SpiceWare
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Blog Comments posted by SpiceWare
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not yet. I started working on a Mac version then got sidetracked with Medieval Mayhem. I plan to pick it up again in January.
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Yep, both banks had 0 bytes free. I was able to free up a little wiggle room
I tried making the AI players update 1 per frame in DEMO mode. The DEMO was horrible after that so, so that's not an option.
I've made some changes and have it running with the scanline break on both my iMac and my MacBook. Looking good so far. I'm investigating other options while the tests run.
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it's not the sum, so those would trap all the time.
I've noticed a pattern - it happens when a right side player is holding onto a fireball.
Nobody's seen it during normal gameplay(and I've been playtesting with the scanline break) so I suspect it's the timing of the music routines causing issues with the extra time to process fireball flareups and the resulting sprite positioning(3 items to the far right).
I currently have it set to move 2 AI players per frame during the demo - possible solution would be just 1 AI player per frame. Main issue is ROM space - if I'm not mistaken, both banks holding Vertical Blank code are down to 0 bytes free.
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Just noticed this in the final build - I let the demo run for awhile, and saw the screen hop twice in Stella. Haven't seen it while playing a game though.
hmm - I'll run it in the the background with a breakif {_scan==#263} and see if anything shows up.The break's caught it twice so far. There's an extra scan line occuring in the vertical blank, shifting the screen down by 1. Only pattern I've noticed so far is the fireball was on the right side of the screen. I'm going to leave it running and save screen grabs of the debugger to send home for analysis this evening.
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Thanks!
I have a game idea already - Dragon Defense Squad. Kind of a missile command meets Pern. All that ever happened back then was a cheesy display kernel that did color changes based on joystick and keypad readings.
NRX?
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Waiting on my friends, so I thought I'd check the blog
I love the new extended animations. It looked like you took my advice about the dragon exhibiting some baseball pitcher-like gestures before he launches the fireball. It gives us a better opportunity to enjoy watching the dragon which is definitely going to go down as the most intricate sprite animation ever done on the VCS.
I think espire8 always planned the gestures, they're seen in his flash demo which was posted quite a while back. I had hoped to have them all coded last weekend, but his XP system crashed and I've been (im)patiently waiting while he reinstalled his system and software. I received most of the sequences yesterday afternoon and did the initial implementation. I need to do some fine-tuning of the playback speeds. I'm also still in need of the knight-chase-off and the easter egg sequences.
The delay turned out to be somewhat good, I doubt the shimmering knight animation would have happened without it.
The last thing that would be nice regarding the dragon is to have him make a noise to announce himself when he comes on, kind of like a referee or something.A referee noise? I don't follow sports, so I don't know what that would sound like. The bank with the sound effects is also down to 0 bytes of free ROM.
Although the music starts up well on the knight animation, it now cuts off abruptly instead of at the end of a phrase. If you have to do it that way, can you at least either ramp down the volume or cut out the melody after the end of the first riff and let it trail out only on percussion? Or you could cut off the music at the end of the phrase and use the extra time to do a kind of grandfather clock thing where you count off how many wins the leader has in flashes/explosions. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM in the same rhythm as the music. That would give it that whole over-the-top Medieval Times/Professional wrestling vibe.The abrupt cut off is on my list of final things to look at. I'm not that familiar with Paul's music routines(I just dropped in the routines with Erik Ehrling's music) but think I could figure out how to make it end at the end of a phrase. As for me attempting to figure it out and write new music with "booms" and all, that's not going to happen in the 1 day I have left.
Yeah, to late. I tried different shield collision routines but kept rolling the screen due to lack of processing time. There's also 0 bytes of RAM left, so storing prior positions of anything is out of the question.It's probably too late for this, but I did notice a real lack of "english". When the ball hits the edge of your shield it doesn't ricochet off the way you'd expect. This was with a ball going straight up-down with my guy in the top left position. Even when I try to hit the ball while moving the shield I can't "bump" it the way you could in real-life like in air-hockey. Likewise if I am holding the ball, when I flick the paddle and release it as I'm moving, the ball doesn't maintain any of that momentum. If you stored a one-frame history of prior movement you would know on collision whether it's a "bump" or not and apply english accordingly. I think that would significantly improve the playability as it would help mix up the return trajectories and reward finesse. Totally realistic physics would result in the ball falling into bad infinite loops and slow shallow angles, so I realize you have to fake it, but I think the trajectory should be somehow colored by the movement of the paddle.Thanks for your input!
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Sweet! I read about that a while back and was wondering when it was going to be released! I'll be good though and not buy it until Medieval Mayhem is finished
I love their game Apeiron X.
I watched a friend playing Redline and he played was a rather interesting network variation where you played on teams. One player on each team had a mini, the remaining had corvettes. The only thing that mattered was the laps made by the mini, so the corvette drivers had to either defend their mini or attack the opposing team's mini.
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Thanks!
I haven't done the dragon sequences yet. What's currently in place is the test sequence I threw together yesterday, with a minor change to test out the new "smooth on/off" frames. It's not totally smooth, but better than before.
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Did not realize the DS was backward compatible with GBA games.
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Thanks!
There is more to come on that easter egg, so you'll probably want to check it again on the final version
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Ich kann Deutsche, aber nicht sehr gut. Ich hatte drei jahren Deutsch im hoch schule
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I also wonder whether everyone buying one has the big screen HDTV needed to really show off the graphics.
My concern is I have the big-screen HDTV, but it predates HDMI by a few years. I have no incentive to buy into HDDVD or BluRay if the picture quality is going to be downgraded on the component video connection.
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So David Vazquez = espire8? That sure explains how he so absolutely managed to capture the dragon
Yep - if you look around his site you'll find work on the easter egg
I plan to print them out, but hadn't thought about the "remove one by one" - that's a good idea.This is going to be a hard decision, I really like a number of the entries.Back when I had to decide on the Gunfight label, I printed all submissions in the correct size on a color laser printer. Then my wife and me spread them all over to the floor. After that we took turns removing one after another, until only one was left
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True, it doesn't fit the theme of the game, but it does fit the design of that label.
(I may have to use that font for a label someday, if I can find out what it is.)
Joel is AtarikFroid
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Looks great!
Of the three, I like the "rough edges" variation the best.This is going to be a hard decision, I really like a number of the entries. I plan to narrow the choices down to the few I like the most, then get my nephews' input as Medieval Mayhem came about because of them - we played a bunch of Warlords last Christmas.
David sent me his initial sketch. He has a low-res scan of it up on his site, it has more of the cartoony goodness. I like how he picked up on the crowns vs helmets per screen position.
Of Joel's I like entry 9 the best - the other font is neat, but to me it feels like it belongs on a space station.
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oooh - tantalizing
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I'm trying to get one, maybe two labels into the Medieval Mayhem contest. I'm about halfway done on the first one.
Looking forward to seeing your label ideas
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Scrolling may be an option. I'll have to think on it.
I'd love to use an AtariVox(I have one), but that conflicts with 4 player.
Background color could work - though the dragon sprite routine covers a rather large section of the middle in relation to the size of the text. To make it smaller requires splitting out another routine, which I'll be evaluating anyway when I work on the revised dragon this weekend.
48 pixel-routine reuses the RAM for castle one's wall, so it can't be used in-game.
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The flicker isn't bad on a real TV, in the emulators it's not so hot looking.
It flickers because the HMOVE bars from the dragon routines(which are also used to display trophies and messages) were causing the fireball to totally disappear on the left edge of the screen when the DEMO message was not flickering.
I don't want to move it to the score area as the score displayed is that of the last game. I also think it's more noticable that it's in demo mode with the message mid-screen.
When I revamp the dragon routines with the new animation sequence I'll see if I can split out a new routine that will allow DEMO to be flicker free. There may be ROM constraints that prevent that from happening.
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That's very true!
I added a new PAL version to the blog entry. It's still PAL50 but the music should play at a better speed.
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Juggle bank usage is fun - not. I'm at that stage in MM
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It fits very well - thanks for bringing it to my attention!
The stutter was bothering me too but I couldn't track it down so I decided to sleep on it. When I woke up I remembered the RoundInit routine resets all the sound registers to 0.
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I was hacking Paul Slocum's Music Kit 2.0 yesterday in preparation for main menu/ background music that I plan to be adding this weekend once moderntimes99 sends me the source for the music.
So far I've ripped out the "light show" code and analyzed the RAM usage. It appears I need to have 3 bytes of RAM that are preserved between calls to songPlayer and 4 bytes of RAM that can overlay my other scratch RAM variables. Stack usage is 5 bytes of RAM, though that can be reduced to just 2 by using 1 additional scratch RAM instead of a PHA/PLA and by inlining songPlayer instead of JSR'ing to it.
If this is correctly, I'll also be able to play music during the attract mode as I have 1 unused byte of RAM while the game is running and I can repurpose the 2 sound effect RAM bytes during attract mode.
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Ooh - Same Game
Blocks may only be removed in groups of two or more same-color blocks touching horizontally.I was able to remove groups of 2 blocks that were touching vertically as well as horizontally.
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24 Character Display
in TROGBlog
A blog by TROGDOR
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picked up on the VIC scheme right away - and it has 2 more characters across than the VIC did
Tried it and it rolls on my Atari.