Game mock-up graphics and ideas

u/JWinslow23 April 15, 2016, 05:53:09 AM

North & South, a Civil War sim, on TI-84+.

Hopefully I can make this. I'd love to see it!

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 15, 2016, 05:57:18 AM

I am definitively curious about how this could be done. My main concern is flood-filling that gray area. The only way I can think of is to designate one point in the gray area and then fill each pixel one by one from left to right and top to bottom. But that might be quite slow to render for large patches of sea.

THe lines would probably not be too hard. After all, I once drew the Zelda logo in pure BASIC (although I used an ASM lib to setup 160x240 mode beforehand using Stat Plot:

u/JWinslow23 April 15, 2016, 06:09:33 AM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 15, 2016, 05:57:18 AM
I am definitively curious about how this could be done. My main concern is flood-filling that gray area. The only way I can think of is to designate one point in the gray area and then fill each pixel one by one from left to right and top to bottom. But that might be quite slow to render for large patches of sea.

THe lines would probably not be too hard. After all, I once drew the Zelda logo in pure BASIC (although I used an ASM lib to setup 160x240 mode beforehand using Stat Plot:

I would not do anything like flood filling (unless I could get away with each area being entirely rectangular

). I'd love to have it in one form that I could just draw on command without having to go through a "rendering" process every time I wanted to draw it. Perhaps I could turn the graphics all into tiles, but the state boundaries could be vector graphics?

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 15, 2016, 06:12:43 AM

Yeah but with vector graphics, how would you draw a large pool of gray water? I am a bit confused. I guess you could always have vector graphics for state boundaries, though.

The other idea could be to use a massive image but with RLE compression. A tile-map would definitively work too, but what you would need to do is make a large picture mockup, convert it into a tilemap using Mappy, for example, then export the tileset (and if you can convert the map data into calc format, then export that too)

u/JWinslow23 April 15, 2016, 06:16:48 AM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 15, 2016, 06:12:43 AM
Yeah but with vector graphics, how would you draw a large pool of gray water? I am a bit confused. I guess you could always have vector graphics for state boundaries, though.

The other idea could be to use a massive image but with RLE compression. A tile-map would definitively work too, but what you would need to do is make a large picture mockup, convert it into a tilemap using Mappy, for example, then export the tileset (and if you can convert the map data into calc format, then export that too)

I mean, the tiles are for all the graphics EXCEPT state boundaries and rivers. Including the water, the western United States, and that bomb throwing Hispanic guy's napping place.

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 15, 2016, 06:18:15 AM

Oh I see, so the map itself would be graphical and just the borders would be vectorial.

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 16, 2016, 06:37:39 AM

Here is a mockup of what Metroid could look like with CE Textlib with tiles made of 3 rectangles each (to avoid the slanted effect I would just have to change the X offset to be high enough to move down so I can move the Y offset back up by a multiple of 4:

This would use 6x6 tiles to preserve the 12x8 map size from the TI-84+ xLIB game (another reason why it would use CE Textlib).

The idea there is that since it takes 0.3 seconds to draw a sprite made of 27 rectangles, then I could display 8 sprites made of 3 recangles each in that amount of time. The drawback is that by doing so I wouldn't be able to skip drawing empty sprites (where you can walk) like I do with First Fantasy II. On the other hand, I could always just use some boolean logic with CE Textlib (so that I execute a dummy command instead of DrawRectangle) but that in turn could cause the list to take longer to be stored and the game to be larger. As for the name, it could be Diortem, Metextlibroid, Textlibroid or Textlibtroid.

EDIT: I updated the mockup. The Samus sprite would be made of 7 rectangles.

Last Edit: April 16, 2016, 07:30:57 AM by DJ Omnimaga

u/aetios April 16, 2016, 01:57:24 PM

That looks nice man, wanna see that.

u/Dudeman313 April 16, 2016, 03:19:13 PM

Just saw this. Man, that's awesome-looking! Samus looks pretty cool.

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 16, 2016, 05:58:40 PM

Thanks. Samus was hard to make in such small amounts of rectangles, especially the legs.

u/Dudeman313 April 16, 2016, 06:30:35 PM

Have you started playing around with jumping and movement yet?

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 16, 2016, 07:40:31 PM

There's no code yet. That's just a mockup and not guaranteed to take off. But I am 100% sure it would be feasible.

u/Dream of Omnimaga April 18, 2016, 08:37:11 PM

Here is another set of mockups for what Metroid CE Textlib could look like:

The second one would require making a custom font routine (digits would be made of 3 rectangles each, including a big white square followed by erasing parts of it with 2 black rectangles.) Drawing digits would probably use the same sprite routine as other triple-rectangle sprites.

The power-ups uses more rectangles, because they don't need to be drawn in real-time. The gun uses 4, the morph ball too, the bomb uses 3, the varia suit uses 5, the armor uses 4 and the plasma beam uses 7.

I forgot to include the long beam in there, but this one would most likely use 2.

Last Edit: April 18, 2016, 08:42:02 PM by DJ Omnimaga

u/123outerme April 18, 2016, 08:45:45 PM

Looking great, DJ!

Quote from: 123outerme on April 18, 2016, 02:50:49 AM
It appears I've lost my top secret .gif somewhere...

It's a small test for one of my new projects. It'll be sorta like Fire Emblem and Empire Earth combined. You gather an army, arrange them into different formations (fully customizable) and fight enemies! Of course none of that is shown though

Last Edit: April 18, 2016, 09:07:06 PM by 123outerme