Spectrum Computing

I just say that bullets would go out in alternate colours so the player could tell when collisions are going to be checked. This may reduce computing time and still feel precise enough for the player.

hikoki wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 5:59 pm I just say that bullets would go out in alternate colours so the player could tell when collisions are going to be checked. This may reduce computing time and still feel precise enough for the player.

Can you expand on this because it all sounds a bit illogical to be honest? When you say "alternate colours" do you mean alternating the game frames the bullets move on (half on even frames, half on odds) or something else because it's not clear what changing the colour of a bullet would have on accurate collision detection? Do you foresee a frame of the game where some bullets are not being checked for collision detection at all?

I don't know maybe you can disguise a ray by drawing a line as a gradient from light (bullet end) to dark (tail end) giving it an appearance of motion so that your fake bullets seem to travel a shorter distance than they actually do each time you check for collisions.

Done a bit more bunnycoding.
Looks like it'll be all too easy to drop down to four frames where there's a lot going-on on-screen.

I've added some code to draw wall-like obstructions like rock spikes sticking out from the top and bottom of the screen, a bit like what you see in DELTA on the C64. These are like double-height sprites but quicker to draw, so long as they stay in the top or bottom third of the screen and don't straddle the 2K boundaries. I've also started sketching a couple of alternate backdrops, though it's hard to make a screen look interesting while being sure to re-use enough tiles for it to store efficiently. I have made it so the backdrops can be re-coloured on the fly so they can be re-used for later levels.

I've also integrated the Special-FX tune player from Beepola to add some incidental bits of tune between levels. Not sure whether to go it alone or see if someone more experienced with it would like to tune-up my tuneage. For a main tune I found a useful website http://www.musicnotes.com that has lots of simple arrangements of pop songs and popular tunes - though maybe an original piece of music would be better?

I did find a bug in the player though - there's an ADD A,L and LD L,A to step through part of the tune or part of a percussion effect, to add A to HL. But if the table it's using spans a page break it can't do the sum in 8-bits and it crashes. Had to change it to LD D,0 / LD E,A / ADD HL,DE to do the 16-bit sum properly.

New scrolly level background, new logo graphics:



Just been debugging it for attribute clashes as it pixel scrolls... Quite a pain.

Looking great. I’ve always loved cyan on the Spectrum.

I'm drawing the backgrounds in ZX Paintbrush. They come out as three screens wide and a third high.
I've written myself a compressor so that it can pick out re-used 16x16 blocks and build up a map. So I try to use a lot of copy+paste when designing to keep it efficient. The pain in the arse is making sure that the attributes are all the same even in the character cells that don't have any visible pixels.
I'm trying to keep it to around 4:1 compression, so using around 40-48 blocks over 192 map cells on each level graphic.

I loosely based this view on the reddish interstitial night-time views of 'National City' from series 2 of DC's Supergirl, which I gather is really showing the cluster of towers that make up downtown Los Angeles, with the hills in front and the suburbs spreading out behind.

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:21 pm Looking great. I’ve always loved cyan on the Spectrum.

Always loved the Speccy colour palette, so vibrant, even given it's limitations. The C64 had more colours yes, as did the 464. But in those modes the pixels were widened and blocky to boot. The 464 had a nice palette, could put out some nice pics given the care it rarely got, but the palette of the 64 was awful, really earthy/muddy. I'll go for the attribute clash and the better resolution thanks.

Great pic, fantastic new logo. What's the crack with the new publisher name?

Sorry for the nitpick, but the shading makes the title skirt close to 'Ga Ga' to my eye.

How fancy is your compressor?

I think I needed my own label if I've made more than one game! 'Ionian' comes from sitting at a desk here while writing the Buzzsaw+ title screen multicolour code:



I've written some tools in Borland Visual C++. The background one loads a .scr, then cuts it up into 16x16 tiles. You'll notice the whole thing uses the same 25% offest stipple, so each tile can be shrunk down to 8x8 pixels and 2x2 attributes. (The scroll routine expands them out again into alternate pixels on alternate lines).
The compressor then compares each tile with any that it's already done and replaces them in the map with the previous tile ID. Then the map and the minimum tile set are saved as defb data statements.

I've also written a simple run-time compressor for the logo that can skip empty characters and re-use attributes to save data space. It's not doing the most efficient algorithmic compression you can get, but it's quicker to decode by using something simple that works in whole bytes rather than a compressed bit-stream.

DouglasReynholm wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:42 pm

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:21 pm Looking great. I’ve always loved cyan on the Spectrum.

Always loved the Speccy colour palette, so vibrant, even given it's limitations. The C64 had more colours yes, as did the 464. But in those modes the pixels were widened and blocky to boot. The 464 had a nice palette, could put out some nice pics given the care it rarely got, but the palette of the 64 was awful, really earthy/muddy. I'll go for the attribute clash and the better resolution thanks.

Wow, just 3 posts and we've already got to blocky / earthy / muddy commode ...
I like the Spectrum palette too, but I never liked color clash and I often wanted to have orange color and more gray shades, but I learned to live with it.
All 8bit computers have their limitations, even the best among them as MSX 2 and BBC Master.
Blockiness has never been a issue for me back in the day on old crt TVs, even in multicolour mode, and especially not in hires 320x200 resolution.
If the colors are washed out, increase the saturation, how difficult it can be...
After all I'm not playing a palette, but good games and c64 and Spectrum are the best on that matter.

Joefish wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2019 6:07 am 'Ionian' comes from...

Oh, right! When I saw the graphic I read it as "eye-onion"!

Joefish wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2019 6:07 am I think I needed my own label if I've made more than one game! 'Ionian' comes from sitting at a desk here while writing the Buzzsaw+ title screen multicolour code.

I just call it natural major. There’s no need to go all fancy with Ionian or Aeolian. The rest of them make sense, of course, but these two—come on!

Skegpool is looking splendid in that pic Joe

Eek. The chemist in me read it as 'ionion', which I thought was a great name!

Well, the confusion is understandable; the blue domes are more typical of Dodecanese architecture than Ionian.
Anyway, is 'Ga-Ga BunnyGun' so bad?
I've made a few tweaks, but making the 'o's rounder means either a bigger mask or the odd white pixel on the blue logo...

Maybe if I make the dash a dot, each 'o' can be a pixel wider, then I can try to make them look a bit rounder...
I could extend the whole text a few pixels to the left, but I originally kept it in line with the top of the text below... Not sure if it needs to be...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2019 12:18 pm Skegpool is looking splendid in that pic Joe

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the pic was Star Wars episode One.

Yeah, I'm that geek.

That's not quite Naboo, but I have some pictures from yonks ago taken in the Italian lakes; they were used in Episode III...

Joefish wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2019 11:33 am That's not quite Naboo, but I have some pictures from yonks ago taken in the Italian lakes; they were used in Episode III...

I've not heard the word 'Yonk' used for years!!! Out of interest, how long do you think a yonk is, more than a Donkey, but less than ages?

Well, I asume 1 'yonk' = 1 'donkey's year'. But I've no idea how long 'donkey's years' are either.

It's conventionally a long time, though a donkey's life expectancy is less than a human's, so it's not as if it would be an extension in the way that 'dog years' are assumed to be shorter than a 'human year'. And the idea that it's actually 'donkey's ears' as rhyming slang for 'years' is invalidated by it being a phrase that long pre-dates rhyming slang. There may be some pun in a donkey's years being as long as a donkey's ears, but that's long lost to history. So f*ck knows, basically.

OK, you can now shoot enemies and they explode and die!
And there are solid rock obstacles that block your shots.
The player still can't collide with anything. And the enemies don't move or fire back.

Still, while you're waiting, check out these pictures of some cheeky cosplay bunny action from GEEKxGIRLS:
http://geekxgirls.com/article.php?ID=3902

First go at the Go-Go BunnyGun loading screen now up on ZXArt:



https://zxart.ee/eng/authors/j/joefish/

Looking good! Although perhaps the title logo could have another coloque to improve its readability

Thanks.

I know what you mean - there isn't much contrast between white and cyan. But blue on white is too dark.
I've tried moving it down below the blue bit at least. If I could do it blue-on-cyan it might look good, but that makes it very difficult to have the cyan sky stipple down to white.

Maybe I can redraw it to better fit character squares, so I can then recolour it. Here I've re-used the logo I'd drawn to use in the game, with an outline added because it was inverted, and that made has made it spill over into more characters. I might have to scrap the in-game one anyway, or shrink it, as I'm running out of memory!

Argh sorry Joe—I'm not very keen on this screen. The bottom segment is decent, especially the outlines of the hair and blades of grass, but the green to white of the sky looks totally wrong to me.

I'm not averse to the theme, far from it, but how does it fit the game?