Boinxx

Seems a long time...

2005-11-25T22:50:00.000-08:00

...i am still working on Boinxx (conceptional vise or even coding vise) but world of warcraft and my xbox (Pro Evo Soccer 5) pays my attention...

so i decided that i am touching the code again. last time i have implemented the 1st enemy and it seems to work... so i discussed little bit with TMR of cosine how i can implement the enemies. event driven or time driven and he suggested that i should go for time driven... which seems easier as a first step.

also implemented is a better collision detection and tile determination. in boinxx i'll gonna need 2 approches. the old one which was coded 2 years ago is the one when the player hits the water.... but as some tiles are special tiles and they are "smaller" than the 4x4 ones i need to check the tile map as well and this was a little bit harder than thought in the beginning (think of that you don't check when the ball is high in the sky but when the ball is near the ground...but when the player is near the ground the sprite data is on other position than the player starting position and so on...)

more to come this weekend...

small enemy prototype engine tested

2005-07-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

my aim is to bring some emenies to boinxx and i would like to use some dynamic approach to give boinxx a more "professional" look...

so i played around with some approaches and asked one of my mates who is a doctor of physics and he gave me this formular:

* vex=(px-ex)/16
* vey=(py-ey)/16
* ex=ex+vex
* ey=ey+vey

where Vex,y is velocity of the enemy while px,y is the position of the player. ex,y is the enemy position... it took me a little while and with the help of Thomas J. i implemented the code. the difficulty was that we have to deal with signed numbers and to move smooth on screen even with 8.8 fixed point maths. and this is something i managed to understand on 68000 but not on 6502... esp. signed numbers + division. so Thomas - the 2600 maniac behind thrust+ conversion - gave me this:

calc lda px
sec
sbc ex
sta vex
lda px+1
sbc ex+1
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vex
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vex
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vex
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vex
sta vex+1
lda vex
clc
adc ex
sta ex
lda vex+1
adc ex+1
sta ex+1
lda py
sec
sbc ey
sta vey
lda py+1
sbc ey+1
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vey
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vey
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vey
cmp #$80
ror @
ror vey

sta vey+1
lda vey
clc
adc ey
sta ey
lda vey+1
adc ey+1
sta ey+1
rts

and this works perfect...

so stay tuned...

Small Progress

2005-06-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

I have planned to release a new version this week. this version of Boinxx will contain some special fx (fog, reverse, big jump, ...) which will be selectable in the debug mode...

so stay tuned...

small update - highscore table

2005-05-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

ok... i spend some time with playing around with the possible highscore table. i used Vidol's brilliant G2F logo which fits perfect for a highscore and/or title screen...

what happened last week

2005-02-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

ok. small update what happened and what i have done...

i have reorganised the code for more effiecient ram usage. thank god for switching of the OS so i can put a lot of the stuff there like VRAM, font, lookup tables, etc... which is quite handy.

i spend 2 days in figuring out how i can implement a depacker esp. for the level maps. i don't mean the "tile2vram" depacker which generates out of a tile number a 4x4 char tile on screen (which actually saves ram by factor 16!). i tried flashpack but this hasn't worked properly in atari800win4.0 so i was searching for other routines.

as taquart had released numen few years ago i found in the sources a routine called "inflate" which some polish guys at atariarea explained me as a unzip routine... i played 2 days with the sources and used winzip,gnuzip, pucruch etc but it hasnt worked... one of the coder of numen, fox, sent me the c-source code for the deflater which packs data so i can use the inflater for depacking. but i am a business guy and not a coder so i have no c compiler etc installed... so another day went by just trying to compile the packer... but luckily fox sent me in meantime a deflater.exe for pc which i could use... and with this little tool i was able to pack all levels with a ratio from around 50-60% of the orriginal size... so an unpacked level has 1004 bytes and now it takes around 400-600 bytes... quite good.

the good thing about this routine is that it does not uses much varibales or is destructive... i can call the depacker every time i would need to depack data...

so next would be to pack the MPT music files and depack them while runtime... this took me again several hours as the MPT format is a quite native format which must be compiled and saved to a special memory location. so the 1st tests failed simply because i had moved the buffer around but haven't compiled the msx to this new buffer adress...

further i have started with a new level tile set (the missing "rock" one) and with the highscore module which will be depacked by runtime as well...

i like the depacker as i can easily tell the routine take packed data from there and depack it to this adress...so i can pack the highscore module quite heavy and depack it after game over... as it contains one of the g2f graphics it works quite well... (unpacked 7kb, packed 1,7kb!)

so... now back to my Sony PSP...

just got 2 new levels by vidol

2005-02-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

just recieved new levels by vidol...

he is still using gfx set 1 but we have 3 others we can use:

Boinxx Logo by dely

2005-02-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

Vidol's brilliant WIP Logo

2005-02-10T02:02:00.000-08:00

just recieved a new reviewed a title screen

2005-02-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

some WIP screenshots

2005-02-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

1st Enemies designed

2005-02-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

ok... haven't touch code today but made the 1st draft design for the enemies:

- barries
- swarnies
- darts

they will be draw with the not used 4 missles. they will be scripted manually in the code, basic concept:

they are made of 2 animation frames and they all have a similar data structure:

barries: startx,starty,direction,steps
swarnies: startx,starty,velocityx,velocityy
darts: startx,starty,speedx,speedy

there will be different sub-procederes handling each enemy so i can hardcode and speed up each of them...

further there will be different special tiles triggering special events:

- extra life
- warp
- big jump
- special (extra life, bonus points, slow down, reverse controls)

they will be triggered by tile_no >128 in the map. so in the tile set there are no tiles with that high number but i can easily handle these values with BMIs...

more tomorrow...

ps. i have a nice idea regarding spicing up the title screen... stay tuned.

new beta posted

2005-02-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

i finally managed to convert Retrofan's level tilesets into one Atari font. thanks to photoshop... ;)

now all the 5 level chars fit into the 128 characters. the tileset is being redraw as now i decided to have one large tile set containing all tiles instead of loading each level + gfx set. thanks to more free ram because of getting rid of the OS...

so today i managed to implement kind of level patcher. this routine is deciding depending on players level which tilemap to use and sets the colours etc for the tilemapper.

so finally i implemented a static "title screen" containing basic infos. and as it all worked out good without any big issue i have implemented a 1st version of the attract mode which is showing every few seconds the title screen and switches later to level data and back until player presses start.

Boinxx is getting more and more professional... so if i just had somebody designing levels with C64 tool charpad i could concentrate on the enemie routines esp the scripting and the soft sprite routines...

last week

2005-01-31T14:20:00.000-08:00

so... i had not much time for coding as i was preparing 2 sales meetings... aarg... but as i was coming back last weekend i suddenly found a g2f title screen @ atariage for boinxx drew by PoV. i was very supprised. i remembered that i have coded intros back in 1996 where i used a sample "please wait" sampled with a 4bit hardware sampler directly from my tv set where a ST demo was running...

this sample will be used in boinxx somehwere... i threw yesterday quick code together and it worked... the boinxx titlescreen and the sample... so the sample + playback code are still working.

today i searched my email archive for a kernel routine we have used in NUMEN demo. to gain more RAM and more CPU cycles you have to switch off the operating system of ATARI. and with this little routine:

switch_off_os_rom sei ;stop interrups
mva #0 ^4e ;stop all interrupts
mva #$fe ^31
mwa #nmi $fffa
mwa #nmi $fffe
mva #$c0 ^4e
rts
; NMI routine
; ^4f==#$5f if VBLKI
; ^4f==#$9f if DLI
nmi bit ^4f
bpl sys_vbl
; DLI routine, e.g.
; pha
jmp (dliv)
; pla
; rti

; VBL routine, e.g.
sys_vbl
pha
txa:pha
tya:pha
dec 20
lda $d300 ;prepare joystick
and #$0f
sta stick0
jsr vbl
pla:tay
pla:tax
pla rti

i have implemented this into the latest boinxx version and it took me approx 1/2 hour to get it running as i had to find the code snippets which are dealing with shadow registers & OS routines as they are not there anymore... ;)

hours spend today

2005-01-23T14:29:00.000-08:00

hmmm... tried more than 3 hours to implement MPT music done by xray... as he composed 4 tracks for the on hold project 4pac i thought why not using some of these tracks as they are composed of 3 channels so one channel could be used for ingame sound fx... but i didn't managed to get it done... i do not know why... on jaskier's page i found several mpt replay source codes but none of them played them back. i guess i haven't initialised them properly...

so... just before going to bed i thought it would be nice to show the people out there some of the special events i was talking about weeks ago... so i simply reassembled the actual code base with reversing the joystick controls... hahaha... this one will be a real nasty one as it's really hard to play with reverse controls...

another nice fx i borrowed from GBA SP... the "earth quake" simulated by hscroll... it works quite good but it took me 10 minutes to implement as the display list and several routines which were handling the screen and the collision had to be adapted for 48 bytes long screen lines instead of 40 bytes... i have not tested if the collision is working correct or not... but anyway the collision routine needs a complete rewrite late anyway as it's based at the moment of reading vram instead of the tilemap...

i don't know why it's starts to flicker on screen because of enabling hscrol but this could be simply that antic is stealing more CPU cycles because of reading more data needed for the scrolling... this will be fixed later...

when the earthquake starts you can notice the black areas left and right of the playing screen...this will be filled with the background tile (water) so it will be a real "overscan" experience...

so...now i am going to sleep...

Boinxx older versions

2005-01-23T04:06:00.000-08:00

i had just a look on the past vesions of Boinxx and how it started... if you compare the old versions with the new one I am confident of being on the right path...

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58459
http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=60515

more to come later...

little hangover

2005-01-22T08:42:00.000-08:00

...just went out yesterday and so i have a little hangover... anyway the theory behind the sprite engine is getting nearly finalised so expect to have new code tomorrow. the sprite engine will not be implemented fully into boinxx but instead a smaller version will be used in the high score table routine... stay tuned!

Blogg started

2005-01-21T07:46:00.000-08:00

hmmm... 1st time i have a webblog... and now? anyway... just let people know that i am still working on Boinxx. at the moment but only conceptional vise as i am working on the sprite engine. i'll gonna try to implement a 1st version this weekend.