MIX-IT-UP Comp Entry - Tyoob

Started by BasicBoy, October 12, 2019, 18:58:58

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BasicBoy

Here's where I am so far (although bear in mind that the game won't be anywhere near as busy as this, where I've filled the tunnel with an excessive number of objects for test purposes):



Furthermore, the tunnel won't be as twisty as that (for the most part), except perhaps the final level. I recently found that I can't change the diameter of the tunnel without causing side effects that I don't have time to handle. So, sadly, the tunnels will be of constant diameter.

The frame rate drop is rather alarming (no time now for optimisations), but hopefully the final version of the game won't get busy enough for such drastic frame rate drops.

Still to do:

* Four levels, each with an end-of-level boss
* Music & sound effects

and other bits and pieces.

The player will have to meet a kill quota, so even if they reach the end of the tunnel and kill the end-of-game boss, they can only proceed to the next level if they've killed enough baddies (there will be some kind of indicator showing the current kill count).

With so much yet to do there's no guarantee I'll be able to get this finished in time for the deadline, but I will try...


BasicBoy.
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Steve Elliott

Looking good, although I think your ship should be more vector-like than sprite-based.  More angular with some transparency perhaps.
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BasicBoy

Quote from: Steve Elliott on October 12, 2019, 19:09:55
Looking good, although I think your ship should be more vector-like than sprite-based.  More angular with some transparency perhaps.

Yes, I've been meaning to replace the player's ship with something more '3D' (with correct perspective), but I probably won't have time. I'm not sure about the transparency suggestion. In line with the Retro requirement, I've chosen to use the 320x256 screen resolution and (horrible!) fixed 256-colour palette of the Acorn Archimedes, and transparency effects are probably not going to work well.

Steve Elliott

So you've thought about it, just tweak if you have time  :)

Transparency could be faked with a dot pattern, if you've ever seen Platypus you'll know what I'm talking about.
Win11 64Gb 12th Gen Intel i9 12900K 3.2Ghz Nvidia RTX 3070Ti 8Gb
Win11 16Gb 12th Gen Intel i5 12450H 2Ghz Nvidia RTX 2050 8Gb
Win11  Pro 8Gb Celeron Intel UHD Graphics 600
Win10/Linux Mint 16Gb 4th Gen Intel i5 4570 3.2GHz, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 2Gb
macOS 32Gb Apple M2Max
pi5 8Gb
Spectrum Next 2Mb

GaborD

Looks great. I don't mind that it's busy, just adds more challenge, which is good.
You have nicely color separated the background from the gameplay elements, so it's not too hard to see what's coming your way. The background could maybe be a bit darker to separate it even more, but it works already.
Looking forward to the end result.

RemiD

this looks cool :), it reminds me of "space harrier" on genesis

is it 3d ?

BasicBoy

Quote from: Steve Elliott on October 12, 2019, 19:28:18
So you've thought about it, just tweak if you have time  :)

Hmm.. more than a tweak, I think! More like a 'whole day' job. (At least at the rate that I work at...)


Quote from: RemiD on October 12, 2019, 19:55:05
is it 3d ?

I suppose it's meant to be at least pseudo-3D? The 3D effect would look more convincing with distance-dependent colour shading (faraway tunnel segments and objects should be darker, and near ones ligher). But there's no time (again!) for such enhancements because I have essential game elements that need implementing in time for the deadline.


RemiD

@Basicboy>> no i mean, do you use 3d to make it (3axises with meshes and textures) ? or only 2d (2axises with images)

BasicBoy

Quote from: RemiD on October 12, 2019, 21:14:51
@Basicboy>> no i mean, do you use 3d to make it (3axises with meshes and textures) ? or only 2d (2axises with images)

It's purely 2D - no textures or even any GPU acceleration. All graphics (sprites, lines, etc.) are software rendered. It's all rather oldskool.


Qube

Love it ;D - That was the sort of style I was originally aiming for with Galaxy Defender when I did the ZX Collection for one of the game comps but didn't have the time to take it to that level.... Nice one :)
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Until the next time.

iWasAdam


BasicBoy

Quote from: iWasAdam on October 21, 2019, 08:56:30
All runs fine and dandy here :)

Thanks, as does yours on my system.

All the entries seem to work fine on my PC.

3DzForMe

Works great here also, frantic fun!
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Xerra

Here's the two error messages when I've tried to run the game. I've done this via Parallels both times so far. Original version message is first image and your diag version is the second. Also probably worth noting is it appears my Parallels installation was trying to do a slog-worthy crawling speed windows update in background although this Mac is powerful enough that it wouldn't normally be much of an issue...

Anyway this error comes after starting game. The logo scrolls across and the options to pick a level are present and correct, along with the music. Soon as you press space then it's done.

I will be testing it on proper Windows machine at weekend but this info might be useful to you anyway.
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BasicBoy

Quote from: Xerra on October 22, 2019, 17:36:49
Here's the two error messages when I've tried to run the game.

Thanks Xerra, that was very helpful. I now know what the cause of the error is.

The game uses delta time in an attempt to make it frame-rate independent. For this, I chose to use a high precision timer rather than a 'standard' Windows millisecond timer (which would have been a safer choice, although offering less resolution). So, using the standard Windows API function QueryPerformanceFrequency to obtain the frequency of the high res timer, which on the system you tested the program on (under Parallels) returned zero! Yes, I should have allowed for that possibility, but I presumed Windows would always return a sensible non-zero result. The error occurs on line 16730 as you reported:

dt# = 60.0 * ABS(time1%% - time0%%) / Freq%%

There's the division by zero. (By the way, the %% indicates 64-bit integers in BBC BASIC).

Actually, under Parallels, it's possible that QueryPerformanceCounter (which I use as the effective high res timer) is also returning zero or junk values.

I suppose I could use the millisecond fallback option (via standard Windows API calls GetTickCount or TimeGetTime) which would almost certainly work.

Anyway, thanks again. I'll consider implementing the safe fallback option.


BasicBoy.
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