Horizontal scrolling with DPC+

[Sprybug]

Hey guys,

 

As some of you know, I'm working on a game called Robot Zed. I got a working demo of it in time for PRGE. While there at the AtariAge booth, I got to see some of the other games being demo'd and visually they always seem to look so much better than what I can come up with in the standard kernel. I'd love to use DPC+, but as you know, my games scroll horizontally, something that there are no routines for for DPC+. I've seen examples using pfread and pfpixel to simulate horizontal scrolling, but my main concern with that is the amount of cycle times it would take to scroll a lets say 32x44 playfield pixel screen. I would love to play around with how DPC+ stores the playfield data in its program memory and make it scroll the way I want by accessing those locations and doing what I need to do to get the result I want. Is there anything I can do in my program to do this by accessing certain parts of DPC+? Any help would go a long way to making Robot Zed look 10x better. I also would love to take advantage of those multiple virtual sprites too.

[+Gemintronic]

I've considered using the virtual sprites in the multi-sprite kernel for platforms and moving backgrounds. Maybe the same strategy could be used for DPC+?

 

Pending that maybe you have enough pull to get batari (Fred) to add that kind of scrolling in.

Edited October 28, 2016 by theloon

[Sprybug]

I've considered using the virtual sprites in the multi-sprite kernel for platforms and moving backgrounds. Maybe the same strategy could be used for DPC+?

 

Pending that maybe you have enough pull to get batari (Fred) to add that kind of scrolling in.

Funny thing, I saw Fred last weekend at PRGE and didn't even think about bringing it up. Also learned that he now lives about TEN MINUTES FROM ME. He just moved here.

[wallaby]

Getting direct access to the memory location for the playfield would be a big boon for me too. I use horizontal scrolling in DPC+ but it's a hack by animating the playfield. If I could procedurally generate my playfield it would save a few thousand bytes too.