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Final Assault - new game by GMG


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14 minutes ago, emkay said:

The Fish eye COULD be mentioned. But tell me what you see if you are directly in front of a wall. The more it gets away to the sides, the more the ground or ceiling can be seen. Without that, people might mention that it is just some horizontal scolling ... ?

 


vs

 

 

 


I mean it is not hard to understand just by watching what we are talking about...

PS: both don't use fish eye correction.

 

Edited by Heaven/TQA
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The demo is tricking by not using direct angles  0 90 180 270 degree.  In a game the unexperienced player will always try to go straight ahead. 

It always moves a litte form a slope. Then check the backgound wall  after0:44.

 

It's mostly the missing skill to control the gameplay that makes things look weird. 

 

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Somehow it always seems to be the same people who make a mess of most of the threads, especially when it involves some new or exceedingly clever program, game or demo. 

 

Anyway ... I fired this up for the first time tonight on my Incognito 800. Loaded up super fast with HSIO enabled and plays great. This is a great accomplishment on the platform. Thanks for creating something really cool for our old machines, and kudos for managing to do it in only 64K. 

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Just now, DrVenkman said:

Somehow it always seems to be the same people who make a mess of most of the threads, especially when it involves some new or exceedingly clever program, game or demo. 

 

Anyway ... I fired this up for the first time tonight on my Incognito 800. Loaded up super fast with HSIO enabled and plays great. This is a great accomplishment on the platform. Thanks for creating something really cool for our old machines, and kudos for managing to do it in only 64K. 

 

 

It's those people with some perception problems. 

Particular some "DrVenkman" comes in, if emkay is arguing. 

Is there something bad "emkay" is the problem. Is there something great "emkay" is the problem. 

 

I'm defending the Atari from people who were everything than Atari related. 

The game is great. Everything is fine, the best thing ever seen on the Atari (sorry rensoup , my preference is 3D gaming :) ) 

Well, the missing link has been done. The key to POSSIBLY a new genre for the Atari, as this game sets the limits very strong. 

 

Think what you want. This game is THE asskicker, and if the Atari scene isn't building new games on this...

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16 minutes ago, danwinslow said:

Yes, indeed. Dealing with perception is difficult, depending on your perspective.

Perception is difficult for someone who is blind and deaf.  Tone deaf (with regards to a conversation too).  Just remember folks.  When 200 different people have a problem with one single person, it is obviously the 200 people who are the issue, not the one.

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2 hours ago, emkay said:

The Fish eye COULD be mentioned. But tell me what you see if you are directly in front of a wall. The more it gets away to the sides, the more the ground or ceiling can be seen. Without that, people might mention that it is just some horizontal scolling ... ?

No. The more you turn your head to look along the wall, then you see more of ground and ceiling. Looking straight at the wall and keeping same distance from it must not change vertical size of scaled wall projection... 

 

Or, are you saying wolf, doom, quake got it wrong? 

 

Take a walk outside, look at some wall and try strafing along it :)

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Hello guys

 

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Perception is difficult for someone who is blind and deaf.  Tone deaf (with regards to a conversation too).  Just remember folks.  When 200 different people have a problem with one single person, it is obviously the 200 people who are the issue, not the one.

 

To be honest, the meaning of most doesn't have to be the truth.  But we're not talking about somebody like for instance Galileo Galilei here, but more like Don Quixote.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Perception is difficult for someone who is blind and deaf.  Tone deaf (with regards to a conversation too).  Just remember folks.  When 200 different people have a problem with one single person, it is obviously the 200 people who are the issue, not the one.

Just to be clear, my post was an attempt at a wordplay joke, not an opinion on any preceding posts.

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5 hours ago, popmilo said:

No. The more you turn your head to look along the wall, then you see more of ground and ceiling. Looking straight at the wall and keeping same distance from it must not change vertical size of scaled wall projection... 

 

Or, are you saying wolf, doom, quake got it wrong? 

 

Take a walk outside, look at some wall and try strafing along it :)

i wonder how many people will actually walk outside and try it. hmm superb resolution, smooth motion, nice colors, but if i turn too much and fast, I got dizziness and black dots. Is that normal or is my matrix broken?

 

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btw, when developers were working on Uncharded 2, they visited desert to study the movement of the sand. it was figured out, that sand flows - it behaves more like liquid than as a hard material. 

 

So in order to do our research properly, give us some time and we will get back to that problem when we finish cardboard model of the game world ?

Edited by goldy/gmg aka lopez453
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Me thinks @globe knows perfectly well what we're talking about, as he mentioned it earlier.
And has a good point about memory taken by all the game stuff. Throwing out huge lookup table made sense as he needed it for a game.

Improvement is for sure possible, it's just math :)

 

Globe, if you wanna chat about these coding topics with someone who actually stood in front of walls for a long time and looked at them from strange angles, just send pm :)

Although I imagine you're on some tropical island right now, drinking cocktails and enjoying your post-dev rest :)

Well deserved... Cheers!

 

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11 hours ago, Level42 said:

I'm absolutely not a programmer but I assume the game takes advantage of Atari's GTIA graphics mode ?

Gr.9 + hscroll trick for bigger pixels while vram requirements stay small.

10 hours ago, popmilo said:

This is the problem imho. Fisheye not corrected. Wall should be horizontal across the screen width.

Not curved to left and right like red lines show. @globe think you can fix this easily with some math. Even if it's real time multiplication it shouldn't matter much. Drop in fps would probably be torrelable.

Fish eye correction was there (in earlier builds) but I decided that 5KB+ (multiplication lookup table + small routine doing the lookup and writing corrected length value into raycaster length buffer) would be better spent elsewhere.

 

Whether drop in fps would be tolerable is debatable, 38 extra multiplications without lookup for each frame is not a trivial matter and I think we can all agree it would take much more cycles than previous memory-hungry but really fast solution.

 

But that's not the main problem.

 

I already mentioned several times about the RAM trouble and in the end I really had to fight for each byte, spending a lot of time during the final debug trying to get couple of extra bytes so I can fix what was still broken.

So 'you can fix this easily with some math' is not that easy when you realize you don't even have space for storing 19 multipliers needed for the fisheye.

 

Bit more details about the RAM usage:

As soon as the game is started from the main menu and the DEPACKING with some siren noises takes place, the whole memory from $0000 to $FFFF (with exception of 2KB of HW registers and 6 bytes right at the end)

is used.

Rom is turned off (that already happens in intro)

 

Whole zero page, roughly 2/3 of it is 'single use' populated with permanent variables while the rest is used as buffers for rendering and other non-persistent stuff that needed a boost (mostly distance calculations, enemy line of sight checking etc...)

 

Stack from $0100 to $01bf , followed by safety gap and actual return addresses from JSRs.

 

From $0200 to $BFFF - code and data, there are some small gaps in some of the data (enemy and object PMG graphics data aligned for easier and faster handling) but most of these gaps were filled either with small tables or with multitude of memory variables.

Remaining gaps are spread through several KB of data, non consecutive, mostly small chunks (1 - 4 bytes) which makes them really hard to use for anything.

 

$C000 - $FFFF (minus HW regs and vectors) is used for VRAM (double buffered), PMG memory (double buffered) and a whole lot of tables precalculated at runtime (biggest being 4KB for light effect LUT) or used for current running game (enemy / items / objects - positions, states and behavior)

 

So once again, and hopefully last time, there really isn't much space for anything and a dread the moment someone finds some serious bug that would require more than a byte or two to fix.

It's THAT bad.

 

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10 hours ago, emkay said:

I wonder , if this engine allows some vertical movement. Just like those old PC games imitate walking.

Technically yes, it was covered in the tutorial and wouldn't be that hard to do, even a bit of faked looking up and down would be possible.

It's one of the things in my big 'I'd like to have this feature in later versions' list which we started to fill as more and more things got cut.

 

One more thing, I'm really grateful for your enthusiastic support, for YouTube vids you made and your input but if it's possible (and I'd like to ask this from the other side of the debate too) tone it down a bit.

Let's just agree to disagree and realize that compromises were made, and my priorities won't align 100% with those of other people, no matter the result.

 

I'll try to make more people happy when the version eating up more memory happens.

 

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@globe

Just a question: would it be possible to see how the game looks in action without a dithering on the floor or possibly make it off/on by some key, provided RAM allows such feature?

I've read on another forum an idea from @fox that it might increase readability of the graphics in the mode that is used - might be worth checking, if you agree? ?

 

EDITED:

I've just read there's no RAM left for anything more ?

Edited by Jacques
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19 minutes ago, globe said:

  

Technically yes, it was covered in the tutorial and wouldn't be that hard to do, even a bit of faked looking up and down would be possible.

It's one of the things in my big 'I'd like to have this feature in later versions' list which we started to fill as more and more things got cut.

 

One more thing, I'm really grateful for your enthusiastic support, for YouTube vids you made and your input but if it's possible (and I'd like to ask this from the other side of the debate too) tone it down a bit.

Let's just agree to disagree and realize that compromises were made, and my priorities won't align 100% with those of other people, no matter the result.

 

I'll try to make more people happy when the version eating up more memory happens.

 

May I say just how refreshing it is to read such insight from a developer, without the all to common on these forums 'developer attitude'. It's amazing.

 

Great job.?

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1 hour ago, globe said:

So once again, and hopefully last time, there really isn't much space for anything and a dread the moment someone finds some serious bug that would require more than a byte or two to fix.

It's THAT bad.

Be sure your efforts are appreciated very much - esp. by those who know what creating such a game on such a platform means.

 

If you have badly the need to free some space, just two suggestions (even I'm quite sure you are aware of them):

* you could free some bytes in the font by e.g. using only uppercase letters

* VRAM, texture definition space and calculation time could be relaxed by mirroring the screen.

  (It would even underline that if one 8-bit machine can accomplish such a game, it's the A8 thanks to the flexible video processing... - Edit: Of course it could also be a way to double the vertical resolution by preserving current memory footprint.)

 

Thanks for all the hard work. This is really a showcase.

Edited by Irgendwer
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