The Southsider

Hi there!

 

Uihjah! Interesting parallel efforts. That now looks also very cool and it's ultra-smooth. I wonder how important a sense of horizontal motion is to the gameplay.If it's mainly the vertical motion that matters, this approach seems to be suited better.

(At the cost of giving up the original dotted look of course)

 

Greetings,

Manuel

Uihjah! Interesting parallel efforts. That now looks also very cool and it's ultra-smooth. I wonder how important a sense of horizontal motion is to the gameplay.If it's mainly the vertical motion that matters, this approach seems to be suited better.

(At the cost of giving up the original dotted look of course)

 

I don't think the horizontal motion is particularly important to the game. The entire width of the screen is always visible, so the horizontal motion is just for effect. The vertical motion in my demo is very smooth as I am using a 1LK unlike Beamrider. However, I'm not sure if it will be possible to retain this when displaying the aliens, as some of the lines will be required for sprite repositioning.

 

Chris

I think this is looking great. It gives the "feel" of Juno First very nicely. Horizontal movement isn't really important to the game. You don't move very far left or right until you hit the "edge" of the grid.

 

Completely ignorant question - can you keep the single scanline kernel, but have the grid draw using every other line? So you keep the high resolution, but sacrifice a little smoothness in the scrolling to get sprite repositioning?

That looks really nice!

Hi there!

 

However, I'm not sure if it will be possible to retain this when displaying the aliens, as some of the lines will be required for sprite repositioning.

 

Hm... you could just dynamically decide on which lines you reposition, as the pattern leaves most lines unused so far

 

Greetings,

Manuel

Completely ignorant question - can you keep the single scanline kernel, but have the grid draw using every other line? So you keep the high resolution, but sacrifice a little smoothness in the scrolling to get sprite repositioning?

 

That should be possible. However, I think I can reposition a sprite and draw the background in a single line by doing a bit of pre-calculation. This might require the width of the screen to be reduced slightly, but I will have to run some tests first. The response to this demo seems to have been very positive, so I am now thinking of taking this further, though I do feel like I am stealing the idea from Manuel

 

Chris