Timmy
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 9
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« : 14 de Noviembre de 2013, 10:08:34 pm » |
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Title: Heart Stealer Developer: Timmy + (musician needed) Year: 2014 Game size / RAM required: 32KB ROM / 16KB RAM Game genre: platform Other info: A couple of weeks ago I figured out how to make MSX games using z88dk, so I thought I wanted to "port" my old Spectrum game to see how easy it is. It was surprisingly hard to find good documentation on the net, but in the end I've borrowed some books from a friend and so I've started so programming. Basically it is more like a complete rewrite instead of a port. The sprites are hardware sprites now, and therefore the rooms are slightly larger, and I have to use a completely new palette. This MSX machine is completely new for me so I'm still working on the graphics, or how I can add more colour to the main sprite while still having 3 enemies on one horizontal line... Well, and many other stuff really...  A mock-up screenshot for now: PS. Before I forget, my musician for my Spectrum games only does 1-bit music, so I need a PSG musician too.
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mars2000you
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« Respuesta #1 : 15 de Noviembre de 2013, 04:02:03 am » |
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Jon_Cortazar
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« Respuesta #2 : 15 de Noviembre de 2013, 04:46:43 am » |
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Great to see you joining the MSXdev, Timmy! Good luck with your MSX re-make, looks cool!  |
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Jon Cortázar Abraido (aka El Viejo Archivero) RELEVO Videogames [Dioniso: La cafeína está haciendo su trabajo; yo espero hacer el mío.] [pitpan: Me sigue pareciendo más productivo jugar al SNAIL MAZE que seguir esta discusión.] |
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kabish
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« Respuesta #3 : 15 de Noviembre de 2013, 08:00:44 am » |
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I love this game, simply and fun one. |
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Tono
Karoshi Newbie
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« Respuesta #4 : 15 de Noviembre de 2013, 08:19:16 am » |
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Welcome to the MSXDev, Timmy! The screen looks quite different to the speccy one, really. And the game has a lot of fun.
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Parecía buena idea...; ¡Con lo bien que iba...!; ¡Qué infortunio!
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blackwinds
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 14
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« Respuesta #5 : 16 de Noviembre de 2013, 10:05:50 am » |
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Timmy enter on MSX World... Simply fantastic! Tymmy is a game designer and coder very talented! . Heart Stealer 1 & 2; . Forest Raider Cherry; . Future Looter* Just great games!!! Heart Stealer on MSX fills a gap, because the MSX version of Uwol not released. * http://retrogamesrevival.blogspot.com.br/2013/05/future-looter.html |
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Timmy
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 9
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« Respuesta #6 : 16 de Noviembre de 2013, 05:41:08 pm » |
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Wow! I have seen reviews for that game but I haven't found this one. Thank you for the nice review! |
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Timmy
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 9
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« Respuesta #7 : 16 de Noviembre de 2013, 06:30:20 pm » |
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Welcome to the MSXDev, Timmy! The screen looks quite different to the speccy one, really. And the game has a lot of fun.
You're right. I'm not completely happy with how it looks now. The screen seems to be too large. Maybe I will reduce it back to the original screen sizes. (The screenshot also stretched the screen a bit, but that might be an emulator setting.) |
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mars2000you
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« Respuesta #8 : 17 de Noviembre de 2013, 12:40:29 am » |
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(The screenshot also stretched the screen a bit, but that might be an emulator setting.)
You are probably using openMSX; switch to blueMSX if you use Windows and your screenshots will have the good size with the borders and without horizontal stretching : small size : 272 x 240 big size : 544 x 480 Remark : to convert the 320 x 240 openMSX screenshots into the 544 x 480 blueMSX format - double the size of the screenshot to get 640 x 480 - then rezize the width from 640 to 560 while keeping the 480 pixels for the height - finally remove the 8 first pixels on the left and the 8 last pixels on the right ... You can then go to the small blueMSX format and the result is :  |
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« Última modificación: 17 de Noviembre de 2013, 12:43:18 am por mars2000you »
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pitpan
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« Respuesta #9 : 17 de Noviembre de 2013, 12:23:40 pm » |
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Timmy: feel free to ask any question regarding MSX development in the development section.
About adding more colors to the main character, that means adding another sprite plane. As you already noticed, MSX can only handle up to 4 sprites in a row, but I you can accept a little sprite flickering, you can double that amount easily and therefore use 2 colors per character.
Without using flickering, you can play with vertical coordinates an use different sprites that do not overlap vertically in the same character.
AA
AA CC
BB CC
BB
As you can see, that only accounts as 2 sprites in every scan line.
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Timmy
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 9
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« Respuesta #10 : 17 de Noviembre de 2013, 10:12:50 pm » |
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You are probably using openMSX; switch to blueMSX if you use Windows and your screenshots will have the good size with the borders and without horizontal stretching :
small size : 272 x 240
big size : 544 x 480
Thanks. I will likely install both emulators soon. |
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Timmy
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 9
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« Respuesta #11 : 17 de Noviembre de 2013, 10:30:29 pm » |
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About adding more colors to the main character, that means adding another sprite plane. As you already noticed, MSX can only handle up to 4 sprites in a row, but I you can accept a little sprite flickering, you can double that amount easily and therefore use 2 colors per character.
Without using flickering, you can play with vertical coordinates an use different sprites that do not overlap vertically in the same character.
As you can see, that only accounts as 2 sprites in every scan line. Thanks you for explaining this trick. I am still thinking whether to keep the original single colour sprites or to draw new ones. They were designed with single colour in mind, and the last couple of days I think I might only update the main character with a vertical split sprite like you were suggesting. But I'm not sure of it yet. Still need to think about it a bit more (mostly because I can't draw ) |
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Maggoo
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 29
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« Respuesta #12 : 19 de Noviembre de 2013, 04:56:00 am » |
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About adding more colors to the main character, that means adding another sprite plane. As you already noticed, MSX can only handle up to 4 sprites in a row, but I you can accept a little sprite flickering, you can double that amount easily and therefore use 2 colors per character.
Without using flickering, you can play with vertical coordinates an use different sprites that do not overlap vertically in the same character.
As you can see, that only accounts as 2 sprites in every scan line. Thanks you for explaining this trick. I am still thinking whether to keep the original single colour sprites or to draw new ones. They were designed with single colour in mind, and the last couple of days I think I might only update the main character with a vertical split sprite like you were suggesting. But I'm not sure of it yet. Still need to think about it a bit more (mostly because I can't draw ) Another option to obtain more colors in sprites and limit flickering is to combine software (like on the spectrum) and hardware sprites. For example you could use software sprites for the inner part of the sprite (even using a different color for every line) and use a hardware sprite for the black outline... And u can have up to four of those on a single row without flickering. The drawback is the impact on the background graphics of the software sprites and the additional computation required when multiple sprites overlap but with good level design it's not too difficult. |
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MsxKun
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« Respuesta #13 : 19 de Noviembre de 2013, 10:27:34 am » |
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Another option to obtain more colors in sprites and limit flickering is to combine software (like on the spectrum) and hardware sprites. For example you could use software sprites for the inner part of the sprite (even using a different color for every line) and use a hardware sprite for the black outline...
But then the movement is choppy, unnatural, not smooth and playability decays easily. I rather prefer 1 color sprites but smooth than multicolor and choppy. Also remember, the MSX tiles can have multicolor. 2 colors per line. |
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--  She Bops! |
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Maggoo
Karoshi Newbie
Mensajes: 29
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« Respuesta #14 : 19 de Noviembre de 2013, 02:15:37 pm » |
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Another option to obtain more colors in sprites and limit flickering is to combine software (like on the spectrum) and hardware sprites. For example you could use software sprites for the inner part of the sprite (even using a different color for every line) and use a hardware sprite for the black outline...
But then the movement is choppy, unnatural, not smooth and playability decays easily. I rather prefer 1 color sprites but smooth than multicolor and choppy. Also remember, the MSX tiles can have multicolor. 2 colors per line. It does not have to be choppy. You can make those sprites move smoothly with pre-shifted data (which is a common thing on the Spectrum but without the colors limitation as you point out). You can use the extra color attributes to have "MSX2 like" sprites with one color per line. I just ran a little quick and dirty test to see how it would look like so pardon the very basic look of it : http://youtu.be/uOt5n44P_SkBTW it moves more smoothly than on the video, somehow youtube seem to havea slower framerate. The 3 "monsters" are using software sprites for the red and hardware sprites for the black outline. After a few seconds in the demo I switch to a different color of background every odd line to show you can add more color. The main character is 6 hardware sprites (3 at the top, 3 at the bottom). The disadvantage is the extra processing and the fact that the background on which the sprites are moving has to be uniform or made out of stripes (which can look neat if you play it right)... |
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« Última modificación: 19 de Noviembre de 2013, 02:49:09 pm por Maggoo »
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