E.X.O. [Done]

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I'm waiting on my video to upload to YT and given the changes that my ISP recently did concerning upload speeds since all the new fun began...it takes a lot longer than it used to. The video shows what the game currently looks like on my 7800 through my TV. I've dialed in the colors as best as I can based on the shot above with the blue hues in it. I seem to have that okay, but it does make the missile rockets that shoot up and down at you look more purple than they should when they come towards you. Also, the floating drone orb things have more purple hue to them than they appear in emulation as an example. Can also see how dark the maroon background is as a whole on my LCD. I could brighten the image on my display, but that would effect brightness on all systems I have plugged in and show a grey background vs true black on my panel and I'm not a fan of that.

 

Also I show footage that is slowed way down to show that the collision hitbox on the ship I think it too large. There are clearly parts where other obstacles can be gotten really close to, and parts where you aren't even touching the obstacles or enemies and the game registers it as a hit.

 

Last is a unedited run with me playing the game, but I wasn't able to finish the demo before loosing my lives. Still most of the screens are seen so that @Muddyfunster can see how they look on actual hardware on a UAV modded NTSC 7800 through s-video.

 

I will edit this post later when the video is done uploading.

 

[Trebor]

17 minutes ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

I've dialed in the colors as best as I can based on the shot above with the blue hues in it. 

Those blue hues that were seen green on real hardware is 'correct' for a hot system and maybe even when just warm (Need to take a closer look).  If a system is warmed up or hot and those greens are made to blue, what will happen is the system cooled, instead of being at the 'factory setting' ~25.7 degrees of hue separation will start closer ~22.7 degrees.  The difference will be while most consoles fall from cold to hot range of 24 thru 28 degrees, the adjusted one may fall more in the 22 thru 26 degrees range. 

 

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but just a thought worth mentioning.  I believe future builds will have the Hue $Ax values that were selected changed to Hue $9x values, which will provide a consistent blue look regardless of CRT/LCD display, cool or hot console.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Well..that was adjusted after it had been on for about 10 min while running B*nQ in demo attract mode before I started to adjust the colors again. Although having done this, Knightguy does look more brown now than he did before and the fireballs in Knightguy still have a purple hue to them as well but they always have in that game thus far on my 7800. I can tell you that the colorbar on the bottom still match on my console through my LCD through the utility cart so I didn't see a need to really adjust this further.

 

 

[+Muddyfunster]

13 minutes ago, Trebor said:

.... I believe future builds will have the Hue $Ax values that were selected changed to Hue $9x values, which will provide a consistent blue look regardless of CRT/LCD display, cool or hot console.

Yes, I will be looking at the palettes based on the your advice, thanks  I want the look to be consistent as possible so there are a couple of things to review.

[Trebor]

12 minutes ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

I can tell you that the colorbar on the bottom still match on my console through my LCD through the utility cart so I didn't see a need to really adjust this further.

As expected.  ?

 

When the system is warmed up or hot and the color dial is being tuned, it's hitting the match of ~25.7 degrees factory setting.  The console warmed/hot will fall around ~26 degrees. ?

 

This is what the diagnostic cart is actually showing as far as color/palette values; below demonstrates a console at ~26.2 degrees:

 

[RevEng]

Here's a visualisation of the warm up effect on the console colors.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

3 minutes ago, Trebor said:

As expected.  ?

 

When the system is warmed up or hot and the color dial is being tuned, it's hitting the match of ~25.7 degrees factory setting.  The console warmed/hot will fall around ~26 degrees. ?

 

This is what the diagnostic cart is actually showing as far as color/palette values; below demonstrates a console at ~26.2 degrees:

 

Right... so there really isn't a happy medium on this in regards to the current AV mods we have and modern flatpanels. The colors always appear to be off in some regard due to this.

 

 

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Okay, so to get back on the initial topic of some glitches...etc. Here is the video I took this morning that finally finished uploading to YT (since my ISP has felt the need to drop my once 10Mbps upload speeds to only about 3Mbps to YT these days). I shot this at 60fps and left it that way. In the timestamps I note where there are two instances of possible collision detection issues and I slowed the video in this part way down to better see this. My guess is that on some enemies, the player sprite hitbox is too wide as there are plenty of other places in the game, where it doesn't seem to be an issue?

 

While I wasn't able to complete the demo in this video, you get an idea on how it looks on my AV setup here.

 

 

[RevEng]

The initial glitch is likely the Mateos on-cart RAM not being zeroed. Muddy, try to "memset" any memory you've used there when the game starts up.

[+Muddyfunster]

13 minutes ago, RevEng said:

The initial glitch is likely the Mateos on-cart RAM not being zeroed. Muddy, try to "memset" any memory you've used there when the game starts up.

I think so. When I manually set those variables the issue went away (it was starting to count from a too high number so the frame read was jibberish). 

 

I didn't realize memset was a command  every day is a school day!.

Edited July 26, 2020 by Muddyfunster

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Forgot to mention that I didn't pipe in the audio directly to the camera so I apologize for my sounds of frustration during game play. Also, you will notice some shifting of the backgrounds on sprites that move about on the screen. This isn't an issue with the game or my 7800 and is the one and only annoying thing about my Extron 7SC. It has a built in motion compensation engine in it that cannot be disabled. Only time I don't see this happen is when using VGA,Component, or RGB sources into it as it mainly just has to scale the images at that point and in some cases just passes thru the signal without any changes being made. So I only see this on s-video and composite inputs. Still I'm used to it, but I'm sure it can be jarring to those that haven't seen it before.

 

And if I haven't mentioned it before, these videos I've been doing on game testing lately aren't public and are unlisted on my YT channel so they don't come up in normal searches. Figured we didn't want this vids of potential issues that I know will be resolved etc, getting people the wrong idea about the games.

 

[+Muddyfunster]

Thanks @-^CrossBow^- the footage is helpful. I think there is a small glitch with collision detection as you suggested and I'll be taking a look at that.?

 

The dropping through to the UI bug I was aware of and that should now be fixed too

 

The palette stuff is really interesting and I honestly did not realize it was such a complex topic. Appreciate the guidance from @Trebor & @RevEng.

 

I'll be making some palette changes to improve the consistency of the image vs my original vision for those elements and screen affected.

 

Appreciate the feedback, please keep it coming.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Muddyfunster
typo

[+Muddyfunster]

Speaking of fan speeds :

 

if you compare the fan speeds, make sure you compare the same fan on the same screen as they all intentionally run at different speeds on different screens, to add variety

[+sramirez2008]

Finally.?

[+Muddyfunster]

@sramirez2008 Nice job  (note to self, make level 2 harder...) !

 

[+sramirez2008]

1 hour ago, Muddyfunster said:

@sramirez2008 Nice job  (note to self, make level 2 harder...) !

 

Oh noooo!?

[SlidellMan]

I like how you modeled the fonts in E.X.O. after Gradius and RayForce.

[+Muddyfunster]

I tried a few different designs and there is still no guarantee I'll keep these fonts . 

 

I love the typography in the 80's and 90's arcade games.

 

The main font is a bit of a hybrid inspired by Gradius + Gradius 3 plus my own adaptations.

 

The other is inspired by RayForce (Taito), Outfoxies (Namco) and Fallout, but the old style CRT effect I was going for didn't really work out consistently how I wanted it to on the 7800 hardware so I've changed that out for something slightly different in terms of palette and presentation that's easier on the eye. An experiment that looked ok in emulation but not on real hardware.

 

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by Muddyfunster

[phattyboombatty]

On 7/25/2020 at 12:43 PM, gambler172 said:

144 k would be great,cause Mattheos cart,Concerto and CC2 can handle this.CC2 can do 512 k....but no 256 k....hope this info helps.

Thankfully, this is no longer the case! New CC2 files were released by @Mitch earlier this year. This has changed everything for the ol' CC2!

 

What an awesome feat of gaming excitement this is! I was able to get this to load with no hesitation on my CC2 and play this on real Atari 7800 hardware by using the following menu entries:

 

7800:    EXO        EXO210    7256R16    78BIOS

 

Use tabs for the MENU.TXT file and spaces for the MENU.CC2 file. New banking schemes for the Cuttle Cart 2 are located here.

 

As always, don't forget to remove the first 128 bytes of any .A78 file to convert it to a .BIN file.

[+Muddyfunster]

.

 

 

 

Edited July 29, 2020 by Muddyfunster

[Jinks]

3 hours ago, Muddyfunster said:

.

 

 

 

Run and tell that brother! 

[+Muddyfunster]

So far today has been a bit of a sprite and graphics day.

 

I started doing some of the prototyping for Level 2's tiles and specials and decided that it would also be a good time to rework the main sprite. At the start of the project, I wasn't sure whether I was aiming for a straight port of Cybernoid, a clone or something else but as I'm now definitely going for "something similar but also different" I think it's time to give the Salamander a fresh look.

 

 

Then a bit of a happy accident, I exported "all" ( as in a sprite sheet, instead of just the current new frame) and compiled into my test code without realizing and found that actually, that looks good, as I can compare them in the engine to see side by side what works and what doesn't  instead of flipping between compiled instances (no idea why I didn't think to do that earlier lol ).

 

 

Anyway, sneak peak of the graphics for L2, still very much work in progress and no where near done (level 4 gfx are more complete than level 2). Plans for lots of new stuff.

 

Going to add the new ship sprite to the demo and see how she flies. Also need to update the collision code as the sprite has slightly different dimensions as it's a few pixels shorter in height and a couple of pixels wider. Hopefully that doesn't break any of the existing hazards.

 

Edited August 2, 2020 by Muddyfunster
typos

[SlidellMan]

Almost looks like an image trail.

Besides that, your tilework is getting better.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

1 hour ago, SlidellMan said:

Almost looks like an image trail.

Besides that, your tilework is getting better.

I agree and it that is always a good effect to use when your ship is exiting the level to the next one in my opinion.. (hint, hint) ? 

[+Muddyfunster]

Thanks for that feedback guys  might be expensive in terms of ROM space for the graphics unless I get creative.

 

I've also tweaked the ship some more. For some reason I kept looking at the sprite in game and all I could see was Grouch Marx ?, so I cut the nose off and shortened the gun.

 

 

 

Looks a bit more snub-nosed now and being a bit shorter, it navigates the natural 16 pixel gaps much better.

 

I also went in and fixed a couple of bugs that got flagged in the demo on some of the collisions and the hit box feeling off. That was really valuable feedback (thanks @-^CrossBow^- @sramirez2008)- ?. That checking also led me to another glitch that I found and fixed in the sprite movement code for the jelly type enemies.

 

With these fixes and tweaks in place, I'll be posting up another demo soon. 

 

Thanks again for the feedback!

 

 

Edited August 4, 2020 by Muddyfunster