Flying Shark

[sometimes99er]

Awesome.

[+arcadeshopper]

this is awesome!

[artrag]

It looks awesome ! Greetings!

[Asmusr]

Latest update: you can shoot a few things.

flying-shark-8.bin

[LASooner]

Looking really good. Only played it on JS99.net but it's moving really fast and smooth. Well done.

[artrag]

Awesome!

 

 

A question :

- How do I shoot in JS99 ? I cannot find the key

 

A suggestion:

- Why not adding a smple animation of the tile for sea?

All you need to do is to chanage the tile definition while scrolling. There is no computational overhead nor extra VRAM usage if you take the 8 scrolling steps from 8 animated frames of the waves

 

 

Edited September 16, 2017 by artrag

[Asmusr]

A question :

- How do I shoot in JS99 ? I cannot find the key

 

Use the Tab key.

[ti99iuc]

Latest update: you can shoot a few things.

 

It is so niiice ! I played it until the 2° level with ships... it is higly playable and great already. Thanks

[Asmusr]

A suggestion:

- Why not adding a smple animation of the tile for sea?

All you need to do is to chanage the tile definition while scrolling. There is no computational overhead nor extra VRAM usage if you take the 8 scrolling steps from 8 animated frames of the waves

 

Yes I will probably do that later, but it requires some changes because I'm currently storing one 8x16 tile for 8 frames instead of 8 8x8 tiles for 8 frames. My current approach only takes 1/4 of the space, but I guess I have enough room on the cartridge.

[artrag]

Maybe you could deal with animated tiles as axceptions instead of explanding all tiles by 8

[Asmusr]

Maybe you could deal with animated tiles as axceptions instead of explanding all tiles by 8

 

Maybe, but there are quite a lot of tiles that involve water, e.g. 28 on level 2.

[artrag]

By "tile" you mean a couple of adjacent characters, do you?

I expect a lot of "tiles" when you have transitions with ground, ships, shadows etc.

Using pointers, you can use the same code for accessing to independent frames and to data within a 16 byte frame

Edited September 17, 2017 by artrag

[Sinphaltimus]

I smashed in to the edge of the world.

[Asmusr]

By "tile" you mean a couple of adjacent characters, do you?

I expect a lot of "tiles" when you have transitions with ground, ships, shadows etc.

Using pointers, you can use the same code for accessing to independent frames and to data within a 16 byte frame

 

Yes.

I do maintain a list of addresses (pointing into the ROM bank) of the characters to upload, but I only update the list every 8th frame. In other frames I just add an offset (1-7) to the addresses. It's much more efficient simply to switch to a new ROM bank every frame rather than trying to figure out which characters to treat specially. This means I would have to use a 512K ROM instead of a 256K ROM, but the cost difference of producing a physical cartridge is minimal (if any), and for the FinalGROM it doesn't matter at all.

[+Ksarul]

You are right that there is minimal to no cost difference between the 256K and the 512K chips, @Rasmus (a few cents per chip at most). Sometimes the larger chips actually come out cheaper. . .it all depends on quantity and source availability at the time I need the chips. All other costs would be the same, as they both use identical cartridge parts for everything else.

[fabrice montupet]

Great!

[Asmusr]

I have now refactored the whole thing so it's possible to animate each character/pattern/tile in 8 frames as the screen scrolls.

 

Problem is that the scrolling speed is a bit faster than what's desirable for an animation so it's difficult to make it look good.

 

In order to make more use of animation than just for the water, I have made a wind animation for the palm trees. Again it's a bit fast, but it does make the background more dynamic. Let me know what you think.

 

For the water I have struggled to come up with a reasonable animation. I have ended up just scrolling it sideways and changing the colors a bit. Let me know if you have any ideas. The water is currently only one 8x8 tile, but it could possibly be expanded to 4 tile (or 16x16).

 

I don't think there's more in the current graphics set that it makes sense to animate, but let me know if you have any ideas. Animation is completely free in terms of performance, unless you add new tiles.

 

The ROM is now 512K with a lot of redundancy and about 160K free.

 

flying-shark-8.bin

[fabrice montupet]

Rasmus, you keep pushing the limits of the 99/4A computer! Congratulations!

[artrag]

Awesome!

[ti99iuc]

Wow it is really fantastic... i just had a bit of seasickness in the second level

[artrag]

What about scrolling back and forth the 3 waves within the sea tile?

[Asmusr]

What about scrolling back and forth the 3 waves within the sea tile?

 

Yes that's a good idea. I have tried something like that in this version.

flying-shark-8.bin

[artrag]

Much better!

I see that the 3rd wave is cycling, this makes the sea look moving to the left.

If you want avoid the effect, you could use just two waves 4 pixels tall, going back and forth. Probably the best would be add a black line under the 3 lines now used for the first two waves.

 

If you can spend more time and tiles on the issue, the rule more or less would be that the crests of the waves plot a sine wave animated across the sea tiles.

[+retroclouds]

Very impressive! Well done!

[Imperious]

the effect on the c64 version looks pretty good, also the speccy except the water's yellow of course.

 

 

I think the wind effect on the trees is a bit too fast though.

 

This is going to be a TI favourite when finished.

Edited September 29, 2017 by Imperious