Re: [stella] Re: the big sprite

Subject: Re: [stella] Re: the big sprite
From: emooney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Erik Mooney)
Date: Thu, 09 Apr 1998 00:34:33 GMT
>OK, thanks for clearing that up.
>
>Now it's time for another demo. This one displays two independently
>moving big spites. They are both 42 double lines high. Is that enough?
>And how is the flicker?

Looks lousy on the emulator, as most flickered objects do, but looks quite
decent on the real thing.  (another incentive for people to buy a cart, if
Eckhard or anyone makes a game out of this :) )

>BTW, you can move diagonally now. :-)

Great :)  BTW, it looks like the players can't move into the leftmost two
pixels of the screen - is this because the joystick-read code doesn't allow
it, or because the display routine doesn't work in that case?

and from Nick:
>No _changing_ playfield data.  If you can find a way to work in
>vertical bars or other tricky things which wouldn't require
>changing PF registers....

For a static PF, no cycles would be required during the sprite display.
The problem with that is the playfield shares the same color as the ball,
so you couldn't be too elaborate with PF if you want to use the ball.  I do
see potential for a side-scrolling background, in a Roman-column style or
something... you could do a decently convincing ceiling above the
big-sprite area, and floor can certainly be done below the players.  Maybe
a forest scene, with vertical brown bars for the tree trunks in the player
area, and use sprites for tree-tops above the players.  And of course The
Pit (I or II) could be done - no PF required, a gradient would do fine for
the background, and a moon (and maybe a few other flying objects) would be
easily doable on top.

>You could probably steal some cycles if you impose some additional
>limits on the characters.... around the hip area, for example, you
>might go with only forty pixels, or a few scanlines of one or
>two double/quad-width sprites.  At least think about it if you
>get desperate for some time to put a horizon up or something.

It'd be pretty difficult to make changes to some but not all frames or
parts of the sprites.  What about a jump-kick animation where the character
needs all 48 pixels of width for its entire height?

You can get 40-pixel wide players free.. then you can pick three of the
following: player color, background color, ball, 8 more player pixels.

There's also another issue we haven't touched - how do you do controls for
high punch, high kick, low punch, low kick, and block with only one
button?! :)

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