GAME IDEAS

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havok1919
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Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2008 9:44 pm
Location: Vancouver, WA
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Re: GAME IDEAS

Post by havok1919 »

Eddy-B wrote:It *could* be done, of course... but then you'd have to change the way the game was coded.
I myself stuck to the same game engine as the original.
Yeah, we're in C-land, so probably no big advantage to go digging around and porting 6502 assembly code unless it was just for fun. ;-)
The way boulder dash stores its caves is by commands: block, line, box, filled box and you could decode the cave data as you build up your scanline, but having done some PAL video myself using an AVR, there's no time to do anything else but get data from the SRAM and output it to the proper port(s), so my best guess is to store the cave data as per the original, and yes that could be packed into nibbles instead of bytes saving 50% space. This way it would only occupy 480 bytes.
An abstracted description language for the level (like lines, boxes, fills of different tiles) would be pretty efficient, but we don't need to do that during scanning. We've got a bunch of time in vblank (all non-kernel execution), so we can just leave the level in a 2D array, apply game logic (gravity, etc), then unpack the array to the appropriate tile values for the screen memory. Seems like it'd be pretty straight forward-- have to see how well AVRGCC does on the execution speed, but we've probably got as many clock cycles free in Vblank as the Atari 400/800 did during a full frame. (And the AVR is pretty stingy with clocks per instructions, like the '02).
But, as uze already mentioned: smooth scrolling is not yet implemented in his project, so you'd either have to wait for a next vesion of the firmware, or use some other way (write it yourself) to scroll the screen smoothly.
I do believe that as of last Friday, he's got H/Vscrolling in with the sprite engine now. (I think that was in the 'programming' forum under the new sprite engine topic.)

-Clay
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