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Final Assault - new game by GMG


globe

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Was this originally named Robot Assault ?

I remember the cool demo and how sad it was, that the game never appeared.

 

The screenshots look very good and I am surprised that you come up with this finished game from out of nowhere. Finally a fully playable game for the A8 that makes use of raycasting, not just a demo (or an unfinished game, like Project M or Vector). Congrats!

 

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That's something unexpected .

Well done. Big applause. 

Not just that this is a real playable game. 

The real phenomenal part is the working "strafe" and "rotate" at once. So you could run around an enemy. I speechless about this special part. 

 

But please, check the music. It starts epic and ends "not so epic" .

 

Intro screen is also worth to applaud. Very futuristic and properly mix of hires and color.   

 

 

.... the most impressive part.... it's a running game....

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36 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Was this originally named Robot Assault ?

I remember the cool demo and how sad it was, that the game never appeared.

I'm surprised someone still remembers, RA was supposed to be a different game though, platformer/shooter with 256 color graphics.

37 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

The screenshots look very good and I am surprised that you come up with this finished game from out of nowhere.

Thanks. This was kind of maybe-it-will-work-maybe-it-won't project and even when I was halfway through I still wasn't 100% sure it will be finished.

So I choose not to make any announcements, to avoid pressure and disappointment if things don't work out in the end.

 

@emkay

Thank you.

As for the music, I like it so I don't really share your opinion but there's a bit of guilt on my side as far as both tunes (main menu music and You Won music) are concerned.

The game engine basically 'ate' almost all the RAM so I pestered Goldy to make the tunes as small as possible. 

 

 

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@emkay  I'm curious what's your opinion on "You won" - Let's wait till You finish the game.

 

After 20 year music-making-break for me, I'm happy that I was able to do more than ordinary sounding Chaos Music Composer song.

 

Some music technical curiosities:

- "Ducking" is used on other instruments when the beat kicks (the concept used in "radio" music production) so the beat sounds more punchy. Noticable on HI-FI speakers or quality headphones.

- There was a plan for dynamic in-game music, but 64k memory constraints were a no-go.

- Globe was able to convert "YOU WIN" RMT music to a 384byte long executable (music including player) by doing his own player routine from scratch and using hand-written raw pokey values instead of notes/patterns and it should sound like low quality sampled music.

 

Edited by goldy/gmg aka lopez453
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A very nice surprise and something I've been hoping for one day, ever since I saw the first 3D raycaster demos put out by many different hacker groups. Of course I hope this is only the first of many, from you @globe and others who see/play your game and are inspired to start or finish their own 3D raycaster  FPS/RPG games similar and maybe also larger in scope and memory than just 64K, though I do think a 64K FPS game is a good place to start so most Atarian's get the experience. Thank you very much.

Edited by Gunstar
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7 hours ago, goldy/gmg aka lopez453 said:

@emkay  I'm curious what's your opinion on "You won" - Let's wait till You finish the game.

 

After 20 year music-making-break for me, I'm happy that I was able to do more than ordinary sounding Chaos Music Composer song.

 

Not sure, if I will find the time to play through till the end. 

 

7 hours ago, goldy/gmg aka lopez453 said:

Some music technical curiosities:

- "Ducking" is used on other instruments when the beat kicks (the concept used in "radio" music production) so the beat sounds more punchy. Noticable on HI-FI speakers or quality headphones.

 

I hear the 15kHz filter usage in the titel music. 

The resulting tune on low sounds is the epic part. 

 

 

7 hours ago, goldy/gmg aka lopez453 said:

- There was a plan for dynamic in-game music, but 64k memory constraints were a no-go.

- Globe was able to convert "YOU WIN" RMT music to a 384byte long executable (music including player) by doing his own player routine from scratch and using hand-written raw pokey values instead of notes/patterns and it should sound like low quality sampled music.

 

I guess, you should read through some threads of "evolution of POKEY'S hardware". "RMT hacking" .

To make a dynamic tune, you don't need to handle the full soundtrack. 

With "tickling the pulse width" you could do a tune that sounds different for hours, adding just some bytes to the music code. 

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8 hours ago, Sinjinhawke said:

I think I saw a typo in the intro unless it's a local spelling but the word 'balance'. Fate of humanity hangs in the ballance.

Thanks, noted for 1.1 version if (when:) couple of more issues pop up.

 

1 hour ago, emkay said:

To make a dynamic tune, you don't need to handle the full soundtrack. 

With "tickling the pulse width" you could do a tune that sounds different for hours, adding just some bytes to the music code. 

Going to barge in for a moment. The idea was to make something similar to LucasArt's iMuse system where several melodies could seamlessly transition between each other depending on what's going on.

Like slower, softer 'exploration' tune changing into 'fight' tune after the player gets spotted by the enemy.

In the end it didn't happen because of memory limits but I hope we'll get it working in some of the future projects.

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29 minutes ago, globe said:

 

Going to barge in for a moment. The idea was to make something similar to LucasArt's iMuse system where several melodies could seamlessly transition between each other depending on what's going on.

Like slower, softer 'exploration' tune changing into 'fight' tune after the player gets spotted by the enemy.

In the end it didn't happen because of memory limits but I hope we'll get it working in some of the future projects.

So, how many bytes could be added for a tune?

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7 hours ago, pajero_pn said:

Altirra:   you have to disable =  OFF  "stop on BRK instruction"   

 

 

Of course - congratulations for a great job. 

something strange is happening there, because there is JSR $8A58 instruction jumping to BRK op code (3 in a row)... I suppose it is due to some misalignment of compressed data. Maybe the $8A58 was hardtyped in the source instead of calculated based on length of inserted data and after some updates the address was no longer valid... luckily it does not crash fatally.

 

There are several aspects of this game that are quite unique. The enemy/object clipping and overall incorporation of PM objects to the world is really something that is definitively not a straightforward task. Sound effects depending on the distance from the enemies... nice, quite atmospheric. Also fact that some enemies are running in loops around area and others just going back and forth on a line-based trajectory.

Big thumbs up for the actual gameplay logic, the game engine on the top of raycaster.??

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55 minutes ago, emkay said:

So, how many bytes could be added for a tune?

Sorry, we're full:)

Since I picked 64KB as one of the hard limits for this game there's only a couple of free bytes here and there, nothing really useful for anything but very small changes.

Definitely going to aim for 128KB in the future.

 

46 minutes ago, matosimi said:

something strange is happening there, because there is JSR $8A58 instruction jumping to BRK op code (3 in a row)... I suppose it is due to some misalignment of compressed data. Maybe the $8A58 was hardtyped in the source instead of calculated based on length of inserted data and after some updates the address was no longer valid... luckily it does not crash fatally.

Well that's exactly what happened.

Before last round of bugfixes $8A58 was a start of PMG memory cleanup routine.

After fixing some boss fight bugs Marco found I repacked everything from scratch but missed this hardcoded label that moved to $8A5B.

Another one for 1.1 bug fix list, thanks.

 

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46 minutes ago, globe said:

Since I picked 64KB as one of the hard limits for this game there's only a couple of free bytes here and there, nothing really useful for anything but very small changes.

And queue pages and pages of bickering.

But seriously, well done on this great release!

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What a nice wake-up present.. Thank you Globe and Goldy.

 

Excuse Emkay, he's the group grump / troll

 

Edit: One for the 1.1 version... Nothing severe, just a miss spelling of the word balance on title screen... So easy for these to creep in.. Game looks amazing...

 

 

Edited by Mclaneinc
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