Spectrum Computing

What about a menu option to choose difficulty (easy, medium, hard, arcade)? This way, your game will appeal to everybody!

Put some indication of chosen difficulty in the score table (perhaps show score in a different color) so records from different difficulty levels won't be mixed up.

Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Thu Mar 08, 2018 3:45 pm What about a menu option to choose difficulty (easy, medium, hard, arcade)? This way, your game will appeal to everybody!

Put some indication of chosen difficulty in the score table (perhaps show score in a different color) so records from different difficulty levels won't be mixed up.

In a near future, I plan to have a difficulty setting, since that was also possible in the Neo Geo BIOS settings, and it also helps new players.

I have my own settings for now (mainly line drop speed, and percentage of Power Ups).
But I intend to reverse engineer the Arcade difficulty settings, which is another can of worms

Since there was a request, here is a video of me playing Extruder single player mode, without any changes (easy mode for me )

https://youtu.be/WwGpBG8jHOg

NOTE: The original RZX file has the entire play until I reached the bug I mentioned before (stops dropping balls for a while).
However, after converting the RZX to an FMF and then to AVI, it breaks into several files since AVI does not support files larger than 1.07GB, hence the youtube video is shorter, since it's just the first part of five parts.

Now that the context voting is over, it would be nice to get some unbiased feedback about the game.

As a developer I welcome that kind of constructive feedback.

Don't be shy

One interesting mode could be two players competing on the same screen who are given one colour each. The winner would be the first one to clear all the bubbles with assigned colour. I think this mode would make players plan their moves.

hikoki wrote: ↑Sat Mar 17, 2018 12:05 pm One interesting mode could be two players competing on the same screen who are given one colour each. The winner would be the first one to clear all the bubbles with assigned colour. I think this mode would make players plan their moves.

That would be quite odd, since sharing a screen (i.e. same play area) almost always implies colaborative play, but then only one would win.

However, as a game mode it wouldn't make much sense if power ups are included, since a power up does exactly that, burst every ball with the same color as the power up.

That would be quite odd, since sharing a screen (i.e. same play area) almost always implies colaborative play, but then only one would win.

It'd be odd for sure imagine a Pang game where players had two type of weapons, for bursting and pushing bubbles.

However, as a game mode it wouldn't make much sense if power ups are included, since a power up does exactly that, burst every ball with the same color as the power up.

Of course, there should be a few rules and restrictions for this mode to work. I haven't give it much thought. Probably another rule should have to be that players couldn't take balls with the opponent's colour.

hikoki wrote: ↑Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:08 pm I've just reminded one video I watched the other day where a few spec-chums tried to play some games online using the multiplayer feature from Emuzwin. Perhaps the Pausing mechanic would help to reduce lag to play 1on1 online.

Spoiler

[media]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGmezJ4UsM#[/media]

Hi! That was me!

That was pretty much improvised. I was blind-testing Spectrum games and the discussion on the chat shifted to online multiplayer, so, I fired-up EmuZWin, and sent it to the viewers.

About the lag, take in account that I was acting as a host in Argentina for two users on Spain, and also streaming, so, latency was high, around half a second or so. Latency between close peers is minimal, but still noticeable if you seek for it.

Back to the stream, latency or not, the experience for both the Spanish users was very good. They completed a full Match Day 2 including the extra time.

Thanks for posting that, you made my day

druellan wrote: ↑Sun Apr 15, 2018 2:02 am Thanks for posting that, you made my day

You are welcome.
Broadband is more usual nowadays. I hope you can organise online matches on this forum

hikoki wrote: ↑Mon Apr 16, 2018 8:31 pm Broadband is more usual nowadays. I hope you can organise online matches on this forum

Thanks!, and yes, I'm looking for a Match Day event, sadly, I can't host it myself because of the latency, but I'm encouraging the Spanish community to see if anyone can host a tournament.

Meantime I'll keep exploring EmuZWin, that seems to be regaining some attention with a couple of hacks that improve stability, and problematic games are now more or less playable o netplay:




There are also more emulators out there. Speccy Emulator is another one, but works only on the local network (BUT perhaps using a VPN?), and now I'm testing Plus-F (http://plus-f.socialthingy.com/) with mixed results, but the new version seems to improve things.

Also, other people on the community are experimenting using Parsec and Spectaculator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0r1mpygUTY

[mention]druellan[/mention] Another option could be Retroarch's Netplay.
Simply Austin made a nice Retropie image for Spectrum games.
According to this video review, netplay performs much better on the PC than the Pi
https://youtu.be/jbmyO-iFJ0g

Oh, thanks for that!

A couple of member use Retroarch for streaming, I'm going to ask about it, but if I remember correctly, the FUSE core for Retroarch is not Netplay capable. I might be wrong, though.

druellan wrote: ↑Tue Apr 17, 2018 1:17 pm ..the FUSE core for Retroarch is not Netplay capable. I might be wrong, though.

There could be some way to install other emulators? something to ask the Retroarch developers.
The Pi version seems to support FBZX and two Fuse core versions : https://github.com/retropie/retropie-se ... X-Spectrum

From the netplay-faq on Libretro's site

Which cores work for netplay?
* On a technical level, every core that supports save states should work but the performance requirements may be too high for it to work in any practical level.

Save states.. Is not RZX and rollback what this is about? Maybe [mention]serbalgi[/mention] , [mention]Fred[/mention] et al. have overlooked the possibility to support Netplay on Retroarch
I guess Libretro only supports open source emulators. Apart from Fuse, another one that supports RZX is Unreal Speccy Portable. By the way, [mention]PeterJ[/mention] USP has an addon for Chrome browser that may be useful to support playing online.

Interesting! Save states is the way EmuZWin does it AFAIK, and Plus-F is doing something similar but fragmenting the packets to improve latency.

hikoki wrote: ↑Tue Apr 17, 2018 4:39 pm Save states.. Is not RZX and rollback what this is about? Maybe @serbalgi , @Fred et al. have overlooked the possibility to support Netplay on Retroarch

The fuse team don’t make the libretro plugin for Fuse, I do know that the person that does was investigating upgrading it to a newer version and I think it could be expanded to support lots more of these features (snapshot states are absolutely possible as far as I can see).

hikoki wrote: ↑Tue Apr 17, 2018 4:39 pm @PeterJ USP has an addon for Chrome browser that may be useful to support playing online.

I'm going to check that!

druellan wrote: ↑Wed Apr 18, 2018 12:44 pm

hikoki wrote: ↑Tue Apr 17, 2018 4:39 pm @PeterJ USP has an addon for Chrome browser that may be useful to support playing online.

I'm going to check that!

Yes, I didn't know about this either because my old PCs don't support Chrome. NaCl means native client. C/Cplus emulators running natively on the Browser? this could be useful for other emulators which are coded in C/Cplus like Fuse and Zesarux

Fred wrote: ↑Tue Apr 17, 2018 11:14 pm The fuse team don’t make the libretro plugin for Fuse, I do know that the person that does was investigating upgrading it to a newer version and I think it could be expanded to support lots more of these features (snapshot states are absolutely possible as far as I can see).

Thanks for considering "snapshots states" !!

I've learnt about Fuse-Libretro
https://github.com/libretro/fuse-libretro
supports save states. Could this be used for Retroarch's Netplay?