Fungicide Take 2

[Scaremonger]

I've finally got around to updating Fungicide. It did pretty well in the game competition and I want to see it finished to the way I imagined it.

There were plenty of comments on https://www.syntaxbomb.com/index.php/topic,3984.0.html but I started by converting it to BlitzmaxNG which didn't require much work.

The major issue was stuttering and lagging caused by a badly coded game loop. I've re-coded it after bit of research and testing shows it to work well with lots of objects. Retrofitting it into Fungicide highlighted several other issues mainly caused by rushing to finish it for the competition deadline so I ripped out my sprite system and rewrote large parts of it including the use of SColor8 for my palette instead of the Type I used previously.

For some reason the ship moves very slowly up and down - was this on purpose?

Yes it's far too slow - quick change the speed before anybody else notices

i would have added a way to move the ship more quickly or less quickly to be able to avoid the "spores"

This morning I finished rewriting the player controls by getting rid of the cursor left/right and replacing it with right-shift to simply reverse the direction of travel, and adding a thrust button so we can speed up (or slow down if not pressed). Being able to go faster has really changed the game dynamics. I plan to do a little more work on the controls before I am completely happy with it.

Next is the background paralax scenery!

[Scaremonger]

I've done some work on the background and will sort out some side by side comparison images to post here when I next get time to work on it.

I enabled three layers (Mountains, Foothills and Treeline) that were disabled in the released competition version and tidied up the mountains and foothills graphics. This highlighted just how bad the buildings (City-scape) graphics were and after a couple of attempts at improving them; I decided to remove them entirely and extend the tree-line layer instead. To achive this I have re-drawn a new set of tree-line graphics and re-written the layer rendering code to give it depth.

I've fixed a couple of bugs in the parallax routines that made the mountains flicker and adjusted the height of the horizon. After adjusting the horizon I also updated the sky code to improve fading and increased the random options for sky colouring (but staying within the game pallette).

The next step is to replace the code that controls the ground. I was never happy with it and it also suffers from a bug that sometimes causes a missing pixel between tiles.

[Scaremonger]

Here is an image from Take1 and Take2 which shows off the new look: