Old Tower Preview

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DenisGrachev
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Old Tower Preview

Post by DenisGrachev »

My new game with smooth colorfull scroll under construction :)

[media]https://youtu.be/AMEOWFUb4SA[/media]
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R-Tape
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by R-Tape »

Holy crap! Looks great. The Spectrum's first complete multicoloured scroller.

I can't tell from the vid, is that bicolour or just double resolution? Your own engine?
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DenisGrachev
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by DenisGrachev »

R-Tape wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:50 am Holy crap! Looks great. The Spectrum's first complete multicoloured scroller.
I can't tell from the vid, is that bicolour or just double resolution? Your own engine?
It's an 8x1 multicolor + pixels scorll :) So a camera can move with any speed, even with 1 vertical pixel without any clashing.
It's my own engine and it works on 48k,128k and pentagon.
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Pegaz
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Pegaz »

Great stuff!
Is it possible to make smooth pixel scrolling shooter with this engine?
Some kind of multicolour Uridium type of game, for example...
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djnzx48
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by djnzx48 »

This looks really impressive. Do you scroll the attributes by jumping into the middle of the drawing loop at different offsets? (forgive me if this sounds dumb, I'm no expert on multicolour.) I'm amazed you still have time left over to do the pixel scrolling.
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DenisGrachev
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by DenisGrachev »

Pegaz wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:46 am Great stuff!
Is it possible to make smooth pixel scrolling shooter with this engine?
Some kind of multicolour Uridium type of game, for example...
I think yep, why not.In a very narrow corridor :) Keep in mind that horizontal clashing still exist.The engine not an universal soultion but i'll post a sources with a release to dig in!
djnzx48 wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:00 am This looks really impressive. Do you scroll the attributes by jumping into the middle of the drawing loop at different offsets? (forgive me if this sounds dumb, I'm no expert on multicolour.) I'm amazed you still have time left over to do the pixel scrolling.
Thanks! Nope, attributes drawed from linear buffer and all an "engine" it's unrolled ..... pop hl: ld (addr),hl ..... mostly :) The multicolor zone not a big, just an 12 cells width, tower walls drawed without multiclor but gives an illusion of 14 cells width. In a top border we draw a top 110 lines of pixels from previous frame before beam. During a multicolor loop tower walls drawed + multicolor. After multicolor we draw an new frame for 50 botom pixel lines after beam so in a next frame we have a picture. Pretty simple :)
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Ralf »

It's a narrow corridor but it looks great in action!

And it'really impressive that in year 2018, 36 years after Zx Spectrum was created we still have games that push limits and do things that were never done before.

So Denis, as you have written in the video - may the Speccy force be with you :) I'll be looking forward to play this game.
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Looks brilliant. It’s time someone took Jason’s idea to the logical conclusion—i.e. made an actual playable game!
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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MatGubbins
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by MatGubbins »

A dash of S.I.P, a bit of pinball, a leg of Snake and a whole lot of scrolling colour! Looks great and I can't wait!
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Post by Morkin »

Looks incredible... :o
My Speccy site: thirdharmoniser.com
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Einar Saukas
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Einar Saukas »

Awesome! :)
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DenisGrachev
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by DenisGrachev »

Ralf wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 10:00 am And it'really impressive that in year 2018, 36 years after Zx Spectrum was created we still have games that push limits and do things that were never done before.
So Denis, as you have written in the video - may the Speccy force be with you :) I'll be looking forward to play this game.
omg 36 years, it's more than all my life :0 i'm 35 only :) Thanks,Ralf!
MatGubbins wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 12:17 pm A dash of S.I.P, a bit of pinball, a leg of Snake and a whole lot of scrolling colour! Looks great and I can't wait!
and a bit of Multidude - up to 8 players than can help each one, and a bit of Twinlight with reflectors, and and and...
stay tuned!
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Post by Alessandro »

Denis, you already have a really impressive record behind you, and this new effort of yours seems to go beyond even such high standards. I can't wait to try it ;)
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by djnzx48 »

DenisGrachev wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 9:04 am
djnzx48 wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:00 am This looks really impressive. Do you scroll the attributes by jumping into the middle of the drawing loop at different offsets? (forgive me if this sounds dumb, I'm no expert on multicolour.) I'm amazed you still have time left over to do the pixel scrolling.
Thanks! Nope, attributes drawed from linear buffer and all an "engine" it's unrolled ..... pop hl: ld (addr),hl ..... mostly :) The multicolor zone not a big, just an 12 cells width, tower walls drawed without multiclor but gives an illusion of 14 cells width. In a top border we draw a top 110 lines of pixels from previous frame before beam. During a multicolor loop tower walls drawed + multicolor. After multicolor we draw an new frame for 50 botom pixel lines after beam so in a next frame we have a picture. Pretty simple :)
That's clever! It looks like the beam is overtaking the drawing and making the right wall lag one frame behind. Would it be any better if the right wall was drawn before the left wall, or if you drew one line ahead of the raster? It's still looking great regardless!
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by DenisGrachev »

djnzx48 wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:35 am That's clever! It looks like the beam is overtaking the drawing and making the right wall lag one frame behind. Would it be any better if the right wall was drawn before the left wall, or if you drew one line ahead of the raster? It's still looking great regardless!
Yep, walls drawing fixed by swap left and right as you mention :) i seen it first time only on a video
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Joefish
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Joefish »

Looks good.

My stuff just shifts the attributes and mostly uses those to represent the scenery. I've developed a scroller that re-renders the attributes into the buffer for each frame, for making a level from tile-maps. The pixels stay still, but interact with the attributes to make patterns that appear to move. (Although my next game won't use multicolour at all!).

I guess that you're effectively 'hardware-scrolling' the attributes by changing the start address in the buffer used by your renderer, so that you only have to redraw the attributes for characters that have moved. But you do have to redraw ALL the pixels EVERY time.

One trick I found is to end each line of attributes in the buffer with the address of the next line, for you to read with just another POP. That way, you can make the buffer wrap-around as the last line just points back to the first.
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by 5MinuteRetro »

This does look spectacular and I really cannot begin to understand how clever folks like your good self manage this. I've perhaps wondered this before on this forum but this comment makes me wonder anew...
Ralf wrote: Tue Oct 30, 2018 10:00 am And it'really impressive that in year 2018, 36 years after Zx Spectrum was created we still have games that push limits and do things that were never done before.
...why all this serious multi-colour stuff arrived only recently. Of course I understand that there were lots of rainbow engines back in the day but BiFrost/Nirvana and now this appear -- at least to an idiot like me -- like a quantum leap. All of this was possible during the Spectrum's heydey so... why didn't it happen? I guess that the platform petered out/died before this stuff could be incorporated into commercial titles?
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Joefish »

Commercial titles were all chasing the latest arcade game, which were all about scrolling and huge sprites.
That, and it takes far too long to perfect a multicolour graphics game engine. No-one would have paid a games programmer to spend that long on one game.
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by 5MinuteRetro »

Joefish wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:02 pm Commercial titles were all chasing the latest arcade game, which were all about scrolling and huge sprites.
That, and it takes far too long to perfect a multicolour graphics game engine. No-one would have paid a games programmer to spend that long on one game.
I don't doubt those commercial pressures were a factor. Equally, technical superiority/advance can be a selling point -- see Knight Lore or Driller, for example. The latter in particular was pretty awful to play but it scored plenty of hype off the back of its 3D sheen (no idea if it made loads of sales but the numerous follow-ups that employed the same engine would suggest there was sufficient commercial interest).
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by Turrican »

Genius!
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by AndyC »

Much better cross development and debugging tools help enormously too. Plus vastly superior documentation about all the subtle timing variations that have come about from getting emulators to run every demo, on every hardware configuration, to a cycle accurate behaviour. That kind of thing just wasn't around back in the day and so each developer (or at best development company) would have needed to discover it all for themselves.
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by R-Tape »

5MinuteRetro wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 2:41 pm All of this was possible during the Spectrum's heydey so... why didn't it happen? I guess that the platform petered out/died before this stuff could be incorporated into commercial titles?
Joefish wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 4:02 pm Commercial titles were all chasing the latest arcade game, which were all about scrolling and huge sprites.
That, and it takes far too long to perfect a multicolour graphics game engine. No-one would have paid a games programmer to spend that long on one game.
AndyC wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:00 pm Much better cross development and debugging tools help enormously too. Plus vastly superior documentation about all the subtle timing variations that have come about from getting emulators to run every demo, on every hardware configuration, to a cycle accurate behaviour. That kind of thing just wasn't around back in the day and so each developer (or at best development company) would have needed to discover it all for themselves.
I'm not so sure. I'm surprised that multicolour games didn't gain traction BITD. In 1987 we had this Rainbow Engine (a YS Star Tip), and it's a complete multicolour engine for 16 columns, so most of the hard work had been done; I wonder why no-one made the leap of imagination to use it with sprites etc (or did but never created it). For starters, it seems obvious—now—to use it for static multicolour blocks and have a monochrome background in which you move the pixels.

Even though the trend was towards the latest arcade/film conversion, surely a multicolour game would still have been popular in '87 or even '88?

I keep meaning to put together a thread about the history of multicolour. I'll try and do that tomorrow.

Denis's next step is to invent a time machine and take this game with him...
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by AndyC »

Unless I'm entirely mis-reading the documentation, that only allows one colour across each row - which is interesting as a kind of "raster bar" effect, but not necessarily for a game. I think it would be quite difficult to use that in a practical sense (though I'd be interested if somebody wanted to try). It's quite a long way off from allowing close to arbitrary colour changes at horizontal points (as per modern engines), even for a small area of the screen and being able to do that effectively is what unlocks much of the benefits of such an engine.
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by R-Tape »

AndyC wrote: Wed Oct 31, 2018 9:29 pm Unless I'm entirely mis-reading the documentation, that only allows one colour across each row - which is interesting as a kind of "raster bar" effect, but not necessarily for a game. I think it would be quite difficult to use that in a practical sense (though I'd be interested if somebody wanted to try). It's quite a long way off from allowing close to arbitrary colour changes at horizontal points (as per modern engines), even for a small area of the screen and being able to do that effectively is what unlocks much of the benefits of such an engine.
No you're right—it's one colour per line, but there's still loads you can do around that. Denis's game is working around limitations in a similar way.

I had a very quick play and manage this mockup (just a static screen):

Image

You could even have coloured sprites—just design the game around it, as Denis has done with Old Tower.
(though I'd be interested if somebody wanted to try)
Doing a 'what if' is tempting!

[mention]DenisGrachev[/mention], apologies, I'm taking this off topic. When I start a general multicolour thread tomorrow, I'll move some posts to it, if needed.
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Re: Old Tower Preview

Post by MatGubbins »

SuperColour - a type-in from Your Sinclair, June 86 (Ghost n Goblins cover) is the one that you're after.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... id=0008809
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