Join us on Discord!
You can help CodeWalrus stay online by donating here.

Alien Breed 5 Episode III: Impact

Started by JamesV, December 21, 2015, 01:37:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 3 Guests are viewing this topic.

alexgt

I want to be a beta tester ^.^ keep the updates rolling ;)
  • Calculators owned: Ti-84+, Ti-Nspire, Hp Prime, Broken HP Prime, HP 48SX

123outerme

I understand about the CSE. If you ever decide to make a CSE version, I wouldn't mind testing, not at all.
  • Calculators owned: TI-84+CSE, TI-nspire Clickpad, TI-84+SE

Dream of Omnimaga

If you ever make a CSE version JamesV, you will probably have to ditch vertical scrolling or make movement so that you move tile by tile instead of pixel by pixel. In the first scenario, the game would be like Super Mario Bros 2 USA in which there is horizontal scrolling, but vertical movement is Zelda style.

And I see about 1bpp. By the way I didn't know the CE supported anything else than 256 and 65536 colors O.O (the CSE only supported 8 and 65536, IIRC). But yeah, my suggestion was mostly tile by tile rather than the entire screen, where each tile would have two colors each, but the said colors would be different from one tile to another (eg floor vs walls). But I guess having one color change for each level would work too.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

JamesV

#18
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on December 25, 2015, 02:59:17 PM
If you ever make a CSE version JamesV, you will probably have to ditch vertical scrolling or make movement so that you move tile by tile instead of pixel by pixel. In the first scenario, the game would be like Super Mario Bros 2 USA in which there is horizontal scrolling, but vertical movement is Zelda style.

And I see about 1bpp. By the way I didn't know the CE supported anything else than 256 and 65536 colors O.O (the CSE only supported 8 and 65536, IIRC). But yeah, my suggestion was mostly tile by tile rather than the entire screen, where each tile would have two colors each, but the said colors would be different from one tile to another (eg floor vs walls). But I guess having one color change for each level would work too.
If I couldn't do it smooth scrolling, I wouldn't bother I don't think. One of my earlier Alien Breed games back in 1999 was tile by tile, and it wasn't well suited to the style of gameplay. But I'm fairly confident that smooth scrolling monochrome would be possible, which MateoConLechuga demonstrated by having a simple port of an earlier version Alien Breed 5 running on the CSE :)

With some assistance from MateoConLechuga, the 3x scaling/drawing routine is now running substantially faster on the TI-84+CE. Thanks Mateo!


alexgt

Nice @JamesV ! The scrolling looks amazing on the CE ;)
  • Calculators owned: Ti-84+, Ti-Nspire, Hp Prime, Broken HP Prime, HP 48SX

JamesV

Quote from: alexgt on January 03, 2016, 06:42:52 AM
Nice @JamesV ! The scrolling looks amazing on the CE ;)
Thanks @alexgt! I'm certainly happy that it's at least functioning nicely and at a decent speed. I'm excited to see how far I can potentially push it! :)

I haven't done much work on this for the past week as I've been enjoying a summer week off work, but current status is that after many hours of work, the source now cross-compiles for both the 83+/84+ app version and the 84+CE program version. Now I just need to start stepping through the 84+CE version and get the game to a playable state.

alexgt

Awesome! how hard will it be to make the CE playable? is most of the code already working?
  • Calculators owned: Ti-84+, Ti-Nspire, Hp Prime, Broken HP Prime, HP 48SX

novenary

Damn, that's fast. The color screen has an advantage of having much less motion blur than the monochrome models which is great for scrolling games. Good luck with the port. :)

JamesV

Quote from: Streetwalrus on January 04, 2016, 03:37:32 PM
Damn, that's fast. The color screen has an advantage of having much less motion blur than the monochrome models which is great for scrolling games. Good luck with the port. :)
Thanks - yes it looks quite nice on the colour screen vs. the old monochrome screens.

Quote from: alexgt on January 04, 2016, 02:22:19 PM
Awesome! how hard will it be to make the CE playable? is most of the code already working?
I'm getting close to getting the game somewhat playable on the 84+CE, there are just a lot of little Z80 -> eZ80 things to patch up (eg. "ld h,0 \ ld l,a" needing to be updated to "ld hl,0 \ ld l,a"  etc.)

In terms of the new campaign, Episode III: Impact, it will be a little different to Episodes I & II. Instead of just being a linear 12 level campaign, it will have multiple routes available. The current plan is to have around 30 levels, with a single play through taking you through anywhere between 11-14 levels depending on the path you take (around 5-6 different paths available). The paths that take less levels will have a slightly higher difficulty curve than the paths that take more levels. This one won't be set on a space station either, it will be on a planet surface & multiple towers, ala Alien Breed: Tower Assault.

I've also got at least one more enemy getting added in (the "security guard" enemy from the previous Alien Breed IV game of the early 2000's that I did), and I have ideas for another 2 possible enemies that I haven't implemented before that I think would be cool :)

Dream of Omnimaga

I had completely forgot about that last video. I was repliying a week or so ago, but then ran out of time. Good job so far and I'm amazed at the speed. Will the 3 episodes be available in one game, by the way?
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

JamesV

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 07, 2016, 04:45:21 AM
I had completely forgot about that last video. I was repliying a week or so ago, but then ran out of time. Good job so far and I'm amazed at the speed. Will the 3 episodes be available in one game, by the way?
Thanks, it's looking good so far speed-wise. Yes correct, the 83+/84+ flash app version will have all 3 campaigns stored as part of the app, whilst the 84+CE version will (most likely) have them stored in external appvars :)

JamesV

The game now runs and the player can move around a level. Enemies / shooting, etc. are still disabled, but should be working in the next week or two. I haven't had a whole lot of spare time to work on this lately, but I'm enjoying chipping away at it bit by bit :)

Text & menus aren't properly implemented yet, but I'll (most likely) be overhauling them on the TI-84+CE version to have higher definition splash screens and font.


Dream of Omnimaga

That speed is impressive as always. Nice job. However, do you mean you'll use high res fonts in-game? Because if you do that, you really need to be careful about your font choices. Some HQ fonts won't mix well with low-resolution graphics, while some others will do.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

MateoConLechuga

Nice work, and looking good! You may want to check out mon2color for the TIOS drop-in text drawing routine from monochrome calculators, but it looks like you will be making it differently, so neat! Good luck! :)

JamesV

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 15, 2016, 08:03:13 AM
That speed is impressive as always. Nice job. However, do you mean you'll use high res fonts in-game? Because if you do that, you really need to be careful about your font choices. Some HQ fonts won't mix well with low-resolution graphics, while some others will do.
The fonts generally don't appear on screen at the same time as the low resolution graphics, so I think it will be fine :)

Quote from: MateoConLechuga on January 15, 2016, 10:03:04 PM
Nice work, and looking good! You may want to check out mon2color for the TIOS drop-in text drawing routine from monochrome calculators, but it looks like you will be making it differently, so neat! Good luck! :)
Thanks, Mateo! I had considered getting in touch with you regarding your solution for the CSE, but I just decided it would look nice in this instance to go a bit more high definition for the menus and text screens, etc. Not that I've implemented any of that yet, I'll get around to it though. I'm still working on getting the essential in-game code to run properly, which is just taking a bit longer due to being back at work hah :/

Powered by EzPortal