Weber's Rants (tutorials)

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Jubatian
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by Jubatian »

By the way wouldn't it be nice to link some to the Games and Demos list? Well then really there would be nothing left to ask for there, ROMs for native use, in-browser emulator, videos... What else? :)

(For some reason since the forum upgrade I see only big blank space where the videos are supposed to display. I checked your YouTube profile and see what you were probably posting here)
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by D3thAdd3r »

That is an excellent idea. It seems MediaWiki has to be version 2.5 and some extension installed? Perhaps Alec will be interested to do this 8-)
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Artcfox
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by Artcfox »

Jubatian wrote:(For some reason since the forum upgrade I see only big blank space where the videos are supposed to display. I checked your YouTube profile and see what you were probably posting here)
FWIW, the embedded videos still show for me in Firefox (desktop or mobile). What browser are you using when they don't show?
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Jubatian
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by Jubatian »

This is Firefox ESR (45.8.0) in Debian Jessie, a relatively fresh install (since my previous computer died about two months ago).
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Artcfox
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by Artcfox »

Jubatian wrote:This is Firefox ESR (45.8.0) in Debian Jessie, a relatively fresh install (since my previous computer died about two months ago).
I believe that embedded YouTube videos play using HTML5, and that recent versions of Firefox ship with Cisco's H264 decoder preinstalled. Do you have an H264 decoder in that version of Firefox?

Navigate to about:plugins and you should see:

OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc.

listed if you do.
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Jubatian
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by Jubatian »

I checked it, for some reason it was disabled (I didn't disable it). However even after enabling it and checking for Jessie updates it didn't work. It isn't very critical for me (although makes it impossible to see what you were posting unless I extract the video links from the page's source).
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Found this on YouTube, and as many of us probably are, I am a big fan of seemingly impossible things working by taking advantage of the specifics. I never thought a great deal on palette effects even though I knew roughly some demos were using them for...something. Did not know how much palette effects could be turned into. A cool video with a nice general overview on it:
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uze6666
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by uze6666 »

I saw the exact same video yesterday and thought the same! :lol:
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by Jubatian »

D3thAdd3r wrote: Wed Nov 01, 2017 3:48 am Found this on YouTube, and as many of us probably are, I am a big fan of seemingly impossible things working by taking advantage of the specifics. I never thought a great deal on palette effects even though I knew roughly some demos were using them for...something. Did not know how much palette effects could be turned into. (...)
Huh, that's an impressive trick there! I don't think Uzebox has any mode nowadays which would enable similar effects, although I have one in mind. 4bpp can be realized with code tiles, but I never did that since for an useful resolution it takes too much ROM (but it is possible at 7 cycles / pixel). Such a solution would allow reloading the palette on every scanline (Mode 74 can only reload Color 0 as it has to fill 16 palette buffer entries for each color).
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Re: Weber's Rants (tutorials)

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Random post to generate some buzz for UCC. I haven't made it that far yet, but I have some graphics starting to shape up, besides a title screen which is pretty nice I feel. Most of the flash space is going to be devoted to graphics and I mean to have a large variety of tracks(offloaded to SD, brought into SPI Ram), and a larger variety of turns than most of the 8 bit racing games. I always disliked how there were only a couple types of turns in these games. I decided to go totally top down(Micro Machines) as opposed to the perhaps more popular 3/4 or isometric(R.C. Pro Am). Simply because it seems to take less tiles allowing more variety. No ramps/jumps or angled roads because it takes gobs of tiles, and I have never seen it executed well, being more a loss of control than anything.

It looks strange how much is devoted to sprites, but for me the smoothness of the car rotation is the critical factor for everything to feel right. I will need to do some custom blitter to reuse the graphics with different colors, then it can be well justified. Will also need to use the "partitioned sprites" trick to be able to get several cars on screen or else make the cars a bit smaller, but it should work out. I am thinking to leave out weapons from this game and focus entirely on the racing(reduces sprite and flash pressure as well). Also will probably leave out "rubber banding" and "catch up" style mechanisms popular in others games, as I feel it lowers the skill ceiling.

These will be radio controlled formula cars(electric or nitro, not sure yet), so it is all "on road" and no dirt track stuff, though I intend to some slippery spots. The road will always be flat, but I hope to make good use of bridges as the tracks can be specified down to the tile allowing less cookie cutter shapes. Bridges and other things might not work very well without the isometric view, so I will have to see what I can do. Just going to say "Uzenet", I know I have already said it many times before but one of these times it must be true!?
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