Commander X16

 

I had this in mind when I was making FASTMATH.  I think I can find a way to do really fast conversion from 16.8 fixed point to the fractional notation and back so you can take full advantage of it.

Yeah. Thank you ed. Most of the base logic is in place now

 Now comes the challenge of making great graphics and a nice game concept. Thinking about making the player and enemy ships "configurable" based on pre-rendered smaller sized parts like 8x16, 16x16, 16x32 or 32x16 dimensions around a base ship of 32x32. This saves memory and I think this is what @Frank van den Hoef had in mind when he created this sprite engine capable of controlling 128 sprites at the same time. The small pieces can have more extensive animations and "glue" to the base ship or other extensions. Stuff like cannons, lighting, engines, defense shields, radars, tractor beams, magnets, wings, ...

It also allows for weapon loading, adding game experience. 

Enemies are also a challenge. What to model as enemies without doing "cliché" ... Am thinking on some drone concept or chopper concept.

The game concept and making the game exciting should add some randomness and side challenges in addition to just shooting. Something like a puzzle to be solved might be interesting. So your brain must think of solutions while shooting and evading.

The video vram of 128KB is a real challenge to manage in such a shooter game. Many may have a lot of comments about this and that's fine. But doing is another. A game like this needs animations otherwise this game will get boring quickly.

I've put the tiles in 8bpp mode because it is impossible to tile with shadows and light effects using only 4bpp palettes, and have a smooth colour experience.

Sven

Looking good!!

reminds me of battlesquadron on the Amiga one of my all time favorite vertical shoot em ups

On 5/28/2022 at 2:52 PM, desertfish said:

reminds me of battlesquadron on the Amiga

Checked it out. Indeed it has flavours of it. 

I never had an Amiga unfortunately as I was too young when the Amiga came out. I do remember I envied those who had one ? But then the C64 and C128 had lots of those games implemented of the Amiga. 

On 5/28/2022 at 8:49 AM, svenvandevelde said:

- implement a (fast) collision detection algorithm using spacial hashing technique

Collision detection looks like a challenge in a game like this. Will the algorithm also handle sprite-to-tile collisions?

On 5/31/2022 at 9:29 AM, epsilon537 said:

Collision detection looks like a challenge in a game like this. Will the algorithm also handle sprite-to-tile collisions?

Well... if you mean collision detection of the player plane and bullets with ground tiles, this has not been added. I plan to use sprites for gun turrets. However, such a collision detection could be added by merely adding the relevant tile quadrants to the spacial hash.

Some further progress on my game Equinoxe. Now implemented a "Least Recently Used" cache and my VRAM heap manager, which allows me to dynamically copy in images into vram and replace images which are not used anymore ...

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c3QlFQVOoQS

Very impressive - both the game and the supporting code constructs!