Heaven/TQA Posted December 12, 2014 Author Share Posted December 12, 2014 I got the wow factor when I first got it and then it went into my heavy rotation... still like it and imho it's a masterpiece by Triace. Btw his 4th Pokey tune at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 I got the wow factor when I first got it and then it went into my heavy rotation... still like it and imho it's a masterpiece by Triace. Btw his 4th Pokey tune at all. The last tune is the best , for sure. I like it. As I always promoted the 15kHz mode for a good sound fitting to "Soundtracks". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted December 12, 2014 Author Share Posted December 12, 2014 Yeah. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lemiel Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 Very short time to read all scroll text after flip disk - I am watchin YT on SV page. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted December 13, 2014 Share Posted December 13, 2014 Hmmm, counting the parts/sectors on the 360k disk, I see that Arsantica-2 (including XBIOS) has a total length of 759 DD sectors. Maybe it is possible to use a better packer (e.g. Exomizer) and/or shorten the demo by 52 sectors - then it would fit on one standard 180k disk. Easy to say for me - hard to do for you, I know... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 14, 2014 Share Posted December 14, 2014 Just been listening to the end tune in RMT... good way to evaluate game/demo music is do so in a detached form, let it live only on it's own merits: The tune IS GOOD. no question. . as a technical feat, uses stereo and probably near nothing in the way of synth tricks. Probably nothing in there that hasn't been done technically in the last 5 or maybe even 10 years. To make something clear: It's two pokeys. Nothing to say against that. But if a demo claims to be using "stock" Hardware... . as a musical feat - Wow factor=maximal. The emotion and atmosphere generated by this song is rarely matched by anything on the Atari. If a list of the best 10 musical pieces ever done for the A8 was done, this would have to make it. Sadly, you cannot do much more "musically" without "special synth tricks. You'd need them already to have a wider spread of available frequencies. A better Tool than RMT is even more requested than in the past. I wonder what Triace could do with some proper Tool there. Here just a really slight change of that tune. Just some frequency spread, and an arpeggio that is not possible... You know "slight" changes in RMT means to hit a nail with a wrecking ball. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted December 14, 2014 Author Share Posted December 14, 2014 Stock hardware except 2 pokey. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 14, 2014 Share Posted December 14, 2014 Stock hardware except 2 pokey. 1 POKEY means less resources and less data on the Disk though You may realize that the demo looks boring to some people at POUET. The problem is that less happens with long loading times. If the demo was doing some small "unexpected" stuff here and there, even longer loading times would not be a problem. Imagine the rotating planet. The ship simply stops and then the screen gets black. In the endpart, you use the PM to show that scroller. It also could be used to have the "double scanline" for very low data on the screen, just some flashes inbetween... enemies move.... You could adjust the whole DL without interfering some PM animations. Digis can be played also. Just some small stored waves played repeatedly at different speeds... and so on. As you read the sectors from Floppy with your own routines, you can read a defined amount, do something, read, do , read ... and so on. But don't let the screen or sound let the same too long. As I wrote before... there is much "left" for another "ArsantIIIca" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted December 15, 2014 Author Share Posted December 15, 2014 Yeah. I know the issues with loading times. Some insights: First screen coded for Arsantica 2 was the rotating planet scene. It does not use any code generator in first place. the planet texture is 128x64 size and needs to be stored in Hi/lo-nibble format. then there is a shademap for the shading which takes ram, too. so everything needed to be loaded from disc in first version. It was planned to use that for the "entry screen". the ship sprite was added later plus background gfx. the unrolled code for texturing the planet is about 40kb alone without the gfx. then you add music on top. everybody knows that RMT is not the most "compact" format... size doubles when using stereo music. then we had the first version of the fractal flight which was planned to be used in realtime. but over the development of this... I went down the road of precalculating the stuff (the code of the flight itself is the same, only the fractal generating is done prior and saved on disc...). so when peaking into the code you find a lot of the "old version" means joystick routines etc the data for the flight needs 64kb (4 banks)... again loading from disc... then we added the 50fps fading effect... with all gfx etc... also needs RAM (is calculated in realtime btw) here as well unrolled code) plus stereo music... sprite animation of the blastdoor (we had more sprite animation for the flame) then I wanted to have a 160x720 heights graphics... same issue again... you need to load the bloddy data from disc count yourself... 40x720 bytes alone for the gfx data... then again plus stereo music... ok... then the most impressive (imho) fx was put last which was the radial blur in realtime (so no animation there, it's bloddy 6502 doing all the stuff)... I added our end scroller on top and then our gfx guys painted a long gfx scroller... count yourself... 5 players per screen = 1280 bytes x 10 screens = 12kb alone for the scroller, rest is full with the radial blur code and data. then again stereo music... so basicly at this point... I thought... hmmm... we need more intermission screens than only a loading scroller (like in ARS1).... so we added more and more gfx by Alien (Turtle, Alien, Battlestar cruizer from back) and tried to squeeze them into RAM... more fx were added (interference bump mapping and warp core, rotozoomer) and both added more to loading times and space usage. then I coded last minute the text prompter between part 1 and part 2 to tell at least some story as connection plus playing some music/sound... the texter was done basicly without some nice interesting stuff because deadline was coming and I wanted to have the rest working before spicing up the intermission parts. same for part 2/part 3 intermission. It was planned to have more "Advanced Wars" GBA style story with more faces as Aliens/Panda having a conversation while loading part 3... but it turned out that I needed to whipe the gfx... so again a black screen? no.... I added the turtle pic as we entered the "water" while escaping from the Alien entered mothership. but again this pic needed to be loaded... then I had the initial idea of having the scrolling pic running while it loads the other parts of the pic (so when 1 screen was scrolled out it was already caching from disc the next gfx)... but thanks to Atari.... no or weak music while doing that... abd only scrolling a pic without music? na... then I added the bump mapping on top.... (everybody knows.... you need a lightmap, interference map) which take a lot of money and were only stored half because of symetry... well... again? loading from disc needed.... then I added the "coming home sequence".... again gfx... where? loaded from disc... The as I was using xBIOS... I thought LZ4 packing was the way to go. which helped to downsize everything. not optimal for each data group (gfx fex.)... using delta encoding etc... but lesson learned... I found it cool of depacking while loading but this in the end could cause even longer loading times at I might miss next sector as drive is already spinning even I was still depacking etc etc etc. so emkay... more was planned and more was on the list but deadline was causing to "ship the product" as I thought... releasing a product is better than polishing to death (remember... project was started right after Revsion... so in April). ps. I like your edit of the Ars2 song but for me it is now "too happy" ;=) I wanted to have a "sad" song 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 (edited) most of this plays on an ntsc machine with the jumping screen issues on certain screens, we have seen this on some other software that usually got fixed and the worked fine on those machines. only time screen totally fails is at very last sequences where it all goes dark and just music plays.... Edited December 15, 2014 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 (edited) so emkay... more was planned and more was on the list but deadline was causing to "ship the product" as I thought... releasing a product is better than polishing to death (remember... project was started right after Revsion... so in April). "Polishing to death" wasn't needed. Using small regions on the screen with "popup" FX, using the PMg as a display while the screen content needs to be changed... A "one charset" screen 32 Bytes width. Or a "Graphics 1 or 2" screen... uses very little DL and memory. Quickly loaded, quickly changed. It could be done also while loading a "big effect". Drop one "big effect" and add some "wow fx" while loading. ps. I like your edit of the Ars2 song but for me it is now "too happy" ;=) I wanted to have a "sad" song Thanks. But I'd be more happy to create some authentical "synth tricks" to what's really possible. Edited December 15, 2014 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
analmux Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 (edited) Interesting moving graphics! Looks like some 'numerical inverse scattering' during the planet rotation and the light rays at the end Edited December 15, 2014 by analmux Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
analmux Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 You know "slight" changes in RMT means to hit a nail with a wrecking ball. Interesting adaptation. Now it also sounds like 2014 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 And here is some ... erm .... quick ....cough.... hust... adaption of some very low system usage FX It's build in basic... in those left over "25th hour of a day"... last week It's all BASIC. No special routines. It could be build faster, but that wasn't the goal to reach. It's just to show that you could do a lot of things during Disk-IO.... Even the "parallax FX" uses only one charset... It's a short one, but it doesn't stop to do something... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted December 20, 2014 Author Share Posted December 20, 2014 thx. Cool stuff... I am fan of "simple but interesting" things on screen... (remember the shaking of the Battle Cuiser in Arsantica 1 as an example ;=)) Now I got somebody who will design the intermission screens :I) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 (edited) thx. Cool stuff... I am fan of "simple but interesting" things on screen... (remember the shaking of the Battle Cuiser in Arsantica 1 as an example ;=)) Now I got somebody who will design the intermission screens :I) Some informations about this In the first 20 seconds, it makes a copy of the charset and shows some FX. The "char animations" were build with direct pokes into the char memory. When "normally" a wait phase has to be done, it creates the "Defense" and the "Alien" char. The "block" is designed to keep an image there, or some animations inside the char memory. And then you can do colour changes, block moves..... whatever... btw. You know how slow Atari Basic is . The low use of resources makes it usable fast. btw. 2 : The most time had to be the "design". Not the writing. So a designer tool would help much. At least, you can speed up Altirra, to run through the demo Edited December 20, 2014 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
analmux Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 And here is some ... erm .... quick ....cough.... hust... adaption of some very low system usage FX It's build in basic... in those left over "25th hour of a day"... last week It's all BASIC. No special routines. It could be build faster, but that wasn't the goal to reach. It's just to show that you could do a lot of things during Disk-IO.... Even the "parallax FX" uses only one charset... [...] It's a short one, but it doesn't stop to do something... Did you programm it yourself? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 Did you programm it yourself? Yes. Why? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jacques Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 (edited) I've just tested it on my 800XL with SIO2SD booted in QMEG's UltraSpeed, demo hangs with black screen after first part (at attempt to load next part). When ran in normal (1x) SIO, works just fine. I used 360 KB ATR version. Edited December 20, 2014 by Jacques Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
analmux Posted December 20, 2014 Share Posted December 20, 2014 Yes. Why? No essential reason ... Just curious, cause you wrote it in third-person singular in post 89. Do you have other basic or ML plans? Or is it a secret? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted December 21, 2014 Share Posted December 21, 2014 (edited) No essential reason ... Just curious, cause you wrote it in third-person singular in post 89. Do you have other basic or ML plans? Or is it a secret? Further plans belong on the fact that a 24h day cannot be expanded ... If a day had 48 hours, a Wolf 3D for the A8 had been there for decades No time, no coding. You know, I'm not a coder in profession, but sometimes it is fun to calculate bit rows in the head and to learn languages ... Edited December 21, 2014 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gury Posted December 24, 2014 Share Posted December 24, 2014 Thanks for great new demo from SV2014, other intros, games and art works are great, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted December 24, 2014 Share Posted December 24, 2014 Have the files been released for the other compo entries? Apologies if a link has been posted elsewhere. I did a search of the forum here and couldn't find anything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted December 24, 2014 Author Share Posted December 24, 2014 Pouet.net 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
voy Posted December 25, 2014 Share Posted December 25, 2014 http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/parties/SillyVenture,2014.12.5-7,Gdansk,Poland 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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