SpritesMind.Net

Stef wrote: Mon Feb 19, 2018 2:59 pm as normally you will never update 768 tiles at once !

I was thinking the same, but it is just twelve 64x64 explosions animating on the same frame, for instance, right?
So I think it will be needed, for sure.
But sure, if it comes to it that I need that mem I can just make sure the frame updates are divided between frames.
Will leave that optimisation for later, though, the sprite engine seems to be handling whatever I throw at it at the moment.

It would be better to pre-upload that big explosion animations to the VRAM then :p
But if it works in the current state then you can keep it that way for now

768 tiles use about 24KB. The maximum you can update on a vblank is about 4KB. If you try to update that much at once the only thing you will accomplish is a slowdown of 5 or more frames. Not playable.

On solution is to fragment it into several packets. Other is to upload it during loading. BUT using 768 tiles for a explosion is wasting half of the video memory just for explosions! Remember I said you will learn tricks to consume less memory?

Miquel wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2018 3:57 pm 768 tiles use about 24KB. The maximum you can update on a vblank is about 4KB. If you try to update that much at once the only thing you will accomplish is a slowdown of 5 or more frames. Not playable.

Well, ofcourse you will only have this at boss explosions and the like. It was just an example of when the sprite engine might crash if you haven't allocated enough.

Although it feels like progress is slow, I've actually managed to get quite a few things made to the game.
Got the music for stage 2 (and 5, and 8 and so on, I think) from Johan, so I implemented that.
Got a few new enemies in. And we now have "energy dots" as well.

Posted a twitter post the day before yesterday, with a animated gif showing off some of what's in there now. Just hit me that it didn't contain the elemental attack I've made. Well, maybe in the next one, then.

Turns out you can access the twitter videos directly, so here's the animated gif...in almost full screen!
https://twitter.com/i/videos/967440541582610432


And here's a still from a day later version:



Will try to focus on getting the elemental attack upgrade/pickup system in place/figured out next.
Did I say I commissioned someone to do the cover art? Looking forward to that as a kid before Christmas.

Aaaand, at last, I think we have a name for the game! We will let it sink in a bit before revealing it, I think. Could turn out it sucks...

Damn! That's looking good! Still very reminiscent of Beast, but in a good way.

Shadow of the Beast was a revolutionary game back then, a showcase of the goodness of Amiga computers. Keep it up!

Chilly Willy wrote: Tue Feb 27, 2018 8:09 pm Damn! That's looking good! Still very reminiscent of Beast, but in a good way.

Miquel wrote: Thu Mar 01, 2018 1:01 am Shadow of the Beast was a revolutionary game back then, a showcase of the goodness of Amiga computers. Keep it up!

So, then just for fun, I started on a Roger Dean tileset to make it more shadow of the beasty.



Might, actually, keep it. Just need to tone down the saturation in some parts.

Also, just implemented secrets. Yay, secrets ftw!

New video with the current state of things.
Which is really great for spotting bugs and such. At one point there a strange squares during an explosion in the ceiling, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDgZIGNdwzY

New elemental, the fire one! Also, the new name for these attacks are now Transmutation Attack. Full metal alchemist ftw!
Still haven't quite worked out how the transmutation usage system should work, though. Need to get that sorted asap.



When the transmutations are fired there are sometimes slowdown if there are multiple enemies hit during it. A problem? Hell no!

Loved the explosion in Mystical Defender so now I've got my own version of it. And I think it works quite well.
This roger dean level is quite tricky, since you're fooled a bit by the background looking like some of the enemies.

Still thinking about what to do with the back layer in the stages. I am required to add parallax in that one as well, right? It's kind of how it is supposed to be done, since ALL games kind of have it. Like moving the clouds and stuff.

It's coming along rather well. You're getting a decent number of different enemies, and things animate nicely.

Is there lag in the sound effects or is it just Youtube on my end?

Chilly Willy wrote: Sat Mar 10, 2018 3:41 pm It's coming along rather well. You're getting a decent number of different enemies, and things animate nicely.

Aiming for ~30 enemies for the demo, 17 has been started on. Need to step it up.
None of the bosses are in, either (they appear but do nothing). I really need to get going with that, too.

Sik wrote: Sat Mar 10, 2018 4:39 pm Is there lag in the sound effects or is it just Youtube on my end?

I think you're right, actually. Never reflected on that, thanks!
There was a small delay in the gold-pickup sound in the wav, removed that but it didn't do any difference. The explosions-sound (temp borrowed from sonic via sgdk) doesn't seem to have a delay, though, does it? This needs investigation.

Also, now we have per-tile-row scrolling in the game. Needed to redo my map-editor quite a bit to have it export to the new format.
This also means that the back and front layers are now two totally different entities. So I can combine them in any way I want.
So the first "western mountains" bkg might appear at a later stage again, but with a different palette and with a different foreground.

To be honest it's already quite impressive in the current state ! Are you using the sprite engine all the way ? in this case i'm not surprised you experienced slowdowns here and there, you are already doing quite a lot with it, the fire special attack throw many sprites on screen ! I need to work on sprite splitting with rescomp as currently it does a pretty bad job and waste lot of bandwidth :-/ maybe tweaking your sprites can help too (disable auto visibility if you use it or static allocation where you can)...
Still, this is really impressive and you make quick progresses each time, i'm impatient to see what will come next ^^

Stef wrote: Sat Mar 10, 2018 8:22 pm To be honest it's already quite impressive in the current state ! Are you using the sprite engine all the way ? in this case i'm not surprised you experienced slowdowns here and there, you are already doing quite a lot with it, the fire special attack throw many sprites on screen ! I need to work on sprite splitting with rescomp as currently it does a pretty bad job and waste lot of bandwidth :-/ maybe tweaking your sprites can help too (disable auto visibility if you use it or static allocation where you can)...

Yep, sprite engine with auto-visibility for all but the HUD.
Will need to benchmark and calculate when it comes to the explosions and cpu/vram usage. Maybe just have a system that limits the number of animations of explosions per frame? Anyway, I'll leave this til last, though, when I have all of the info I need to make decisions on it. At the time being, I'll just let it slow down and make notes of it.

Stef wrote: Sat Mar 10, 2018 8:22 pm Still, this is really impressive and you make quick progresses each time, i'm impatient to see what will come next ^^

Thanks, it's already more to it than i was yesterday and I'm having so much fun with it.

Is there any possibility of a demo?, even if it is just a really small one.