sh3-rg

Love it. I come here maybe once every 5 or 6 months, get to read pages and pages of back-and-forth and some of the most ill-judged attempts at humour the internet has to offer. Get to ride the highs and lows of self-imposed deadlines and appearances coming and going and joy of all joys, get to do it all again in another half years time - BAM! Have to say, I totally called the main theme of this soap opera wrong this time... I was fully expecting a "d'oh! tax years run April to April!" revelation come the January posts, allowing for a further 3 months of solid string-dangling, I didn't see that "everyone is skint in january" plot twist, it totally blindsided me. M. Night Shyamalan stuff right there. I'll put a note on my calendar and see you all in August, ciao! Well that's sure to pay the bills.

haha, sound about right! hope you're all having fun nonetheless :-)

lol, we made that in a couple of weeks when neither of us had much else to do, kept it secret and went about it in a way that was supposed to make the design and creativity side of level creation simple. then we piled more stuff in, had idea after idea how to add more, and effectively sacrificed the easy level design bit resulting in a whole load of cba. fun times! showing it on the big screen at a french party was fun stuff, it got a bit of love but it's effectively a bit of a cock-tease of a release. and yes a very, very dead one at that haha.

Once you realise this, and that the particle layer can be shifted around, and that you can have multiple copies of it with multiple CLUT allocations set to them, and you can resize it by editing the .S file and you can scale it just like any other object, ... and... and... well that thing becomes super useful But as a single backdrop that's on a weird offset and confuses you the first time you start plotting things to it and the co-ords are wacky... yeah, that's not so much fun

I like these kinds of games where you re-play, learn more and are better equipped to progress next time (but will inevitably fail and repeat the cycle). There's tons of indie games that do this and the most recent example I can think of is actually a text adventure written in Dreams for ps4 (closed beta, not released). Actually, I say I like them, I don't actually like to play them, but I like the concept and like watching videos of someone else go through them when I'm in a very CBA mood. And I don't actually play Jaguar games at all bar giving a go or two to anything that's released freely, so I'm not at all sure my feedback is of any use at all But it doesn't seem like the kind of game you'd need on a cart if you just wanted to play it, as unless it has different endings and branching narrative it's going to be one-and-done. Box collectors/shelf-fillers will buy it whatever, might never even take it out of the box. Physical CD release might make more sense, despite the hassle in getting it created, as that kind of game seems like it'd benefit massively from a proper soundtrack. For me, attempting something as you suggest on Jaguar would be an interesting exercise, but probably working within the confines of the system would stifle creativity too much and lead to too many compromises. But if you're making it for PC and are down-porting to Jaguar later, well that's an entirely different situation... but I'd personally just get that done and released first and then come here with the questions and polls because in that kind of context, with something tangible people can accurately consider, then you're getting actual useful feedback and not asking for opinions based on theoreticals.

I'd be massively shocked if messing with screen width didn't break raptor object handling, but it'd be a pleasant surprise

Just be aware, VJ is not 1:1 for a Jaguar. It's handy as part of a development and testing setup in known good conditions, but don't be too surprised if the first time your game is sent to a Jaguar all you see is a black screen or just odd stuff in general.

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Well I think you're all just being over-sensitive and hyper-critical..... Speaking of speculation, speculators and collectards really are blessed... a game developer making bank on clearly broken efforts, handling constructive criticism somewhere on the intersect betwen Chemical Ali and Trump's Twitter account. Bravo, Mr. Bonez. Jaguar fake news. Nothing to see here, please buy and enjoy! Perspective is a wonderful thing, you could really do with some when considering how you've handled both yourself and your releases. Sad.

You'd normally have a game loop and call the pad reading once per screen update, rather than having it sit and wait for some kind of input, as usually there's more going on than all stop and idling until someone presses B or whatever.

Your post is practically invisible in the dark theme.

You couldn't make a cup of coffee from the ground up, never mind anything worth playing The day I start taking Atari game making advice form an talentless, asset-flipping, no-shame cash-grabber is the day I should probably knock this stuff on the head once and for all, thanks all the same.

Frogz64 was nothing more than Doger + graphics downloaded from the internet and minimum effort "coding" - it even included existing Doger bugs. He practically begged in PM to let him sell it as his game and he'd hand over money or that he wanted me to work with him on it after telling me he didn't realise he couldn't just take a tutorial, alter it and sell it as his own. I pointed out I don't do Atari stuff for money and that I didn't particularly appreciate what he was doing and how he was doing it, as it wasn't at all in the spirit of how it was put out originally. Following this I simply had to tell him to go fuck himself when he came back at me with another pathetic whinging essay about $$$s and such bullshit I couldn't be less interested in. AFAIK, he then went on and made carts and sold them anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Don't know what's worse... that he made them, or that morons actually handed over cash for them. lolol. If he'd simply wanted to alter it & put it out as his own thing for free, I'd have had no issues, that would have been entirely consistent with a tutorial offering. Then you shove your (hopefully improved) version of the code up and maybe more people can learn more things from it. Win-win. But this whole Wave One Games thing seems merely to be the Jaguar version of Steam asset flip scumcuntery. Low-effort, low-skill shite for cash and nothing else. No talent, no pride, no fun - just gain. And like I said, people are stupid enough to buy it because it's on a cart and there's only a few of them made, so woooowoweeee they're going to be worth a fortune one day!!!!!111 Right?!!!?!?! lol o l Except when they're not. hahaha.

Does it do it at the same place each time? A transition between certain levels maybe or anything that helps track it to some common trigger? I remember I found a few issues with level data and the CD version - the CD was replaced for an updated version, but this doesn't sound like your issue at all.

respectfully disagree. the jaguar's dedicated hardware is more geared to producing fantastic results in terms of 2D, it has little dedicated hardware specifically designed to help generate 3D scenes, unless say you value gouraud shading as a must have in terms of 3D IQ (I personally don't, it looks very much of the time - clean flat-shaded polygons are far more appealing for me.) and that's just shading... you have to generate the polygons without dedicated hardware assistance. that's not to say it's impossible just less practical, for instance the Atari ST had a few fairly serviceable 3D games with far less powerful hardware at the coder's disposal... but nothing I think people would go out of their way to play today unless a hefty dose of nostalgia accompanied it. don't even get me started on judderry/wobbly early 90s textured ick... *suppressing urge to heave and hurl* nobodywantsthat.gif the 64-bit object processor allows programmers to get fairly elaborate 2d engines up and running in no time, the OP is beastly and taking advantage of it is using the hardware exactly as it was intended. 60 fps titles with masses of action on screen - no problem. compare that to the performance of commercial 3D games on the platform - a good 95% of which I'd personally class as meh to terrible - low resolution, low frame rate, low fun. nothing that would or could stand up in any way to the average title released on the next generation of machines that came along that did have dedicated 3D hardware, never mind stuff that releases today or at any time in between over those following 25 years. people today can create 2D games on Jaguar that are just as fun, playable and perform like-for-like framerate-wise as titles released on current platforms. I can't even imagine a very, very remote edge case where a 3D equivalent could exist. most game designers and developers don't want to waste years and years creating the fundamental infrastructure to even allow them to begin creating a game, they want to get to the fun stuff of actually making the game. don't get me wrong - some actually do lean the other way, and they're usually the types that are not naturally designers or creatives, those who are maybe more maths/tech inclined. a few rare individuals have the skills to cover all these bases, but they aren't going to be wasting their time and skills sat at a Jaguar. we've seen very little in terms of aftermarket 3D games produced that are say not ports or adaptations of other existing stuff. we've also seen people aim too high and get literally nowhere near ever creating a releasable game as they're lost for years in the tech - harsh realities and practicalities brick-walling their progress. if you want to design games and actually get them out, you have to be realistic and have a workable plan, this is true if you're a solitary person sat for a few hours every other saturday with a jaguar and a skunkboard or a 200-strong team creating the next AAA franchise for next-gen hardware. recall Mark Cerny's "time to triangle", it's probably the most important factor for this topic. it's the reason the original playstation absolutely exploded on the gaming scene, the reason the ps2 took a little time to get going and the massive reason the ps3 was an utter bitch to work with for many years - ps1 = a box of tricks, ps2 = something that took a little learning and work both from devs and sony themselves, ps3 = powerful yet esoteric architecture that was notoriously difficult to tap... so maybe the Jaguar of its day... apart from the bit where is sold nearly 90 million more units, oh and the bit where genius coders cajoled the hardware into producing some of the most stunning titles of the generation, of and.... etc. etc. Where would Jaguar sit on this scale? Judging by results we saw in the commercial releases, it would clearly need a new category of 12 to ??? months. In terms of aftermarket/homebrew games, probably "??? to LOLOL" tl;dr it's nice to want things I don't think CJ has ever coded/had the desire to code a 3D engine in his life. vladr has come far closer to creating a 3D game than say someone like atari owl ever did, but he's still yet to pop a game out the door. typo came, saw, dropped the bombs with his demo-effect skills and showed what could be done in a short time frame when the combination of desire, game designer and technical coder are present in a single person, but none of that was polygon-based iirc

Where do you come up with this stuff? It's effing glorious & worth the $199 hardware price alone. The jaw-dropping moment when you're first placed down onto the track rivalled anything from those first few weeks trying out the new hardware and every piece of software possible. Incredible. Only wish I had time to play it (or any game really) and that it was a lot cooler (putting a HMD on in this heat is the last thing I'd fancy doing right now).

Yeah, you can probably buy a Switch & the game for less than you'd find the Jaguar version for.

Hadn't really followed this, just read bits now & then. Watched this video to get me up to speed, well worth watching, SD&R not holding back as expected:

Not sure on game suggestions, but definitely needs avocados. Then it'll be a triple-A game.

I've got quite a few! There's Myst, a game I bought for cheap from some liquidator. Then there's the Myst demo I got with my first Jag CD. I also got a copy of Myst (demo version) with the second Jaguar CD I bought. I also purchased, via eBay, what turned out to be a CD-R of a game called "Mist" - at least that's what the person who used hot pink glittery nail varnish to scrawl on the surface thought it was called. Wasn't great, bit samey.

Yep (you could have tried it out quicker than posting )

It's an interesting video, but not really applicable to the Jaguar, the two machines have very different architecture. I think the video is designed to show how this game gets around NeoGeo hardware limitations - it has hard limits on the number of tiles both per scanline and per frame. Jaguar has its own limitations and advantages when it comes to handling sprites and is much more flexible by design. Branch objects are a path to success when you want more objects on screen than would otherwise be possible... but they're not going to be any use if your display consists of a number of full screen layers, there would be nothing to branch past. The OP is phenomenal - making use of what it does well is surely the best plan, no? How do you see those concepts applying to Jaguar?. And what better frame rate do you envisage over the 60fps of Metal Slug 3? Maybe the real challenge of reproducing that game or something like it would be coming up with a system to real-time decompress bitmaps to RAM during game play, replacing old assets no longer needed as you progress further into the level with new stuff before it's required. You'd know more about this sort of stuff if you actually interacted with Jaguar with anything other than a joypad, and maybe did some code experimenting, even if it's just with raptor basic as I do - getting real first-hand experience of what the Jaguar is and does might clear some stuff up for you. Just making use of someone else's object handling routines via basic, you'd still be getting at least a feel of the hows and whys and for the limits of what is and isn't doable. Personally I love making stuff with fake a "3D" look like the rubber cube, twister, boingy platformer, bexagon, a new first person shmup I'm making, etc. etc. etc. all 60fps in basic. "2.5D" is something you've mentioned several times, it's rather a nebulous term, but go actually do something other than posting in forums about hypotheticals. You can even do "proper" 3D, I've done 60fps burning vector blitter stuff (thanks to SCPCD for helping me figure out why my lines were perforated ) - have a go, get stuck, ask for help - people will be more than willing to assist in my experience. It's fucking good fun!