Spent a little time fixing a couple of minor bugs.
The first happens when sprites cross stars - they disapear as though the sprites wheren't masked at all. Odd, because I spent some time making sure the stars would show correctly behind the sprites. I remember this because of the optimisation I did to the sprites where if the character its about to overdraw is $00, it doesn't "mask" it in, it copies it. This was quite a saving and it does 9 of these checks per sprite. Now since the stars are basically characters, I made a choice and accepted the slow down invloved. It would have been quicker for have the stars vanish. Anyway, after shuffling code around trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I discovered that it was indeed a simple bug. The stars were being drawn to the wrong screen. They got drawn to the front buffer, and not the back one. The reason it didn't look terrible is because the stars check to see that theres nothing there before they draw themselves - this is simply so that they'll draw behind the scrolling back ground. Anyway, I changed it to the backbuffer and PING! all is well.
The second was obviously a simple one. once you shot a baddie, he sometimes drops a coin. If you pick up this coin, you get money. However, if you then shoot the space where the coind was, the bullet hit something. Obviously, the coin wasn't as dead as I thought. Turns out when adding the NOSHOOT flag, I'd tried to optimise the bullet collision, and it hadn't worked. It could have, if I'd set that flag on every dead baddie - but I dont want to, so the extra check for it actually being active has to go back in.
Oh well... couple of minor fixes today only... Still, its good to get these things found before any games players find them and complain!
Oh, and with Russell deciding to do a spectrum version, Retro Edit has become even more important...*sigh*... so much for my idea of a simple tool to do the job. This means I'll have to do hires editing, and a spectrum tile editor. Russell has a lot of restrictions for his tiles, so a custom editor is needed. At least the sprite editor will be simpler, but it does mean I've to do it properly and do MCM with bit patterns rather than just numbers - bah!
10 comments:
That editor, as I said before, could become the most complete ever, ass MSX and CPC464 too :D
PS: contact Russell, and tell him to set free the comments in his blog for "Other" and "Anonymous", at the moment we all can't comment :(
I meant "add", not "ass". but it holds to be a compromising Freudian lapsus :D
Ha! If I add all these editing modes, I'll never finish!! Hires for speccy is at least something C64 and +4 could use!
"contact Russell"... Mmmm... How about I turn my chair around and ask him? :)
Yeah... I'll get him to switch on Anonymous posting.
Actually, I was looking at my keyboard to make sure "s" is close to "d". But we all know that on Italian keyboards "s" and "d" are miles apart, so there must be a reason for your typo ;)
And yes, tell Russel. I'm too lazy to register ;)
About the Editor: I wondered about that one screen shot (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6916/1686/1600/Editor3.png) in which "Hi-Res" is checked but the graphics are MCM. It's probably a "beta feature" and I hope you include the real "Hi-Res" mode (which I assume because that's close to the Speccy's graphics mode).
Later,
Chicken
I was already typing when you posted that one :)
" I wondered about that one screen shot"
Yeah, dont worry.... I have written the code for it yet, so its just showing a default state.
Basically, there IS no hires yet.
How about hires over mcm ? :)
Its one c64 black hires sprite over one mcm sprite.
If its not to much trouble :)
Personally, I wouldn't want to waste a C64 sprite for that. Multiplexing 7 sprites gives you a little more flexability.
Oh, and Russell has enabled Anonymous posting now.
Who asked for "hires over mcm"? Are you coding a game using that?I have seen that in some demos but never in games, though I have to admit that I haven't see too many C64 games recently. Is that a mode often used? I can imagine that is makes the sprites looking more detailed.
Well, since the plus/4 doesn't have any sprites anyway, I don't really care too much ;)
Later,
Chicken
Sorry... I forgot I was replying like anonymous...
Chicken, take a look on target renegade on c64. that one has some nice hires over mcm sprites.
And yes I am planing to do a game that would use such.
PopMilo :)
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