Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => TI Z80 => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on June 30, 2010, 04:06:26 am
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Ok so as you could read in one of my post lately, I've been trying to do some sort of platformer engine. I failed epically after two attempts, after both of which I lowered my standards for the project, making something more simple, in terms of backend coding. I still managed to make it run fast in 6 MHz and make my engine rather dynamic.
Basically, in this game, in each levels, which are randomized, based on pre-defined settings (allowing each level to only take around 15 bytes), you must control a ball in some sort of tunnel until the end of the "map" (which is, in fact, just data for the floor and the ceiling, meaning each level, despite being 300 x 240 ish tiles approximately, depending of the randomizing, will only take around 700 bytes of storage into L1). In the future, you'll need to get out of the map before time runs out (a counter will display at the bottom of the screen) to finish, else it's Game Over. Your final score will depend of the time remaining. Some levels randomizing settings will be very hard, because the ball bounces on walls and when walls are really close, you bounce everywhere, making the ball hard to control. You also move extremly fast.
I will need to figure out a name for this, though.
There is parralax scrolling and tiles can be animated. The game engine allows me to decide the speed of animations. The walls can be animated too. I have some screenshots below (sorry for the small images and slow framerate, but for some reasons, Wabbitemu produced insanely large GIF files at better quality settings). The sky is actually 4 different tiles making a scrolling effect). It looks much better and smoother in the emu or on calc (and this runs at 6 MHz, btw):
EDIT: I added a new screenshot at highest quality, showing walls being animated through some current tiles and the background scrolling vertically. It's a short GIF, though.
(Note: this is not for a contest)
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That looks Hella Awesome! You really underestimate yourself, this is really cool :) I especially like the paralax scrolling, and the whole physics idea is very neat. The gameplay apears simple at first, but when your ball is bouncing all over the place, this looks like it could get addicting very easily :)
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Wow, that looks really nice (love the independent background
(though it seems to be a bit of :-\) (never mind, my mistake) and the jump looks realistic). Ever thought of naming it ParallAxe (I'm assuming it's in Axe, and yes, that's how you spell "parallax" -- one "r", two "l"s)? ;D
EDIT: Not sure about this, but wouldn't black-and-white screenshots take up a lot less space?
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Thanks guys ;D and what do you mean Deep by the background being a bit off?
As for parralAxe, it would probably refer more to an engine rather than a game, though. I would probably prefer something that has a ball and speed reference.
I'Ll try b/w screenshots later.
As for the game, I had thoughts about making it faster with a 15 MHz mode and make the framerate lower in 6 MHz mode , but due to the on-calc LCD quality, it's best that it doesn't go too fast either, since it would be hard to see anything, not to mention it would be nearly unplayable.
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That looks epic. In an epic way. Holy crap.
On a side note, you could name it SpeedBall. Simple. Also, have you considered adding obstacles? Dodging swinging blades in that game sounds like fun ;)
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I thought about obstacles. There would still be no way to die besides time running out, but I had thoughts about some enemies that could make you bounce back.
Thanks btw ^^
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This looks like it could be the next fast tunnel!
Seriously, this game looks and sounds like it would extremely addicting and fun to play. Keep up the good work, I definitely would love to see this finished.
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Thanks ^^
Now what I need to do I think is store my sprites in a BASIC pic or something, because it is getting rather hard to dechiper the hex data for them and figure out which tile was what ;D
And I need to be careful for Wabbitemu users to not give them seizures with certain game animated backgrounds :P
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wow! that looks epic DJ! can't wait to play it!
I like the enemies idea as well :)
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DJ that looks amazing! i love the parralax scrolling. i can't wait to play it.
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Thanks. Right now I am adding a few more sprites (some that are animated. My engine has slots for 32 in total but I doubt I will need more anyway. If I do, I can easily add an additional data element per level that will let me use more.
I also need to fix a bug with randomizing when the randomization change interval is set to something else than 1 (for the floor)
I am currently using Runer112 sprite editor in WabbitEmu and copying the data by hand on my calc. As reference, I added code (commented for now) at the beginning of my program that displays the entire sprite sheet. If it gets too hectic to remember each sprite position, I'll store it to a BASIC pic :)
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looks awesome so far!
a couple questions about gameplay:
A is the jump height fixed or dynamic depending on the jump button hold time
B it looks as if this "ball" is always spinning; are you forced to move forwards when you hit the ground or do you only move with the arrow keys
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It looks really nice and simple, and I really love the physics, they look very good.
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woah this looks really good, you should add lobster enemies ;O
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Thanks.
To answer Shmibs questions, nope the jump key won't make you jump higher when holding it down longer. It would be pointless anyway since most of the time you hit the ceiling when jumping. As for moving around, you can move left or right when you want.
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This thing would be awesome once finished, with all the enemies and all, I love this parralax scrolling thing :P
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This is really cool! I hope you finish it DJ! Also, you really underestimate yourself. I'm looking at that and I have no idea how you made it. Excellent job! I can't wait to try this. Wow! ;D
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Well the hardest part was really the physics. I never realised how hard such thing would be. Even harder thing is dealing with negative values in If conditions. I had to work around this and do some other stuff. I had to rewrite my code 3 times. The 2nd time I almost lost all hope. SirCmpwn and Builderboy helped me figure out some tricks and when I removed some pressure from my shoulders recently, I got motivation to code again. The level creation isn't too hard either, except I had troubles at first for a while
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Ok so I fixed a bug that caused the beginning of the track to not be connected with the rest when setting a level to change the random values every two frame or higher. I also applied a small optimization by Quigibo with the way I do the parallax scrolling (thanks Quigibo) and I think I noticed a slight speed increase (and obviously a decrease in size).
Now I need to code the end of levels, timer and scoring (which depend of the remaining time left). Timer may use interrupts, altough I am not decided yet.
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Keep in mind that although interrupts are convenient, they are much slower, larger, and require more control than just calling the routine from your main loop. Not to mention, they prevent you from using certain commands like the OS getkey or mirage's [on] break. You should only use interrupts when it can't be done easily any other way or when exact timing is extremely important.
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Can't you fix OS _GetKey by jumping to 0038H at the end of the interrupt?
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Or rather $006C, because otherwise the OS would switch the shadow regs w/the regular regs again, messing all the registers up. (You could do an "exx \ ex af,af'" before a "jp $0038", which would be a total of 5 bytes, or two bytes more, and that's not as good.)
We just need a way in Axe to chain the normal IM 1 interrupt to the program's custom IM 2 interrupt.
Edit: Changed info to reflect that it should be "jp $0038" rather than "rst 38h"
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Can't you fix OS _GetKey by jumping to 0038H at the end of the interrupt?
Or rather $006C, because otherwise the OS would switch the shadow regs w/the regular regs again, messing all the registers up.
Or rather 003Ah. That skips the shadow reg switch also. ;D
Quigibo, we *need* Mode 1 and Mode 2 at the same time. :D
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ztrumpet: yes, but by going directly to $003A rather than $006C, you're skipping other things (Probably unimportant, and 84+(SE) only IIRC, but still). I can post a short disassembly...
^++ yes, chaining would be so very useful (but definitely as an option, not a requirement :P)
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From Day 23 of Asm in 28 Days:
TSRs
TSRs are Terminate and Stay Resident programs. If you change the RET and exchange instructions in your interrupt to JP $003A, then you'll process the calculator's system interrupt as well as your own.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Why are we jumping to $003A? Isn't the system routine at $0038??
Well, yes, the Mode 1 interrupt does jump to $0038. What we are doing is swapping the shadow registers when our interrupt is run, and we want them to stay swapped when the system interrupt is running. A section of the code at $0038 looks like
0038: JR $006A
003A: IN A, (4)
.
.
006A: EX AF, AF'
006B: EXX
006C: JR $003A
Yes this is completely redundant, but by jumping to $003A the exchanges get skipped over.
This is useful if you still want GetKey and GetCSC and other Mode 1 features to work while you're in Mode 2.
Is there more stuff there on 84s? :)
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Yeah, there is :(
Wabbit screenie attached.
Note that there is even more than is shown. Again, I am unsure what this actually does, but it may just be better to run it anyway (by either method I mentioned)
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Oh. :(
Thanks for mentioning this, but why isn't it in Asm in 28? :)
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Probably because it was written before the 84's or the author only had an 83+.
Well, if for the normal 83+ it's just a jump back, then it should still work on all OS's (jp $006C, that is)
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JP 0038H will also jump to that area. (there's a small chain of jp's in the interrupt, but I forgot the details)
The calculator executes a rst 38H instruction every n microseconds, but the space in that area was limited for some reason, so the main interrupt code was moved to 006AH
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Various OS markers and whatnot cause the lack of space.
The problem with just executing jp $0038 is this:
When you start an interrupt, one of the first things you do is switch to the shadow registers in order to avoid messing with the program's register contents. But when you go to $0038, they are switched again, and now the OS is messing w/the program's register contents, which is not good. You can switch them back before jping to $0038, but it's much simpler just to jump to $006C
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Looks magnificent DJ!
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Keep in mind that although interrupts are convenient, they are much slower, larger, and require more control than just calling the routine from your main loop. Not to mention, they prevent you from using certain commands like the OS getkey or mirage's [on] break. You should only use interrupts when it can't be done easily any other way or when exact timing is extremely important.
oh ok, thanks for letting me know. It might be best then, that I stay away from them for now, unless they are really needed. I try to keep my program as fast as possible.
And thanks tr1p1ea!
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ATM I am getting some help from Quigibo on making the game faster. He plans to change the collision detection so it checks from the level data instead of pixel test. I am unsure how he'll do it, though, so he is gonna do that part since I don't get it. He also figured out other tricks to make the game faster, altough one will make the game a bit larger. It involves a different way to do the parralax scrolling, but it will require two copies of each tile I got. Hopefully, the speed gain will help me add new stuff easier without having to worry too much about slow downs, though. Many thanks to him for the help.
I am not sure if this version will have enemies and the like, though. The challenges of this game will mostly lie in the way levels are randomized. Later levels will often be narrower and have more parts that goes up or down rapidly, causing you to bounce on walls more often when trying to go through. You will need to control the speed of the ball as much as possible. Later levels might also sometimes use tiles making the path much harder to see, such as having both the background and foreground set to the star tile or even have the light turn ON and OFF back and forth every second, like in one of the Donkey Kong Country level:
Such thing would simply requires the animation speed to be set to like 9 or maybe a lil more and have two animation frame where I display both walls and bg with a black tile, like in one of the screenshot attached below. The other screenshot shows both bg and foreground quickly alternating between white and black, creaTing a nice special effect, but I don't know if it will be a very good idea to play on emulators with LCD settings set to no blur, due to seizures :P
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I know I didn't comment originally, but this is looking pretty damn cool. Second screen shot looks gray since the backgrounds are alternating so quickly. O_o I also like in the first screen shot on this page where the "lights" go out for a moment.
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Thanks, and yeah for the lights going out, I was trying an effect like in Donkey Kong Country blackout basement level
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These screenies are awesome! By far the coolest thing I've seen today. Excellent work! ;D
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Thanks ^^
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Definetaly very high on the awesome factor :) * bounce bounce *
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Thanks again.
Btw Quigibo has optimized about 100 bytes in the code, thanks to him :D
No speed gain, but still awesome and I can still read the code :P
Next step will be to apply his other trick he talked about, which will cause an increase in file size since I'll need twice the amount of sprites for sprites used as background image, but make parralax scrolling even faster (since it would now only display 13 sprites instead of 26)
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I finally decided of an official name for the game, after searching for synonyms of speed-related stuff and getting help from people on IRC (Michael.3545 posted a pretty nice online dictionary site, thaks a lot), I decided that the game name would be "Supersonic Ball". I initially thought about Sonic Ball and someone suggested Sphere instead of ball, but Sonic Ball would probably mislead people elsewhere thinking it's an actual Sonic The Hedgehog game and anger some, and Supersonic/Hyperspeed Sphere just didn't sound right to me.
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Nice. I'm glad you decided on a name. ;D
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Now a title screen...
Altough for now I need to focus a bit on the rest of the engine. First, I need to implement Quigibo trick to speed up parralax scrolling, then I'm gonna start coding end of tracks. I might modify the ending randomizing so you have an indication that you might have reached the end easier on tracks that randomizes frequently. Once done, I'll need to implement the timer and multiple levels support. For now I am unsure about allowing the user to select the level at which he wants to start when he runs the game, providing he finished that level, because I feel it may make the game too easy to beat. I may have this feature be unlocked only once you beaten the game, or I may split the game in multiple worlds and allow the user to restart from a specific world. The price to pay when doing that will be a lower total score at the end. (since your total score is based on how much time is remaining at the end of each level)
Now I just fixed two bugs, one that caused problems with the ball starting location and the other with the floor.
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Looks great, glad to see you coding again. I like the name change as well. Keep it up DJ, I cant wait to see how it turns out!
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Thanks a lot ^^
Btw, now I am implementing the faster parralax scrolling
I'll brb then make a backup, though. I think I also need to reorganize some sprite data
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By the way, I think it would be cool to have the parallax scrolling 3 or 4 times slower than the foreground instead of 2 times becasue when you go at the maximum speed it kinda gets blurry on the calculator. This would also make it seem like the background is further away in the distance and would be less distracting (although I think you mentioned that the distraction can be used as an intentional way to increase the difficulty when the tiles are similar)
Great game so far. I wish you good luck with the new parallax engine.
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Mhmm, something I thought about was maybe allowing for different speeds for the backgrounds, which would be defined per level basis. There may even be static backgrounds. I'll have to see how hard it is to implement, though. I'll have to experiment with modulus and the like. For now I'll give 4x slower a try, though to see if it looks better.
Thanks for the feedback :D
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Yeah i noticed the parallax scrolling thing too, we will have to see what 4 times as slow looks like.
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I just tried and it's amazing ^^
Btw now each level can now have their own parralax scrolling speed. It can be set from 1 to 255. 2 is what it was set at by default. At 255 it will scroll every 255 pixels while at 1, there is no parralax scrolling at all (both bg and foreground scrolls at the same speed). I am scared of trying 0, tho...
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Thats awesome! I can haz screenies? :D
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Axe CAN divide by zero!!!!! :)
Dividing by zero causes the value to always be 65535 which means that the background will be completely stationary and have no scrolling whatsoever. This is one of those things I love about Axe. There really are real life situations where you want to divide by zero and it does have legitimate uses.
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if it's 65536, wouldn't it be 0? I am a bit confused now XD
That said I guess I'll give it a try at one point
I know it divided by zero (with two bytes integers IT'S OVER 9000!!!!) but I thought it was 65535, not 65536 o.o
EDIT: wow, seems higher than 255 for sure, the way it remains static even past 256 pixels
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Yeah, that's because all numbers, no matter how big X or Y are, are going to be exactly the same number when divided by zero. That means they will also all have the same modulus too, which I believe is 7 if using ^8. Even if you went out to the 65535th pixel in any direction, the background will still never shift.
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aaaah I see ^^
I guess I'll keep the divide by zero thing in mind for levels that occur in the space
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Awesome! I really like the change in scrolling. This'll be a great game! ;D
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Nice to see you've decided on a name. Custom scrolling speed sounds cool. (I like the dividing by 0 :P)
And yes, good to see you coding again, DJ. Can't wait to see how this turns out! :D
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Thanks guys ^^ I hope I finish this one
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Apparently everyone does :)
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Oh, I forgot to post my last night short update:
-Now levels can end (before, it would just continue reading data beyond L1 limits)
-Timer was added, altough you don't die when it reaches zero yet. It uses custom fonts, by the way.
-The last 15 columns of levels are now straightforward, giving you an indication that the level is ending very soon.
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Excelent updates :) can't wait to try this out on calc!
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Just so you know, this project is on hold until next week. However, I can show a screenshot of the timer. I'll post it below.
EDIT: Here is it.
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beautiful...just beautiful. Everything looks great DJ, I like the timer too!
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Looks great! :)
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Sonic bonus stage am get?!
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Cool! I'm even more full of anticipation! :D
Keep up the good work!
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Wow, this really cool. Just wondering but did Builderboy's Sonic test from a long time ago stir the physics idea part of this at all? (It's somewhere in this subforum somewhere :P I can look later.) But really, as they have said before me, you underestimate yourself greatly! One of those screen shots later in this topic made the level look embossed (or 3D if you will) sometimes. Very cool. Can't wait to see how this turns out! ;D
Edit: I forgot to mention that an idea for an obstacle could be like a "acid" or "spike" tile that makes you lose also if you hit it. Just a thought :)
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I apologize for not reading over the entire thread before responding; so I'm not sure if this has already been suggested...
This reminds me a lot of the Bonus Stage from Sonic the Hedgehog (http://info.sonicretro.org/Special_Stage_(Sonic_the_Hedgehog_16-bit)). (the first one on Genesis) A really cool idea might be to base an entire game around this, using similar sprites and tiles. The objective could be to collect the Chaos Emerald from each level, while getting a bonus for rings.
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OMG! You're right, it does look like that. Only difference is that this looks more like a tunnel instead of a different shapes. I kind of like that idea. Might be hard to implement though.
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Yeah now that you mention it...
my concern would be the rotation, though. I would rather prefer to let this out. For the sequel to that game, I think it might be an idea to make such game, though, or something similar.
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Ya, rotation would be pretty hard to accomplish.
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Currently progress is slow, but I have a week of vacation coming soon, so I should probably be able to finish some more levels and hopefully find a title screen idea.
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the sonic thing could be made a little easier if you just used all circular tiles so you wouldnt have to rotate them as well. i can see that being doable, though still tough. great to hear you're working more soon, im excite for this =D
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Yeah I would need to learn 3D and rotating stuff, which I failed on so far. Plus in math classes we did not do much trig, which is essential.
As for the game I'll definitively have to put all my sprites visually in a document or sheet of paper alongwith the respective hex, because it's really annoying to remember what are each sprites (I have trouble reading hex fast)
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Yeah reading Hex is a pain x.x And rotation would be so crazy with not only the rotational graphics, but the crazy physics you would need O.O I think its awesome enough :)
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Currently progress is slow, but I have a week of vacation coming soon, so I should probably be able to finish some more levels and hopefully find a title screen idea.
Awesome!
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DJ, this is an amazing game. I hope you find the motivation to finish it! ;D
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Yeah reading Hex is a pain x.x And rotation would be so crazy with not only the rotational graphics, but the crazy physics you would need O.O I think its awesome enough :)
true, since it involves rotation, I am pretty much out for this. Someone should probably make such game, though.
I got an idea, though, for a game similar to SuperSonic Ball: a top-down view version of it. It would make physics easier to code than with jumping and be much more fun I think. I could maybe do some sort of racing game
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Idea!
You could do this with your background tile map to make it blindingly fast:
Do all of this when the engine is loading the game.
Draw the background tile at four spots, (0,0), (0,7), (7,0), and (7,7).
Use this code next:
For(A,0,7)
For(B,0,7)
{B*12+L6+1}->{A*8+B+L5}
End
Vertical -
Horizontal +
End
This puts the 8 tiles in L5. Now, in the main engine run this code:
.A is the Var 0-7 controlling the offset of the scrolling.
For(B,0,11)
Pt-On(B*8,0,A*8+L5)
End
Copy(L3,L3+96,672)
This should scroll it quicker.
I just realized that this method may not work, as you scroll in other directions, but if you only scroll to the bottom left, this should work. :)
If you need to modify this, do it at the beginning, by changing the direction it scrolls and where it checks at. :)
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Wow. I can't believe I didn't see this before. This looks great, DJ. Way to go!
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Sorry Ztrumpet, by the looks of it I doubt it would work. You would need my source to know why. Thanks, though.
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Ah, ok. I figured it may help, but it looks like it would be a headache to implement. Good luck on it! :)
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I know I didn't update much, lately, but...
I had some different ideas if I do Super Sonic Ball 2. It would be top-down view instead of platform view. Platform view with jumping and stuff is all cool, but I feel it makes the game a bit harder to control and it won't give me as much freedom. I would like to maybe attempt a top down view Supersonic Ball style game, where you move in all 4 directions and avoid bouncing too hard on walls.
Of course the first game remains Side scrolling. I am not sure about the title of the second game, though. It would use real tilemaps, though.
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Is there a reason why this topic is now called "ques"?
It's like what happened when Spybot45 used to get screwed up- except for real in the actual forum...
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Yeah that was to mess around with Alberthrocks and Netham45 to make them think the bot got messed up again ;D
I thought about renaming the game to ques once, but I think ques would fit more for a RPG :P
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Well im changing it back :P
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D: Bad Builderboy D:
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Yeah that was to mess around with Alberthrocks and Netham45 to make them think the bot got messed up again ;D
Hm, is it possible to have a blank title, or a title of just spaces? I think that's the new error :D
And good luck with the Game!
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lol. Nah I think I'll let it the way it is, considering there's another topic that does that x.x
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Whats the progress on this? Still alive?
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It's a bit dormant due to the contest, but I had thoughts about working on it again lately. I just don't want to spend too much time on it only to find out I'll be too tired next weekend to start judging contest entries.
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Fair enough.
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So you will indeed start again after the contest judging ends?
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So you will indeed start again after the contest judging ends?
I hope so. This looked really fun :)
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So you will indeed start again after the contest judging ends?
I hope so. This looked really fun :)
I hope so too. It's one of the coolest looking games in progress right now. :)
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^Seconded.
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^Thirded
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Looks like quite a game. You ought to finish this.
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So you will indeed start again after the contest judging ends?
It will depend how things goes I guess. Stuff like this Summer or like last fall need to not all happen at once, so my motivation stays up. :P
And thanks guys.