Tempest is possible

[CunningFellow]

Fingers crossed I can get this finished in a week. I reckon it's got a day or two left of coding to get the game playable. I am sure I won't have title screens and high score tables though.

On a positive note, it looks freaking awesome. Get a load of this video

http://youtu.be/1L2nIvrkPh4

[D3thAdd3r]

Damn! You have the camera panning! There it is working with enemies, shots, movement and all after all the mind bending tricks to get it working. Really looking incredible. The sound effects are turning out rather hard to replicate as noise channel ones usually do for me. I will have something for you on that front though, how much flash space do you have left? Keep up the coding the gameplay is really coming together

[uze6666]

with the music and panning it's indeed *very* impressive! Kudos, it's looking out to be the best tempest 8bit ever.

[uze6666]

Hey Lee, I think you were on the sound effects? About that, it would be nice most if not all the non noise ones could be done using channel 5 (PCM) because no track in the song uses it apart the "play" sample. PCM patches can still use commands and the regular waves so it should be a problem:

Code: Select all

#define WAVE_SINE	0
#define WAVE_SAW	1
#define WAVE_TRIANGLE 2
#define WAVE_25_LFT 3
#define WAVE_50_LFT 4
#define WAVE_75_LFT 5

extern const char waves[];

const char patch1[] PROGMEM ={	
0,PC_NOTE_UP,12,
0,PC_ENV_VOL,255, 
0,PC_ENV_SPEED,-20,
1,PATCH_END
};
const struct PatchStruct patches[] PROGMEM = {
{2,waves+(256*WAVE_SAW),patch1,0,256}
};

The only limitation is that it's not currently possible to use the PC_WAVE command on that channel. But its on the todo list.

[D3thAdd3r]

PCM channel 4 is the perfect solution, but I fear there isn't the space(let us know Cunning). The .wav files of all the sound effects I have I believe are from original Tempest. They sound like they are noise+Frequency Modulation so at best they would still require using a wave channel. The T2k ones sound like pure FM, they are easier to replicate, and they sound better so I opted to go that route. What I have so far sounds decent using just wave, I am basically grabbing and modifying pieces from games like Super Contra, Gradius II and some others. I've wanted to use the 5th channel like you did in the song for the submarine game so I will give that a go and maybe document it. If we used normal sfx channel for this there is a lot of sound effects going on during gameplay and the bass line or whatever music is on there is going to be constantly clobbered.

Off track here, but I really need to learn how the sound engine works at the assembly level. I think it's possible to write a program that emulates the Uzebox sound system, and that it also can compare the emulated output versus a raw wave file encoded at ~15khz, which would have some sound you want. Just a brute force method that uses 1 of every command for every frame. For each of those commands, it tries every possible value for the arguments and gives the outcome a score until it finds the closest possible average approximation for each sample in the 1/60 second. Even if every tick the patch used a PC_ENV_SPEED,PC_WAVE,PC_PITCH,PC_ENV_VOL,PC_TREMOLO_LEVEL,PC_TREMOLO_RATE,PC_SLIDE, and PC_SLIDE_SPEED it would only take 24*60=1440 bytes a second whereas it's hard to get a good sounding PCM at less than 8000 bytes a second.

I know I will never get around to attempting that but I bet it would work

[CunningFellow]

I still think I am going to come in about 10K free after the game is done.

If I have spare time to progress the idea I had with interrupt-ended draw time I would be happy to de-unroll some of the draw scene stuff and save a few K more.

I have gotten the background work done to make it so I can draw a web in excel/calc and then plug data straight into the Uze code.

Today I am going to see if I can get zooming/jumping working. If it turns out hard then I will leave that feature for a later date.

Tomorrow onwards I have to work on actual game to make sure I can finish by Saturday.

[codecrank]

holy crap ! this is why I keep coming back here from time to times I'll be loading this up on the jamma uzebox here this weekend.

[CunningFellow]

OK.

I think I can say that I WONT have time to get zoom/jump working by Saturday night.

I am now going to work on some game play and then tomorrow night I am going to try integrate the sound engine Uze/Alec wrote.

I THINK there is enough RAM/horses left for sound.

I am certain there is enough left for zoom/jump. I have just run out of time. It's something I will work on after UzeDTV 2nd prototype.

[CunningFellow]

24 hours out and still no gameplay

http://youtu.be/lpDk-IhWicw

I have 16 levels all fitting into flash with 12K free though.

Now a mad rush day to make it playable.

[D3thAdd3r]

Go Cunning!