+cmadruga Posted August 13, 2020 Author Share Posted August 13, 2020 (edited) Quick test on sprite editor... Looks like 3 sprites for the protagonist could do it. 2 double Y, 1 simple. Could make him draw the weapon only when needed, and try to fit it on the black sprite. Also need 1 sprite for the laser beam coming from his weapon. That's 4 already. Need to see how many sprites are needed for decent looking enemies. I assume it would be a matter of 1 or 2 double Y sprites per enemy. - If I use 2 sprites, enemies will look nicer. But then with 2 enemies on screen I use up all sprites. - If I use 1, I can have 3 enemies on screen. That would leave 1 sprite available for enhancing backgrounds. Then I could make the corpse below get a little closer to the C64 version. Decisions, decisions... Edited August 13, 2020 by cmadruga 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bhall408 Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 1 hour ago, cmadruga said: Quick test on sprite editor... Looks like 3 sprites for the protagonist could do it. 2 double Y, 1 simple. A request - in the C64 version, they use a "running" animation when he is moving (on-screen) at the pace of walking. Reminds me of Karateka (same problem). Would be great if either he could be moving faster using that animation, or use a "walking" animation if moving at that speed/rate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 13, 2020 Author Share Posted August 13, 2020 20 minutes ago, bhall408 said: A request - in the C64 version, they use a "running" animation when he is moving (on-screen) at the pace of walking. Reminds me of Karateka (same problem). Would be great if either he could be moving faster using that animation, or use a "walking" animation if moving at that speed/rate. Maybe the guy had too much coffee or something? What you suggest would be a nice upgrade! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 (edited) 5 hours ago, cmadruga said: Didn't know that one, is that a homebrew? I like the detailed backgrounds! Yes, this is the site of the developers http://www.psytronik.net/newsite/index.php/c64/98-organism But project firestarter is cooler Edited August 13, 2020 by artrag Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TIX Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 (edited) 5 hours ago, cmadruga said: Yep, that's the one. Multi-load was terrible. Did you finish the game? ..not really, I may give it another try now that it's in a easyflash format (No disk swapping, zero loading times) Regarding the port, it would be really cool if we turned this into a full on Aliens game ! Sprite-wise with a little effort we could have Ripley running around blasting Giger's aliens. Of course this means re-scripting the text parts and cut scenes too.. Edited August 13, 2020 by TIX Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 1 hour ago, TIX said: ..not really, I may give it another try now that it's in a easyflash format (No disk swapping, zero loading times) Regarding the port, it would be really cool if we turned this into a full on Aliens game ! Sprite-wise with a little effort we could have Ripley running around blasting Giger's aliens. Of course this means re-scripting the text parts and cut scenes too.. Only the scenes with aliens, the others are cool sequences of dead bodies torn apart and humans betraying the player 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 Even genetic hybridization between Aliens and humans would fit in the plot of Alien movies. It could be named Project Prometheus and the ship Nostromo III The hybridization process could be aimed to militarily purposes, but the player could discover it by himself, having been told that the mission is about rescuing the result of a scientific project for production of humanoid workers in mines of Titan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 (edited) 10 hours ago, cmadruga said: Quick test on sprite editor... Looks like 3 sprites for the protagonist could do it. 2 double Y, 1 simple. Could make him draw the weapon only when needed, and try to fit it on the black sprite. Also need 1 sprite for the laser beam coming from his weapon. That's 4 already. Need to see how many sprites are needed for decent looking enemies. I assume it would be a matter of 1 or 2 double Y sprites per enemy. - If I use 2 sprites, enemies will look nicer. But then with 2 enemies on screen I use up all sprites. - If I use 1, I can have 3 enemies on screen. That would leave 1 sprite available for enhancing backgrounds. Then I could make the corpse below get a little closer to the C64 version. Decisions, decisions... What if you do not plot the bullet from the gun but you just show its effect on the animation of the enemy you have hit? You could make the monster have an hesitation rising his arms or slow his walk for few frames Edited August 13, 2020 by artrag Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 13, 2020 Author Share Posted August 13, 2020 (edited) I don't know guys... I'm a HUGE Aliens fan as well, but it's just hard to make a really good Aliens game. Plus expectations/hype tend to be an issue when doing anything in that space. Firestart is more of an underdog, a cult game that I don't think received proper mainstream recognition. Of course it was already too ambitious for the C64... developers have said that themselves. Which makes the job of developing something similar on the Inty an extraordinary technical (and creative) challenge... Still, I'm motivated to pay tribute to the original game, and consequently to potentially make the first true survival horror game on the platform. To be honest I don't think I can pull it off, but then again I thought the same for Gooninuff. So who knows? Learning makes the effort worth pursuing. Plus @skywaffle knows I'm interested in getting better at handling cinematics/cut scenes for other potentially outrageous projects in the future. Edited August 13, 2020 by cmadruga Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 13, 2020 Author Share Posted August 13, 2020 1 hour ago, artrag said: What if you do not plot the bullet from the gun but you just show its effect on the animation of the enemy you have hit? You could make the monster have an hesitation rising his arms or slow his walk for few frames That would be an idea! At least it could save a sprite! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bhall408 Posted August 13, 2020 Share Posted August 13, 2020 5 hours ago, cmadruga said: That would be an idea! At least it could save a sprite! That is a great idea -- you could animate a flash on the character side, and animate a hit on the enemy side, and not need to have a "bullet" at all. I'd say you could help stretch that further with sounds at both ends as well -- a "shot" shot and a "hit" sound. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 13, 2020 Author Share Posted August 13, 2020 (edited) Looks like 2 double Y sprites per enemy would be a requirement. If I don't use a sprite for the player's laser shot, then I suppose I could have 2 enemies on screen. Or maybe even 3 if I could multiplex the black outline on those enemies. So all in all, it looks like I would need to reserve 11 spots on GRAM: - 5 for player sprites ( 2 double, 1 simple) - 4 for enemy sprites (2 double) - 2 for a background enhancement sprite (assuming 1 double) Feels like 53 spots on GRAM for background would be tight, but probably feasible. I did not violate that limit when I put the 3 screens I showed here previously. Looking good from a feasibility standpoint so far. Question is: would it fit 42K? Edited August 13, 2020 by cmadruga 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 14, 2020 Share Posted August 14, 2020 Some background tiles could be taken from the grom too with minimal changes in the look of the result. Look at the horizontal stripes on the wall... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted August 14, 2020 Share Posted August 14, 2020 Is the screen drawn in Color Stack mode? Otherwise GROM is out of the question. Going by the actual shapes and not hearsay, I'd say perhaps 4-6 GROM shapes would fit in the screen. It could be enough to fit the other custom graphics. Regarding if 42K decles is enough, only implementation could tell. I believe the premium publishers have bank switching schemes to allow for even larger games if that strictly would be required, not sure if e.g. LTO Flash! supports larger ROMs for development purposes. It is true though that the cracked version of Project Firestart on the C64 uses 3 floppy disks (348 kilobytes = 174 kilodecles) and I'd suppose the original does the same. Perhaps you could make it a light version if you notice you quickly run out of space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 14, 2020 Share Posted August 14, 2020 (edited) LTO supports plenty of room with its paging system. I have used it in the Deep Zone cartridge version and JZ has been so kind to customize prologue and epilogue of intybasic to support page swap from intybasic. Carlos, let me know if you want to see my intybasic setup for using rom pages in LTO. The board can fit games up to 120K words (240K bytes). Moreover it supports some extended ASM instructions that can be very helpful in game coding. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qtzYEc9ftnbQsYJRaT2V_DcctKpT6xEn/view?usp=drivesdk Edited August 14, 2020 by artrag 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 15, 2020 Author Share Posted August 15, 2020 I'd like to stick with FGBG, so no GROM cards for me. Maybe I should mock up a few more screens on the tile editor to get a better feeling for GRAM space requirements. Either way, 120K would be a much more reasonable limit to work with. Feels feasible. Artrag, thanks for the offer! If this project really goes forward I will take you up on that. Either way, the game has a lot of fluff that I could leave for last if space would allow for it. For instance, this room activates a hologram that is just for eye candy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 15, 2020 Share Posted August 15, 2020 Moreover Stic graphics should use less space than c64 graphics due to its low resolution Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 15, 2020 Share Posted August 15, 2020 (edited) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Firestart About the plot I see that the idea of genetic experiments for militarily purposes is already there. There is also a white large creature that acts as end boss that has to be killed in a special way using the weakness documented in the logs. The plot on wikipedia is very vague about this point... I should find the final monster in the walkthrough and see how it looks like and if visually presents troubles. Edited August 15, 2020 by artrag 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 15, 2020 Share Posted August 15, 2020 (edited) Omg there is also a FPS modern remake Very bare bone, nevertheless a nice tribute showing that there are still some lovers of this game Edited August 15, 2020 by artrag 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 15, 2020 Author Share Posted August 15, 2020 (edited) 12 hours ago, artrag said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Firestart About the plot I see that the idea of genetic experiments for militarily purposes is already there. There is also a white large creature that acts as end boss that has to be killed in a special way using the weakness documented in the logs. The plot on wikipedia is very vague about this point... I should find the final monster in the walkthrough and see how it looks like and if visually presents troubles. The final monster is a little underwhelming, and maybe something that could be improved. He's like an albino version of the regular monsters. He moves around quite fast and is immune to weapons. So you have to use environmental things to contain or kill him. Edited August 15, 2020 by cmadruga Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
artrag Posted August 15, 2020 Share Posted August 15, 2020 There are nice maps of the full game http://www.dizionariovideogiochi.it/doku.php?id=project_firestart Sorry, the site is in Italian 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 18, 2020 Author Share Posted August 18, 2020 Trying my hand at a more complicated screen to see how much gram would be needed. So far using 33 out of the 53 gram addresses I'm budgeting for background graphics... this does not look good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bhall408 Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 11 minutes ago, cmadruga said: Trying my hand at a more complicated screen to see how much gram would be needed. So far using 33 out of the 53 gram addresses I'm budgeting for background graphics... this does not look good. Open to (possibly extreme) bank switching? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+cmadruga Posted August 18, 2020 Author Share Posted August 18, 2020 9 minutes ago, bhall408 said: Open to (possibly extreme) bank switching? What do you call *extreme* bank switching? Sounds exciting! ? But the challenge here is really that with bank switching or not, I’m still limited to 64 gram addresses per each individual screen... Bank switching would just allow me to have MORE screens built. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bhall408 Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 7 minutes ago, cmadruga said: What do you call *extreme* bank switching? Sounds exciting! ? But the challenge here is really that with bank switching or not, I’m still limited to 64 gram addresses per each individual screen... Bank switching would just allow me to have MORE screens built. Yeah, if you think you can't do what you want in 48 (or 64) grams, then I agree, more memory wouldn't help. (Too bad there aren't per-line interrupts available!) But if the 2 sample screens above were 33, then it sure looks like it is reach. Even if the background had to be solid. Then just plan on using 48 (or 64) per screen, and then memory becomes the limit, and at least there is a way to compensate for that! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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