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Beyond Castlevania...


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I NEED this. :)

Keep going! Please!

 

This morning, I thought about it, and I have made a decision-- I'm going to do the 8K of data method per level.

It will be the right approach in the long run. In all honesty, I've been dreading figuring out what area maps to what slope.

 

This picture will be exactly what's needed to fill in the gaps.

 

+1 for reading my mind.

 

-John

 

OK. I'm done. hope it helps.

 

post-10601-129850362609_thumb.png

It looks like 14 different things to account for. Half a byte?

Edited by grafixbmp
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Adding some fuel to the fire! The savestate was made with Stella 3.0 for OS X -- not sure if it can be opened on other systems, but it has all the sound data.

marble madness 2600.mp3.zip

Frame Timed Sound Effects-EM (Eckhard Stolberg).st6.zip

Wow! That was extremely impressive. That turned out a whole lot better that I thought it would. You've got an excellent ear for the TIA sound. As well as your other works for games I've been working with.

T

Funny though, out of the many game designs I've worked with, this one has truly been a random culmination of several involved. This project or demo wouldn't have seen the possibilities of coming alive if it wasn't for MausGames asking me if I ever thought about marble madness before. And Propane, you got great skill. I've learned a lot from you already. Which is helping me get new ground on the castlevania kernel. And GoldenBand, You seem to have such a knack for taking most ANY song and giving it that 2600 flair and still sound superb. I'm thankful to everyone and everything that made this possible.

 

I sure would love to hear from MausGames and get his take on how it looks.

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Ok, new release to test.

 

I'm testing the new collision-detection table scheme.

 

New features:

- Every 4-byte pixel mapped out to either be a hole, bump, surface, or win-zone.

- Cross the winning area, and the screen turns blue to show a "win" condition.

 

In short, it's playable.

 

Known breakages:

- I have no sloping stuff in here yet

- At the moment, I'm only testing collision on one single pixel, whereas before I tested 4. This means that the ball could react strangely (move erratically, or get stuck) in some situations. In one case, I've seen this impact scrolling. That's something that I plan to fix, but for now, we're just testing the basic engine, so forgive these issues for now.

- I'm not using the "Smart" bumping as before. It's just pushing back and stopping the ball. No noise for now.

 

I'd be very interested to have people play and give feedback specifically on the following areas:

- Are there sections of the map where you feel that the "holes" or "bumps" do not accurately reflect the map itself?

- How does it feel?

- What is your best time to get to the win condition? :)

 

Thanks, and enjoy!

-John

marble_2011_02_27.zip

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It's great. Collisions seem spot on. Framerates are smooth. I am wondering about one thing with the ball movement. With the momentum of the ball the movement is good but the control seems a bit sluggish and I know that is suppose to be there to some degree because of the momentum, however I wonder about this 'range' of momentum. Could this range be shortened a bit? I wonder how it would move and control with fine tuning but, this probably should be left till after all the other collisions are finished.

 

There was one instance where I had the ball half way down the map. I was coming around the first corner and cut it hard back to the left and slid off the path and the ball just shot strait up to the first rug of the ramp and the I just pushed right and came back off the edge. It was wierd.

Edited by grafixbmp
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DOH! Right from the get go I got stuck on the right < border right on the tip.

I didn't take a screenshot the first time so I managed to do it again for ya.

capturekf.jpg

 

Only seems to happen when I set the controls to 45 deg.

You collide it from the bottom left and you fall off the cliff behind the border, then it spawns you inside the barrier.

 

Otherwise fantastic job!

Edited by ScumSoft
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I discovered something that might affect collisions. It was said that problems arise from 45 degree setting. I just ran a simple test of the 45 degree setting and as compared to the levels isometric look, the 45 degree setting needs to be a bit more shallow for vertical movement. I set 45 and went to largest flat area and went back and forth and the movement doesn't follow the tiles correctly. This miss alignment in the angle of movement could be causing trajectories that slip past the collision detection. If this is aligned to the isometric view it could potentially remove other side effect bugs. But it might introduce new ones too.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I wanted to get some opinions on how something looks. I did some design work a while back for a rendition of a zelda type game. Over all I liked where it was going but I was still having trouble nailing the color down. Well I recently revisited them and besides doing some upgrades to overworld looks, I have enhanced the color palette with shades and a bit more variance in tone. I wanted some feed back to see if things looked better, if they can be distinguished better, and if there is less clashing of objects

post-10601-129967982882_thumb.png.

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There is a lot of green involved in either. Gotta make sure that there is next to no color clashes between ground, trees, and Dinky a.k.a. link. You said your eyes didn't like the top one? Are you viewing these full screen to what an atari 2600 would produce to your screen? Are there any particular locations of the image where color isn't working over other locations in the same picture? And, what is your take on the light/dark shade compared to no shading? I added shades to give more depth but if it goes unnoticed I can either enhance from here or go back to a matte finish.

 

Either way the original has 7 colors where the new one has 16

Edited by grafixbmp
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I blew it up as large as my browser will let me. The main shade of green looks better to me in the older image. The new background color makes me feel kind of 'sick' when I look at it. Bothers my eyes and my belly. Wonder what it would look like if you kept everything the same, but used the old background color?

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I blew it up as large as my browser will let me. The main shade of green looks better to me in the older image. The new background color makes me feel kind of 'sick' when I look at it. Bothers my eyes and my belly. Wonder what it would look like if you kept everything the same, but used the old background color?

 

Yeah that new BG color reminds me of the military. Makes me sick too. lol! I'm taking it back to the former shade of green.

 

I think you've got it. I can't even remember why I changed it. I think it was cause the old one looked too blue and originally clashed with another new color but after I changed the BG color, I then changed the color it clashed with because of something else. Ha!

post-10601-129968469557_thumb.png

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Yeah that new BG color reminds me of the military. Makes me sick too. lol! I'm taking it back to the former shade of green.

 

I think you've got it. I can't even remember why I changed it. I think it was cause the old one looked too blue and originally clashed with another new color but after I changed the BG color, I then changed the color it clashed with because of something else. Ha!

post-10601-129968469557_thumb.png

 

The New Color Upgrade with the Old BG Color.. that's the ticket. :thumbsup: ;) I think the colors are playing well with each other in this one.

Edited by PAC-MAN-RED
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New one has a stronger contrast to the color, the older one looks to be a bit more washed. But I also think it will depend on which game screen is shown.

Say if you were in a dungeon, would the new one look much better than the old? I think its just the limited shades of green for these screenies.

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New one has a stronger contrast to the color, the older one looks to be a bit more washed. But I also think it will depend on which game screen is shown.

Say if you were in a dungeon, would the new one look much better than the old? I think its just the limited shades of green for these screenies.

 

I haven't reworked the dungeon pallette as of yet. I probably won't do much if any modifications to it. It already works well with 3 examples.

 

I figured with the introduction of DPC+ and the latest upgrades to batari BASIC, I could finally fully realize this design.

 

I'll go ahead and show a 6 screen example of the overworld I've been doing the last few days. This image is still using the OLD color pallette so it will have the old look. I intend to upgrade it later on but for now this is what the world looks like.

 

post-10601-129972231472_thumb.png

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I figured with the introduction of DPC+ and the latest upgrades to batari BASIC, I could finally fully realize this design.

bB users may not be able to do what you are doing, but once jwierer has a new playfield editor working for DPC+ games, it sure will be fun playing with simultaneous single-row colors for the background and foreground mixed with various pfpixel sizes. I may not be able to make anything that looks good, but I'm sure some of the more arty bB users will make some cool looking stuff. I'm still going to have fun trying.

Edited by Random Terrain
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Ok, new release to test.

 

I'm testing the new collision-detection table scheme.

 

New features:

- Every 4-byte pixel mapped out to either be a hole, bump, surface, or win-zone.

- Cross the winning area, and the screen turns blue to show a "win" condition.

 

In short, it's playable.

 

Known breakages:

- I have no sloping stuff in here yet

- At the moment, I'm only testing collision on one single pixel, whereas before I tested 4. This means that the ball could react strangely (move erratically, or get stuck) in some situations. In one case, I've seen this impact scrolling. That's something that I plan to fix, but for now, we're just testing the basic engine, so forgive these issues for now.

- I'm not using the "Smart" bumping as before. It's just pushing back and stopping the ball. No noise for now.

 

I'd be very interested to have people play and give feedback specifically on the following areas:

- Are there sections of the map where you feel that the "holes" or "bumps" do not accurately reflect the map itself?

- How does it feel?

- What is your best time to get to the win condition? :)

 

Thanks, and enjoy!

-John

I thought about something a moment ago, and wondered what ya thought. If ya have about 8 to 12 bytes of ram free I think there might be a way to do double tall levels. I take it the hard part is in the timing of the change over because of the penalized cycle? well What if you could pre buffer about 2 scanlines worth of data for the new part of a second section, then the kernel just runs a 2 scanline transition sub kernel which loads the PF from this ram and saves on loading time in the process which could off set for sprite rendering and setup and alignment to the new data table as well as the cycle penalty. What ya think?

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  • 2 weeks later...

OK got a crazy idea from a McDonald's toy. Once upon a time Mc D's had about 5 or 6 handheld LCD videogames. They have actually done this a few times and for one of thoes times the theme was SEGA ips one of which was spyro andwas the most elaborate for a cheap toy. Anyway I have one and the unique thing about it is it was in color and you had to pass light through it to see it. there was a pullaway panel so you could play inn the sunlight. To top it all of it was a 3d maze game. Some of you may know of this game. Well, I decided to draw out this digital screen because I go the idea of doing a 3d game engine based on the principals of so-called "sectioning off" areas and enough areas in a table can be called up to render as such. Anyway I wanted to post this pic hoping others could see what I see in the potential of inspiration from it I was getting.

 

post-10601-0-81607700-1300669474_thumb.png

Edited by grafixbmp
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OK got a crazy idea from a McDonald's toy. Once upon a time Mc D's had about 5 or 6 handheld LCD videogames. They have actually done this a few times and for one of thoes times the theme was SEGA ips one of which was spyro andwas the most elaborate for a cheap toy. Anyway I have one and the unique thing about it is it was in color and you had to pass light through it to see it. there was a pullaway panel so you could play inn the sunlight. To top it all of it was a 3d maze game. Some of you may know of this game. Well, I decided to draw out this digital screen because I go the idea of doing a 3d game engine based on the principals of so-called "sectioning off" areas and enough areas in a table can be called up to render as such. Anyway I wanted to post this pic hoping others could see what I see in the potential of inspiration from it I was getting.

 

A bit of a correction to above. These were NOT SEGA characters. They were Crash Bandicoot and Spyro. There were 8 games in all and were released for McDonalds through Universal Interactive. Spyro was developed by both insomniac games and Universal. It was released in the US under Sony, However for America it is known as Sony Computer Entertainment America Or hence SCEA Which can easily be mistaken for SEGA at first glance. This was my bad.

 

This toy was relesed in 2005.

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