Re: [stella] Game update: PCMSG 2.1 (binary)

Subject: Re: [stella] Game update: PCMSG 2.1 (binary)
From: Piero Cavina <p.cavina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 18:11:21 +0100
>Hello Piero,
>
>I have tried your game on my SC. As you expected, it runs too fast and it
>looses the colour on PAL. Also there are some bugs.

Finally I tried it on the SC too. The loss of color is the usual
"odd-number-of-PAL-scanlines-syndrome". No problem.
Slowing down things must be done but will give me some problems: while it's
immediate for the player (2 bytes coordinates and fractional increments, I
have to change some constants), I've used only 1 byte for enemies x
positions, but for a slower, smooth movement I will have to change them to
2 bytes values to be able to use fractional increments. That means eating 9
more bytes of memory and there aren't many left. Oh well...

>If you move the ship all the way to the left, there is a ghost ship and a
>ghost
>shot on the left border. If you turn your ship around in that situation
>whithout moving it forward, the shots keep comming from where the ghost shot
>was stuck.

Nasty bug... because it doesn't happen on any emulator! (tried on PC Atari,
Stella and VCS "special").
These emulator are really nice with programmers...  PC Atari in particular.

>Also you can move your ship under the lower border and the damage(?)
>bar turns all blue until you come up again.

Uh, wrong Y-value check... and actually the bar is a "debugging" bar. :-)

>If you want to do a lot of work, you could turn the game into a Uridium type
>of game, where the player has to destroy several parts of the mother ship
>to win the level. You could use the scrolling background for that.

Good idea, thought it sounds hard work. And since now there's no
ball/missile0 (the two shots) vs. playfield check, in order to add it I
should put my hands in the kernel again. Ype.

>If you have decided to turn the game into a shooter (I liked the old idea
>better, too)

Speaking of the old idea, do you mean that you liked the dots playfield or
there were other things in particular? Please note that almost everything
is still there in the source... only commented out! :-)
The fact is that I really wanted something with shoots. And at least two of
them - I've always found single shooting games a bit sad IMHO.
Maybe I should "merge" the old and the new...?

>you should have the enemies come in formations instead of them
>being replaced when they are shot. You could give extras, when a whole
>formation has been destroyed.

Formations are a good idea. But I need to work on multiple copies for enemy
sprites... that is what I'm doing.

>The shots seem to come from behind the ship. You might want to change that.

oops...

>Also you should use manual firing instead of the two shot auto fire.

Sure, I had left that behind because it's in the easy part! I hate that
auto fire I must say.

>>Of course there's still a lot of work to do, but now that the kernel is
>>working it's fun to add new features!
>
>I hope I wasn't too negative about your game, so that this post actually
>speeds up your move to Playstation instead of encouraging you to carry on. :-)

No more thoughts of Playstations, at least until that PSX 2600 emu comes
out! :-)


Thanks
 Piero




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