I started off with the horizontal and vertical scrolling code from my Uzebox Mode 3 with Scrolling Guide, which stored the level uncompressed in PROGMEM, but I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to store large, or many levels that way.
Level compression always seems to complicate things, and it makes the level format very rigid and tough to quickly add features, and it makes it that much harder for people to understand what's going on without really studying the code.
One of my goals was to be able to get 8-way scrolling working completely from the SD card, without having to use any kind of level compression, so that I could use the extra bits in each tile for things like enemy spawns, or triggers, or any other game extension one might think up. The attached demo is far from optimized, but if it works as it is, that means that I'll be able to squeeze a lot more out of it after optimizations. It's actually reading an extra 384 bytes from the SD card each time you scroll past a tile boundary, so I actually have a crap-ton of room leftover to store additional stuff for the level, or if I don't need to store anything in those extra bytes, I can reduce the size of the data file by a factor of 4.
What I really want to know is when you guys run this on real hardware, does any part of the 4x3 mega sprite flicker as you run and jump around?
The code determines if the camera has scrolled enough to need additional level data loaded into a hidden row and/or column, and then it cue's up the sector containing that level data, by issuing a CMD17, but it doesn't actually look for the data ready token until sometime during the next frame, allowing:
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Player_render(&p);
ProcessSprites();
WaitVsync(1);
RestoreBackground();
ReadControllers();
One caveat of this technique is that I needed to make sure that no matter how big the level is, or which of the 8 directions the camera gets scrolled in, I only ever need to read a single sector's worth of data.
That's the theory behind it anyway. Whether it works in practice on more than just my SD card is what I need people to help me test out.
Controls are as follows:
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LEFT/RIGHT = Move
DOWN = Drop through the thin one-way tiles
A = Jump
B = Run
LS = Attack
(If you do run this under cuzebox, you'll need to have a cuzebox built with the latest changes as of April 9, 2018; it will run fine with uzem.)