Commander X16

Just played the level. It looks and plays great. But it doesn't seem to be possible to get the ball to go up again after it started to bounce mostly sideways. But maybe I'm just a bad player.

The angle can be modified by letting the ball hit the paddle more at the sides. If ball is coming from the right and hits the left hand third of the paddle then it is redirected in a more steep angle. That way you can get it back upwards. Imagine the paddle is curved.

I consider to change that to be depending on the movement of the paddle. So the ball would inherit some impulse from the paddle movement. Not sure how Arkanoid worked...

I don't think Arkanoid did that, but I remember playing a clone in the MS-DOS days and I remember that paddle/ball interaction wasn't really physically plausible, but it was fun. By the way, we're in the same timezone. ?

If you need the ball to go up, just right-click. ?

The improvements look great! The one thing that sticks out to me is that I wish the paddle had even more influence over the horizontal movement of the ball. The ball clearly gets some horizontal component added to it based on where it strikes the paddle, but I wish this influence were even stronger, or just straight-up assigned a velocity instead of influencing the existing one.

To get right at the point, I really wish that when I narrowly miss a block near the edge of the screen, I could bounce the ball off paddle to reflect the ball back and take another shot at the missed block right away at a hopefully similar (but not exact) angle. Right now, I feel like I have to bounce the ball across the entire width of the screen, because it's just about impossible for the paddle to influence the ball enough to actually reflect it back in the direction it came from.

Definitely fun to play, well done! Playing with the web emulator the mouse sometimes gets outside of the canvas. I will look into fixing this and keep the mouse captive to the emulator area.

Yes, using the mouse with the emulator is tricky. It would need to continue reporting mouse positions to the prg even if the mouse is outside of the window. That also applies to the native emulator on Windows, it also happens there.

Uploaded a new version (0.3). Now we have some additional levels ?.

I also improved the collision detection further. The paddle now allows to control the ball so that it almost moves in a vertical line. Not entirely - that would be too easy, right ??

Some cheat codes added, too:

• 
  l: level switch - this way you can check all the levels without playing them
  


• 
  a: autoplay - for testing collision detection
  

Have fun!

I'll upload the source code to github at some point - but I want to do some proper cleanup first. All code is inside a file named "cc65test.c" ? atm.

I started with sound effects - but Vera's PSG doesn't provide me with the effects I'd like. So I also tried the YM2151, but that's a lot more complicated. Any easy way to get sound effects from some sort of library and a "player"?

3 hours ago, AndyMt said:

Any easy way to get sound effects from some sort of library and a "player"?

You can take a look at the code I wrote for XCI to playback PCM sound samples. That's the easiest way, as you can just download or make recorded sound effects and use Audacity to resample them to whatever rate you want to use. Now, this method will take by far the most amount of RAM, as you have to be able to load the entire sample from disk and play it back over time, but it gives you exactly what you want.

You can see my code for playback on GitHub: https://github.com/SlithyMatt/x16-xci/blob/master/engine/sfx.asm

And you can see how I download and convert free sound effects in this video: 

 

@SlithyMatt Yes your framework is definetly on my list. Memory is not that much of an issue with the X16 and it would be a good reason to look into banked memory ?.

I updated to version 0.4 which now has basic sound support.

You can enable/disable by pressing the 's' key.

Next step is to implement some power up. I think I'll start with duplicating the ball.