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None whatsoever. 2013 has been a very stressful year for me, not to mention matashen who really has to handle lots of stuff both at work and in private life.

 

The game is not cancelled, and will not be cancelled, but this year has just not been good for progress, and it affects all our projects. If everything went as planned Quak-Quak and this wold both be out now.

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Life can be hectic, I know, if everything was going as I planned for example I would already be programming for the Lynx. I just want to let you guys know that many of us just following this thread/forum quietly most of the times, but definitely looking forward to projects like this. So I wish you guys the best, and more free time in the next year :)

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Okay, since the coder matashen doesn't post updates, I will.

 

The good news: Game is not canceled. The graphics are pretty much done, as seen in the pics. I can always add more backgrounds if I feel like it, any probably menus will have to be done (I hate those bare menues with the Lynx internal font)

 

Bad news: matashen hasn't had time to work on it in a year now. It always goes like that, we make huge progress for a few weeks, both creating most of the gme in our department... and then there can be long times of no progress. When matashen codes, he is very quick, but this has been the longest pause yet. I contacted him a few weeks ago to ask for the state of the game myself. What he did tell me is that both games, this one and Quak-Quak are still in development, nothing is canceled. Yet this one will under no circumstances make it out in 2014. matashen ran out of RAM, and with DerLuchs we now have someone to do great music too, which must also fit. Also Comlynx has been causing trouble, and a fighting game without Comlynx is pointless.

This means that he is planning to recode the game.

 

Let that sink in for a while.

 

So as I understand it he will start from scratch on the code part. The reason being that developing for the Lynx is a learning experience for him. Other people learn by doing little test programs or demos for themselves, matashen learns while coding actual games. While working on Quak-Quak, he learned things about the Lynx hardware that make his Karate code look outdated and inefficient in comparison. So with his added experience, he will restart the coding.

 

I'm not thrilled about the delay myself, because I had actually hoped to have the game ready for a tournament at e-Jagfest last year. Now this year it won't be done either. But if that is what it takes to make it work well, than that's how it has to be. Sorry to everyone who was hoping for a release soon.

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matashen ran out of RAM, and with DerLuchs we now have someone to do great music too, which must also fit. Also Comlynx has been causing trouble, and a fighting game without Comlynx is pointless.

This means that he is planning to recode the game.

This makes perfect sense to me. Thanks to you guys for the update.

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Yeah, this has been hibernated some of my projects too, most likely forever unless I find a way to get comlynx working relyable with >2 lynxes.

I am not active in the programming forum, although I sometimes do see Comlynx topics pop-up there. Have you ever tried working with the others, such as LX.NET or Karri on a solution? They may have found something you missed. Or D. Scott Williams, he worked as support for Lynx devs at Atari back in the day, and is on AA.

 

We know it is possible to get it working well with many systems since Checkered Flag and Slime World are quite reliable afaik.

 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you got your Bomberman clone working with 4-player-Comlynx, and of course some nice visuals and catchy tunes, this would be a huge hit as far as Lynx homebrews go. I dare to say it would have the most potential of any Lynx homebrew sales wise, because almost everyone loves Bomberman, and some people will likely buy two to be able to play with friends. I know you don't do it for the money, I just want to tell you how big I think the demand would be.

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Bastian got 8 players working in T-tris, correct? Anyway, here are some files from the BattleWheels source. Most are from the generic Atari-provided 6502 folder, but one has some modifications made for BW. I realize this is not complete, but I don't have a grep utility installed currently and am having trouble tracking down all the ComLynx instances in the rest of the BW source. Let me know if there is more you need.

 

ComLynx_BW.zip

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Thanks Carl. I remember seeing this code previously. This approach is better that a simple serial interrupt based communication as it handles intermessage timeouts and detects errors during transmissions also. Some parts will probably find their way into cc65.

 

Have to study this in detail.

 

--

Karri

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>> We know it is possible to get it working well with many systems since Checkered Flag and Slime World are quite reliable afaik.

 

Indeed, I got a copy of the EPYX example code in 2003. And we had a length discussion involving Bastian, Harry, Markus, Carl, Lucien and others back then.

Not to forget the BLL (t-tris) code.

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Couple of things that come to mind:

- The Epyx Redeye code seems the most reliable ComLynx implementation out there. I have no idea what the memory footprint is and the overhead, but Slime World doesn't lag with 8 players, nor do Checkered Flag and Battlewheels with 6.

- Attached is the source code and compiled TestRedeye LNX file that shows the lobby (logon in progress) and communication statistics for redeye. Could be interesting for experiments.

- I suspect the modifications in the Battlewheels source code could be for the "CHECK COMLYNX" message that only BW shows when the cable connection is faltering. I saw this message appear (see next point below) during experiments.

- Work is in progress to have Lynx emulation for ComLynx. Still early and obschan might hate me for spilling the beans, but it seems relevant to let everyone know that this is happening. You can see a screen capture that I did here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNwzkg2cGPM

If people are interested, I can elaborate on our progress.

- It would be really cool to port the Redeye code to CC65 to have this type of ComLynx support besides the normal buffered send/receive functionality currently available.

- Background document from Epyx documentation: https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/documentation/redeye/ or scanned http://atarilynxdeveloper.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/redeye-doc.pdf

 

So, anyone up for the challenge of porting the redeye code to CC65 and/or BLL?

Should we continue this discussion over at the Programming forum?

testredeye.zip

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Me. Pick me.

 

post-2099-0-12544900-1408723362_thumb.gif

 

Actually it would make sense to write a special comlynx driver for games. There is not much point in using the current lynx-comlynx.s driver from the cc65 as it was written to be compatible with other platforms - not to be ComLynx specific.

 

--

Karri

 

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I believe all the source code is available. Carl just posted it in this thread.

 

It appears to be spread out into two layers: comlink and msgmgr.

 

Perhaps the driver could go into a single file redeye.s with a companion redeye.h file for using it from cc65.

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I've started a new topic in the Lynx Programming subforum, so we can stop hijacking this thread.

Hope you all don't mind.

 

 

Me. Pick me.

If anyone can do it, you can. Perhaps you and Shawn can team up. I'd love to help out as well.

 

Where can we find the Epyx RedEye code? Read the documentation on your site and it definitely seems like a good, tested and production-ready comlynx code.

I've added all sources that I have in the new thread.

 

I believe all the source code is available. Carl just posted it in this thread.

 

It appears to be spread out into two layers: comlink and msgmgr.

 

Perhaps the driver could go into a single file redeye.s with a companion redeye.h file for using it from cc65.

Those were just a fragment of the available/needed code. See new thread.

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