Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => TI Z80 => Topic started by: Xeda112358 on July 16, 2013, 08:19:39 pm
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Pokémon Amber is neither a clone, nor a port of a Pokémon game. It takes place 100 million years in the past, before Fossil Pokémon went extinct. After doing much research into ancient Pokémon, it is realised that we don't know the habitats of most Fossil Pokémon and there is some ambiguity in their types. What was the Pokémon world like 100 million years ago? What other Pokémon existed that have not been discovered? How have they adapted through time? These questions and more will play a key role in the development of Pokémon Amber.
Note: This game is not endorsed by Nintendo or any other Pokémon-affiliated organisation. This is just a game being developed by a fan purely for the enjoyment of others. There will be some creative liberties taken.
I thought I would start posting progress here instead of keeping it to my signature. As of yesterday, the following screenshot was up-to-date on showing progress:
(http://clrhome.org/amber/default.gif)
As you can see, I have a scrolling, animated tilemap with proper clipping, and working text commands. As well, I wrote routines for easily making menu and drawing rectangles. Internally, there is a token set, so words that are used frequently in the game can be represented by 1 byte and menus can be somewhat interactive.
I ended up completely rewriting the graphics today, after analysing a different approach. This made the tilemap routine take about 60% of the time previously required (so it is a lot faster) and all of the current drawing got a speed boost (as well as LCD updating). My plan is to keep it running at 6MHz and it is currently energy friendly, I hope (it makes heavy use of the halt instruction).
Things I need to do:
I need to place a player sprite on the screen as well as NPCs and other objects. These are all handled by the event handler, so once I have that finished (probably a good hour or two of focused coding), then trees (or Vines, in this game), boulders, non-player characters, doorways, warp tiles, and all of that will be in working order.
I need to make a smooth-scrolled transition as the player walks. This will definitely slow things down, but that should be fine.
I have not started on battles, Pokémon, or Items yet.
This game will probably use a lot of RAM. I am trying to keep it all in non-user RAM, but that will not be possible with the storage system. Save data will be about 1000 bytes, plus however many Pokémon I allow in the PC (it is about 50 bytes for each Pokémon). So to use the PC system, I either need to have all the boxes in RAM or, only a few at a time (like how the first two generations required you to save every time you changed boxes, it was basically archiving the data and bringing a new box to RAM).
Sprites are going to be monochrome, 24x24 and I plan for 64 pokémon total. This means 4608 bytes of sprite data, but they will all have additional information, bloating it to around 6400 bytes for Pokémon data. Because of this, I will probably have map data and most other event data stored in archived appvars, unless somebody thinks it is a better idea to keep it all in a multi-page app. If I keep it separate, it might be easier to create new games.
Here is a more current image:
(http://img.ourl.ca//AmberBetaEx4.gif)
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that's amazingly fast. wonderful =)
if it's supposed to be the ancient past, are you going to have any trainers?
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Can you port it to nspire?
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Can you port it to nspire?
But... don't you have the GameBoy Color emu and the GameBoy Advance emu for the Nspire already ?
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Can you port it to nspire?
I can try. I do need to get experience with nspire programming.
that's amazingly fast. wonderful =)
if it's supposed to be the ancient past, are you going to have any trainers?
There will be trainers, but there will be a few other important design differences. There won't be a PC, so your bag will be bigger. It will be able to carry your items and 20 Pokémon. There will be places where you can drop off your Pokémon, too, like a daycare, and in order to retrieve your Pokémon, you need to go back to the specific daycare. Internally, going to a given daycare will be the equivalent of opening up a box in your PC. In your bag, there will be two pockets for items (one of them is analogous to the items box on your PC), a pocket for apricorns (ancient version of Pokéballs), a key items pocket, and a TM/HM pocket. HMs will also work differently in Amber.
I still need to work out a good storyline .__.
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That is looking awesome xeda!
I love the title screen :)
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Can you port it to nspire?
I can try. I do need to get experience with nspire programming.
It'll be great if you can do that :)
Can you port it to nspire?
But... don't you have the GameBoy Color emu and the GameBoy Advance emu for the Nspire already ?
Well, i've a nspire touchpad so the gba emulator doesn't work in this nspire. And this seems to be very cool
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Well, i've a nspire touchpad so the gba emulator doesn't work in this nspire. And this seems to be very cool
Hmm, the GBA emulator works on my CX CAS and the GBC emulator works on both of my nspires.
Also, a minor update:
(http://img.ourl.ca//AmberBetaEx5.gif)
There is now some basic walking and navigation. I am working on adding in the smooth scrolling part (I have the sprites for the player to walk, as well as the code done).
Smoothscrolling will probably slow things down to 1/4 the speed, depending on how I do it. That should make it a more comfortable speed.
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That is....fast O.O
You should indeed slow it down :P
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Xeda, this looks like an awesome project! ^^
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Xeda, this looks like an awesome project! ^^
Aren't all of her projects awesome :P
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Xeda, this looks like an awesome project! ^^
Aren't all of her projects awesome :P
You guys are taking words outta my mouth. :P
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Very nice indeed :D. And slow down that walking speed lol :P
Will this include missingno? :P
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Even after you add smooth scrolling it will still move pretty fast! In Cydia, the virtual screen I do the drawing on is a little larger than the actual screen. After I draw the main screen, I just have to keep loading the hidden borders with sprites and then just rotate or shift the bytes as necessary. The demo video is limited by the characters 'Speed' attribute but it can be increased when leveling up.
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Just keep in mind that when sprites are not aligned horizontally, they take longer to display. I noticed that in Axe tilemappers, where gameplay suddenly speeded up when the map was aligned, so as a result, when walking up/down, scrolling was about twice faster.
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I know first hand about that DJ! I wrote a custom unaligned sprite routine that I wanted to compare to the Zoomin' Mob Routine (old school ;)) and it would smoke my routine unless the sprite happened to be aligned when my routine would whip it across the screen! This shouldn't have that issue though because the sprites are all aligned. The screen is drawn and the main character is drawn over it. (:w00t: Right ??)
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The way I have it is the tilemap is drawn to the graph screen (plotSScreen, 9340h) and certain 'events' such as NPCs, the player sprite, items, movable boulders, and anything else blocking paths are drawn to two other buffers (one buffer for the sprite mask, the other for the sprite data). Then during the LCD update, I just take the three layers and mash them together. My LCD updating code is basically:
ld hl,gBuf
exx
ld hl,buf0
ld de,buf1
exx
ld a,20h
colm:
out (16),a
inc a
cp 2Ch
ex af,af'
ld b,40h
rowm:
ld a,(hl)
exx
or (hl)
ex de,hl
xor (hl)
ex de,hl
inc de
inc hl
exx
inc hl
out (17),a ;79 t-states is enough
djnz rowm
lcddelay()
ex af,af'
jr nz,colm
res lcdupdate,(iy+asmflags)
ret
While the tilemap is drawn with aligned sprites (it is more 10 than times faster than my general sprite routine, I think), scrolling the screen will still take a speed hit and the difference will be noticeable from scrolling up/down versus left and right. By my estimate, scrolling the screen left/right will be about 4 times slower, so I will have to add in additional code to keep scrolling consistent.
Here is a screenshot from another project where I wrote a tilemap routine:
(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15107.0;attach=14701;image)
That is with basically no delays, but also no smooth scrolling. This is an example from the same project with smoothscrolling:
(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15107.0;attach=14275;image)
Since Pokémon Amber uses a different gBuf setup, (and since tilemapping and whatnot is done from an interrupt), I don't know how speeds will compare. However, that is basically the same technique I plan to use. Shift the screen, shifting in the appropriate sprite data. This is why it will shift in whole tiles 1 pixel at a time. I won't have to do anything too complicated or slow.
(screenshots are from the OmniRPG - Coding (http://ourl.ca/17704/329257) discussion)
I wonder if I should use those tiles? ...
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wow, just wow
how do you do that kinda stuff xeda :crazy:
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To answer DJ_O about the missingno. question, I don't plan to add that in.
Now I have another small update (I am afraid that I am concentrating too much on details, now). A few days ago, I had some scrolling done, but it didn't scroll in the new tiles, making it bad looking. I now have smoothscrolling finished for up/down, but now I need to finish left/right. Luckily, I have an idea for how to make it work (and it will be about the same speed as scrolling up or down). As well, I found a small issue with my code that was actually slowing down animation significantly. I was resetting the wrong flag in a routine, causing the tilemap to be redrawn and the LCD to be updated every time the interrupt fired (instead of when a tile went to the next animation frame). After fixing that and taking out about a 1000 cycles of code on top of it, I had to increase the animation counter from 16 to 128 to make it reasonable :P
(http://img.ourl.ca//AmberBetaEx6.gif)
Oh, I also added an in-game menu with options that don't do anything (except the Options menu and Exit). I forgot to include it in the screenshot, but maybe I won't next time :P
The character sprite does actually have a walking animation, but it isn't very good and you can't easily see it. I am thinking of making the character sprite 16x16, keeping 8x8 tiles, but I haven't decided on that yet (you can see a lot more on screen with 8x8 tiles and 8x8 character sprite).
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Can you port it to nspire?
But... don't you have the GameBoy Color emu and the GameBoy Advance emu for the Nspire already ?
But this is better than any official Pokemon game ;D
Seriously, it looks good so far, especially the graphics. I want to play this game!
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HI!
Also, that is looking awesome
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Can you port it to nspire?
To answer your question, you could use Jacobly's TI-84+SE emulator or an 84+ keypad on a monochrome Nspire if that is supported.
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The character sprite does actually have a walking animation, but it isn't very good and you can't easily see it.
Feel free to use those from Pokémon Monochrome (http://code.google.com/p/pokemon-monochrome/) if you want :)
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Wow that looks pretty awesome Deeph. O.O
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The character sprite does actually have a walking animation, but it isn't very good and you can't easily see it.
Feel free to use those from Pokémon Monochrome (http://code.google.com/p/pokemon-monochrome/) if you want :)
That is the furthest along faithful rendition of the original Pokemon games that I think I have ever seen for the 83+/84+. Why am I only learning about it now!? Does this have it's own topic? Because it's very worthy of one.
Oh, and your version looks good to Xeda.../me runs
But in all seriousness, I suspect your version will get a lot more awesome given time. For only having worked on it for about a week or two it seems, a lot of good progress has been made.
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Thanks, but I'm not the only author, chickendude helped me a lot :P
In fact this project is far from being done, so I won't make a topic here until I'm sure to finish it completly. Chickendude and I haven't made any progress for weeks now and I personnaly won't be working on it before some more...
Considering Xeda's programing skills, Pokémon Amber has much more chances to be done earlier ;)
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The character sprite does actually have a walking animation, but it isn't very good and you can't easily see it.
Feel free to use those from Pokémon Monochrome (http://code.google.com/p/pokemon-monochrome/) if you want :)
How did I forget about Pokémon Monochrome D: I even remember working on that rectangle routine with chickendude. But really, those sprites are wonderful!
How large are your actual Pokémon sprites? I was thinking of using 24x24. Your sprites look so good!
:thumbsup:+1
I finished work for today and I don't work tomorrow, so now I might actually get more work done!
Also, you and chickendude are excellent programmers o.o I would try to help with Pokémon Monochrome, but I am afraid that I won't be familiar with your style .__. But I might look through it to find optimisations (but it looks very fast already!).
I am going to try to use some of your tiles/sprites to see how it looks.
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How large are your actual Pokémon sprites? I was thinking of using 24x24. Your sprites look so good!
The Pokémon sprites are adapted from what seems to be their menu icons from some pokémon on GBA or NDS (http://www.pokepedia.fr/index.php/Liste_des_Pok%C3%A9mon_de_la_premi%C3%A8re_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ration), and thus were originaly 32*32, but to be able to fit them into the battle screen I had to reduce them to 32*26 (they tend to be larger than taller, so it fits).
Sizing them down to 24*24 wouldn't be easy I think (unless you only want to create your own Pokémons).
I would try to help with Pokémon Monochrome, but I am afraid that I won't be familiar with your style .__. But I might look through it to find optimisations (but it looks very fast already!).
That would be awesome, but keep in mind that we were still repairing some things being broke after we used chickendude's better routines (mainly things with the battle engine) :D
I am going to try to use some of your tiles/sprites to see how it looks.
Nice, now I can't wait to see more screenshots :)
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Okay, thanks! I might try to draw the pokémon sprites myself by looking at those images (I drew the Aerodactyl in the intro myself).
As for a screenshot, I used your player sprites (they look so much nicer!) and I used ideas from the other tiles (like for the buildings).
I am still impressed by how fast your tilemap and scrolling works! I scroll 2 pixels at a time to make it a little faster (only 4 LCD updates every time the player moves instead of 8 ).
EDIT: Oops, screenshot:
(http://img.ourl.ca//AmberBetaEx7.gif)
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By the way, I like how the name is completely ambiguous as far as Pokemon game generations go. "Amber" could refer to a color (as in Blue, Red, Yellow, and so on) or a shiny/precious material (as in Gold, Silver, Crystal, and so on).
Did you do that on purpose?
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The character sprite does actually have a walking animation, but it isn't very good and you can't easily see it.
Feel free to use those from Pokémon Monochrome (http://code.google.com/p/pokemon-monochrome/) if you want :)
Aren't those sprites inspired from Topaze (in an animated version) ?
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Yes you're right (but I've asked you if I could use them, if I remember correctly ;)), I've just made them animated and tried to make a female version of the up/left/right sprites.
So yeah, you should thank and +1 Hayleia instead of me for this awesome 8*8 sprite :)
I am still impressed by how fast your tilemap and scrolling works! I scroll 2 pixels at a time to make it a little faster (only 4 LCD updates every time the player moves instead of 8 ).
In fact I'm using the tilemapper from GBA Lib 2 (http://www.mirari.fr/emAP), because it is way better than any of mine :P
The only thing is that I can't easily handle non-tile based events (like npcs) with it. I've managed to handle trainers (http://www.yaronet.com/posts.php?sl=0&s=153983&p=4&h=102#102) but it's not the most optimised solution.
How do you plan to do that ?
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Yes you're right (but I've asked you if I could use them, if I remember correctly ;)), I've just made them animated and tried to make a female version of the up/left/right sprites.
Yeah, I kind of remember you asking, and I kind of remember saying "no problem", but for some reason I don't find where you asked that -.-
And for the female version, you could have used the sprites from Topaze too, I still have no problem with that (just give credits so that people don't think I stole the sprites).
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It was on a ti-concours topic I think.
And of course I'll put you on the credits :)
(But don't do the same with me, all my projects are completly copyleft and I don't care if somebody "steals" anything from them, though I don't think it'll ever happen :P)
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@Deep Thought: That is partially the reason. Originally, I was making a reference to Old Amber (the stuff that Aerodactyl was resurrected from). Then I started thinking about it and thought it was a great idea because it was a color/stone. As well, when I was trying to think of a name for Jade, I thought of Amber and decide to keep with that idea.
@deeph: I have an events handler that holds all of the event tile data (trees that can be cut, boulders that can be moved, warp tiles, items, NPCs). Essentially, I just loop through the events and draw any necessary sprites and execute any events. There are no events in the current map, but once I add them, it will start to slow things down. (60 events could take over 100 000 t-states to handle)
Also, each event will have some flags associated with it (in the save file). The reason for why I am doing it this way is so that maps don't have to be edited as the player plays the game. If an item is picked up, a flag is set and the event is removed. When the map is drawn, first the tiles are drawn, then the events are placed on top. If the item flag is reset, it won't get drawn, and the tile works normally again. If the player goes back to the map, the item is no longer added to the events list when the map is loaded.
Trees, boulders, and warp tiles don't have any flags associated with them (so trees reappear every time you re-enter a map). I think there will only ever be 20 to 30 events max per map. and the only ones that will be drawn are items, NPCs, trees, and boulders.
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I tried thinking of ways to make smoothscrolling work for left and right nicely. My first attempt was at 30FPS (up and down scrolls at 46FPS). That was no good because that kind of speed difference is very noticeable! Instead, I reorganised my code so that I only needed to shift one buffer instead of 2, then at the end, I shift the map buffer the whole 8 pixels. As well, it helps that I only need to load in the data for 8 tiles instead of 12 to scroll in (that only saves a little over a thousand t-states). The result is 41FPS :
(http://img.ourl.ca/AmberBetaEx8.gif)
The speed difference isn't really noticeable now :) I also added in an option to set the calc to 15MHz or 6MHz (press + or -). This is being designed for 6MHz, but for anybody that wants to make things go a little faster, it is an option.
(http://img.ourl.ca//AmberBetaEx9FastMode.gif)
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Yeah I like the 15MHz switch idea. It's kinda like fast forward mode in emulators, pretty nice feature if I do say so myself.
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Yeah for the events I had the same idea, but considering it would take too much space and time to handle I've finally chose to only have tile-based events (that triggers when the player walk by).
For some events (like trainers), I think I'll use bits instead of bytes to store their flag (with some (re)set_bit routine that will turn on/off a certain bit in a buffer).
Your screenshots are great, there's just a little thing that bugs me : as the player sprite can't be centered, in the best case you have to move it so the player has the largest part of the screen in front of him, else in some cases (like moving to the left or up, here) you have a line/row of tile less in sight :P
It's not that important, though (sometimes that's worse : people make the screen scroll when you reach its limit so you really don't see anything at all, which is really annoying here considering the screen width/height).
Also, I missed the infos in your signature, that's interesting :D
I'm just wondering how will the player ends up in the past ?
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Well the original GameBoy/Color games were this way too, I don't see much of a problem here. ;)
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Will this game have team rocket?:p
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Yeah, I was using the technique of the original gameboy games for keeping the sprite close to the center of the screen (that is why I had to add tilemap clipping x.x).
As for Team Rocket... Yes >:D Bill made a time travel device in the second generation for trading with the first. I want to play off of that idea to make a nice plot. I have a bunch of surprises lined up that I do not want to give away until it has been released, but I don't mind releasing some details :P There is one character that has been in several of the games and a bunch of the shows that will play an important roll early on (for the first time).
One part about the plot that I am really worried about is explaining the extinction of so many Pokémon. I mean, it does take place around when the fossil pokémon went extinct, so I think I need to make an explanation. I was thinking of making the plot as one of Team Rocket's plans goes horribly wrong and you try to save the Pokémon world from extinction... but then what? We know that they went extinct, so does that mean the main player is doomed to fail, or is time altered? Or do we try to save most of the Pokémon and move them out to space (Deoxys stuff involved here).
I do have a plot and storyline, that I think will work, and I hope it turns out excellently ^^ Soon, the only screenshots that I will be able to post will be ones that don't reveal major twists or major parts of the plot!
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Awesome, I can't wait to play it !! :D
About the extinction, I don't know what was the original explanation (meteor impact ?). Was it even explained somewhere (maybe in the museum in pokémon red/blue) ?
Yeah, I was using the technique of the original gameboy games for keeping the sprite close to the center of the screen (that is why I had to add tilemap clipping x.x).
Personnaly I move the player sprite to the screen limits when we can't scroll the map anymore, but it's not that important.
edit : Looks like there's no official reason : "Omastar is the only Fossil Pokémon that has been given a reason for extinction; its shell was too heavy for it to move, thus it starved to extinction." (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Omastar#Trivia).
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@Xeda:
For Pokemon front sprites I have several I was working on for Buckeyedude's Pokemon Red clone. They are a little bigger than what you were talking about (32X32) and are 4 level gray. They could probably be adapted for monochrome though. I'm not sure how they would work being shrunk further, as they are already pretty small. You are welcome to them if you like. Also, I believe Joe Young has some fantastic looking custom monochrome sprites he made for a Pokemon battle simulator. They are probably closer to the size you'd want. You may want to ask him about them.
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Extinction could have something to do with Mount Moon's story. ;)
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Is this still in-dev?
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It is on hold until I have free time to work on certain aspects like the battle engine. That will take a while to code and I will need to be focused on it, which I am not at this point (work, school, clubs, homework, and sleep all leave me a few hours a day to do stuff). However, some aspects like design and layout are being worked on as those don't require as much focus, compression is something I am working on as well for both OmniRPG and Amber. I have a class dealing with optimisation that I have been bored in and so my mind wanders. I came up with another compression technique that I have been using class as 'free time' to analyse.
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I have a class dealing with optimisation that I have been bored in and so my mind wanders.
Lol I guess we all (as in us, Omni members) get bored at some point in CS class. :P
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I have a class dealing with optimisation that I have been bored in and so my mind wanders.
Lol I guess we all (as in us, Omni members) get bored at some point in CS class. :P
It's actually a mostly math-oriented class (mathematical programming and optimisation).
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I just realized how great the storyline actually is, I read it before, but for some reason, this time it clicked. Taking it back to before the Pokemon went extinct was an excellent idea and opens up crazy possibilities for the future timelines and for the sequels to this game! This game will be amazing and I hope you port it to the +C!
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Sounds awesome! My little brother loves fossil Pokemon. And you should port it to the +C, as AssemblyBandit said.
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Please avoid necroposting, this topic is over a year old ;) don't worry, we all do it at first. You can find current topics under Forum>Recent.
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It is barely seven months old. This is still sorta necroposting though.
That said I wonder if you still plan to finish it Xeda ?
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I have been too busy with life and the floating point library thing, but I do hope to finish this :)
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Nice to hear. :) Don't hurry, we can wait.
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My bad, I saw "October 12" and thought it said "October 2012"...
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No problem. ;)
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Is this still being worked on?
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Sadly, no. Everybody is always told to backup their projects and unfortunately, this as well as Grammer and Batlib were lost (among many others). Apparently when I did backup my projects, I only backed up shortcuts to my "Major Projects" folder. For Batlib and Grammer, I have some old versions still online, but I never uploaded the source or even a binary (that I am aware of) for Pokemon Amber.
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Oh, well that sucks! Man, I really wanted to play that too!
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Yeah, this sucks a lot :(
That is why, for my programming projects, I always use like bitbucket or github to back up, bitbucket for if I want a private repo.
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Yeah, maybe in like a million years when I get the motivation, I'll redo it from scratch again, but that was a lot of work to get where it was at.
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Lol
Well I hope that you do get the motivation because I really want to play it. :w00t:
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/me injects a shot labeled "motivation" into xeda