Thomas Jentzsch

/agreed Very in depth and covering a lot of stuff. And good to have interviewers who really know what they are talking about.

I see. Thanks for trying out my suggestion.

Like me.

@alex_79 I plan to allow putting the SaveKey into the right port. So that would be just 2 or 4(6) human players. But now (at least in emulation) the game's auto detection fails and the right port is still detected as QuadTari. Do you know what is wrong here? Is that a problem with Stella or with the auto detection code?

Maybe make only the '(+)' glow?

They increase the longer the race lasts. So at the end of a 90 seconds race they are 3x timer larger than in a 30 seconds race. Should I make them equal for a three race lengths?

You mean replay the last seconds before the finish line? That won't work due to RAM memory constraints, sorry.

/signed But customers also fall for names. Just look which is the best selling Atari 2600 homebrew game. It is a good game, no doubt about that. But there are better ones. Therefore I am pretty sure they will sell a LOT of copies (most likely more than any other homebrew in the store), no matter how good or bad their games turn out to be.

But Sky Jinks looks gorgeous! Especially for a 2K game. It always has a pace in my heart.

AI worked well during the show. Those who watched the show will know this already, for the (few) others: I am planning to join the Game Competition at the Revision 2021 Demo Party (happening Eastern, live on Twitch). I don't expect any fame and glory, but since VROOM! is designed as a party game, I thought it would fit well into that demo party. Of course it would work much better, if this year's party wouldn't have to be completely virtual, but maybe people can imagine how it would be. Following their rules, I must not release my work to public before. Therefore, until then there will be no more public releases (sorry). Instead I will continue development and testing with only very few people in private. Of course this will change back to normal immediately after the show. Nevertheless any feed back from everyone else is of course still more than welcome.

Just watched the show. Tanya did a lot of VROOM! AI plays without noticing. I guess I will make the computer players more obvious. The computer boost flashing is just a result of the AI. It randomly presses when the cars are over a boost.

My thoughts exactly, but I strongly doubt that they would harm their reputation that way.

IMO the problem is that all eight Rhinos will meet in the middle, and that will cause hefty flicker.

Looking forward to your play testing. I suppose you can win the normal (yellow) variations, but I doubt you can do the same in hard mode. Else I have to tweak the AI.

Cool finding. Reminds me at hidden the reserve ships graphics in Asteroids.

Yup, and I suppose even that can be dumped. The questions is what you would want to achieve. Prevent dumping in general? Tough if not impossible. Svolli will know for sure. Tracking down the person who dumped and released the ROM? Possible if you watermark the ROMs. Removing the watermark without destroying the code will require an in depth analysis. E.g. if you watermark just random 100 bits and sell 1000 copies, you can (most likely) still identify the pirate even if ~90% of the watermarks got removed. And finding 100 unused bits is easy, even in a 4K ROM. Just think about the mirrored addresses and unused TIA bits. I once did an experiment with one of my own 4K games and easily got about 2500 bits in 600 bytes.

Thanks. Currently I am focusing on the party game mode, because I plan to submit the game to the Revision Demo Party Game competition.

Thanks. Actually I am surprised too how well the rather simple AI works. And since I currently have to play (and test!) alone all the time, this would be totally boring without AI. Next planned change is high score distance recording (for human players only). So that you can challenge yourself.

Sure, if you dissemble the code completely, then removing watermarks becomes easy. But disassembling and finding e.g. all pointers is quite a lot of work and understanding. Definitely too much for the usual pirates.

If you know the bits to remove, then yes. But you can use bits randomly spread all over the ROM to watermark it (without breaking the code).

And now to version 0.8 (as always, see first post). Major changes: the distance is displayed after the race split old easy mode into kids (white) and easy (blue) modes (I hope kid mode is now easy enough for kids)

Just assume the car is 10% longer than 4.2m and you are automatically 10% faster.

I did some fun math today. From the car width (14 pixel) I assumed that 1 pixel is ~30cm (-> car length 4.20m). Using this I checked the distance the computer reached in normal mode within 30 seconds (~2750m). And that resulted into an average speed of ~330km/h.

I just got an two emails which ruined the tension you did build up so carefully.

OK, next version will have an even easier mode.