only update them on frames where they hit a threshold). I'm worried doing this would make it look jumpy on NTSC as the jitter would be the same for all things that are keyed to the framerate, whereas if you do this for multiple objects with different speeds like a starfield it looks smooth overall even if one object in isolation looks jumpy. I'll have a think anyway. Suggestions welcome Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 You could probably compensate for the difficulty increase by changing the vertical spacing between the plaforms - in any case I'd guess that the spacing would vary as the game progresses anyway. The player speed values would probably need to stay the same for both. Maybe give the player a few options for sensitivity. Or there could even be a powerup that increases your horizontal speed abilities. The progressive acceleration is an easy thing to implement. Just have an index value that slides along a table of the acceleration constants as the joystick is held in the one direction. Index value falls back when the joystick is released. By tweaking the size of the table and the values of the constants, the exact physics properties you want can be achieved. I'd also suggest something like 224 scanline height. The bottom of screen is probably more important to be able to see than the top since you need to see platforms as soon as they appear, so maybe bias the screen slightly towards the top. Of course with the music + sfx, the compensation for NTSC is an easy fix. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CyranoJ Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Just tried the latest binary in Altirra - looks great, keep this up Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Just tried the latest binary in Altirra - looks great, keep this up how did you fix the NTSC issue or is PAL only? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 I've just created some tiles. The right side is now just a copy of the tiles on the left side, which I would abstain from doing so (light source etc.), if my artwork is considered to be included. BTW: Since the platforms are topmost, I think they should move as fastest layer. Otherwise the impression of depth is IMHO corrupted... For the background, the "pattern look" is ok. If only the foreground could be done looking like stones. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irgendwer Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 look on some arcade shooters where the clouds move slower than the ground etc... Windspeed? Just, joking - no, clouds are, compared to ground objects huge, so it isn't any wonder that if depicted small, they are moving slowly?! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 It is a game... no physical simulation... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irgendwer Posted June 24, 2011 Share Posted June 24, 2011 Very nice, Thanks, there is still room for improvent. how many chars are you using for the platforms? (Can't load up g2f and have a look at the moment as I'm on a Mac) I have 4 spare chars at the end now after doing the title logo so up to 7 including the ends would be fine. 4, and there are no dedicated end-caps now. As far as the strange parallax is concerned I think the official explanation is that the camera is tracking slightly faster than the platforms, which are also falling but not as fast as the player. Or something. It may be breaking all the laws of observed reality, but you must admit it looks nice Sorry, but this was the first thing I regognized when looking at the original vid. IMHO it looks strange and is disturbing. I tweak the tiles a little bit and build up the right side, or are you not interested in using them? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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