Comlynx Game Preview - Lynx Blast

[Nop90]

37 minutes ago, karri said:

Just out of curiosity. Is the game round-robin broadcasting the joystick byte to all Lynx units during every time-frame? And all Lynx units run identical code for the game logic?

 

So basically you have to receive 7 bytes and send 1 byte when it is your turn?

This is possible, but when I experimented the comlynx protocol such configuration was affected by several problems to the sychrony of the game (especially music/sfx start, pause and reset events, other timed events).

 

In the end I decided to have only 1 Lynx to apply the game logic to a game state struct. This is sent from 1 lynx to the others, while the others act only as controllers. Not efficient but much easier to code.

 

I'm curious to know what is the strategy adopted by @sage.

[sage]

13 hours ago, karri said:

Just out of curiosity. Is the game round-robin broadcasting the joystick byte to all Lynx units during every time-frame? And all Lynx units run identical code for the game logic?

 

So basically you have to receive 7 bytes and send 1 byte when it is your turn?

I use a modified EPXY comlynx code, which is using "mainly" the scheme of sending key presses only.

But it was a mess to include sending configuration and level data.

 

ah yes, and i changed the Checksum scheme to use a more stable one.

Edited April 16, 2021 by sage

[+karri]

 

1 hour ago, sage said:

I use a modified EPXY comlynx code, which is using "mainly" the scheme of sending key presses only.

But it was a mess to include sending configuration and level data.

 

ah yes, and i changed the Checksum scheme to use a more stable one.

That is really cool! I never had the time to properly dig into the Redeye protocol.

 

Making a ComLynx game is something I would love to do later this year. So any help in making this reality is highly appreciated.

Btw. I accidentally stumbled on something called half-height isometric tiled games.

Half-height isometric maps

And got really carried away with designing graphics in this style. As a matter of fact I finally even bought me a Wacom tablet to speed up shading. To my surprise GIMP appears to have tons of support for low-res indexed graphics designs. It is so intuitive and the results are, well, tolerable. But this is due to my bad graphics skills. I am working on this. The tools would work well even for Bitmap Brothers.

 

So I already know which technique to use for the next competition. But the storyline, gameplay and topics is completely open.