Warrior - 1979 vectorbeam game

[danboid]

It was only yesterday I saw a video and learned of a very cool looking 1979 vectorbeam game called Warrior:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUp0lzFiscs

This game predates me, I never saw it in an arcade but its got a great look and looks fun to play. I was reminded of CF's Tornado 2000 and Chickens in Choppers as well as the recently discussed Barbarian. You could say it's a vector precursor of Barbarian.

I thought I'd post it here as it looks like something that could potentially be remade on the UB.

[danboid]

Do you reckon this could be achieved on the Uzebox CF? How many vectors can the UB draw on screen at once with your T2000 vector video mode?

[CunningFellow]

The blue background and the white vectors no problem.

The red/green parts of the screen would probably have to be simplified to use repeating patterns.

Blue background is "free" and takes no RAM.

Any thing that is not blue/black uses up RAM.

There is enough RAM to make 14% of the tiles on the screen non blue/black.

The background does not need to be lines/vectors. It can be any arbitrary bitmap. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0N7p5DayI

In terms of how many vectors you can draw see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Uaz5XjnVo. That is close to the limit.

[Artcfox]

The background does not need to be lines/vectors. It can be any arbitrary bitmap. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0N7p5DayI

OMG! I don't think I had seen that demo before! Wowza! That looks amazing.

I wonder if it would be possible to do something like Limbo with a fancy background that changes as you move? It might end up being really huge because of the background, but no worries, I have a 32GB SD card

In terms of how many vectors you can draw see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Uaz5XjnVo. That is close to the limit.

That there is a LOT of vectors!

[CunningFellow]

I wonder if it would be possible to do something like Limbo with a fancy background that changes as you move? It might end up being really huge because of the background, but no worries, I have a 32GB SD card

the 400 megabyte data file of T2K would be a half hour long movie of webs rotating and zooming if you played it end to end at 30FPS

[Artcfox]

So, doable?

[CunningFellow]

Yes - Have for a while thought something where the blue background was a world you could walk through would be cool. It just would not ever get done if left up to me

Back on topic. Count the squares that are non blue/black in this picture. You can get to a max of 128 before you run out of RAM.

BarbarianCount.png (298.8 KiB) Viewed 631 times

Each warrior takes about 16. So that is 1/4 your non blank tiles (32) for the two players. That leaves 96 tiles to do the red/green bits.

Simplify them so there is a repeating pattern or reduce the amount of coloured areas - could be done no problem.

[CunningFellow]

Do you reckon this could be achieved on the Uzebox CF? How many vectors can the UB draw on screen at once with your T2000 vector video mode?

If I make a tool to draw the backgrounds and static RAM tiles do you want to give it a try Danboid?

[danboid]

Thanks for offering to help CF!

I don't feel ready to attempt this yet.

My Uzebox project list looks like this:

Add (UART) patch loading to Uzesynth (if Alec doesn't do it, I'm sure he'd do a better job than me). I think the community stands to gain the most the more we can do to improve the music production workflow. Its been put off for the longest time.
Finish IKD - kinda depends on the previous
Defender remake

I've never actually played Warrior. I should give a go under MAME. Defender seems like a more glaring omission but Warrior might be easier to tackle because it doesn't depend on scrolling?

[CunningFellow]

Reading the comments on the youtube video the mention this site

https://mrdo.mameworld.info/mame_artwork_ingame.php

That has a ZIP file (warrior.zip) to download the overlay artwork. Would be a good starting point.

Also Defender would be good