Star Blaster

[spengo]

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QUOTE ("Tyler")

Star Blaster is my latest project for the 68k Calculators coded in C. I got inspiration for coding this game because there used to be a great game out on the internet called Wormholes. Well Centerfleet.com has seemed to have shutdown for some reason so now I am coding Star Blaster Now. Game Story: A group of Human Martian Rebels have decided to isolate Earth from Mars so Mars can have it's own Government System. These rebels are going to extreme limits of killing many innocent people to take over Mars. A group of Elite Star Fighters have been sent out to defend and protect the Space Carriers carrying in Military Troops from many countries to restore control of Mars. May your senses guide you well in your Journey, young Wieger.... Features: -Linkplay (supports linkplay because 89/89TI and 92+/v200) -Grayscale Support -Upto 8 AI -Campaign -Skirmish Game -Map Editor -3 to 5 Space Ships to choose from -About 6 weapon upgrades -About 4 armor upgrades -A nice Main Menu Game Progress: Sprites Status: 0 Sprites (0%) Coding Status: 0 Lines (0%) Project Status: 3% (0.5 Hours) Todo: -Some more Sprites Done: -Most of Sprites Current Challenges: -Drawing Sprites (stickmen are bad enough)

Will be a top down space shooter with 20 directions and cool stuff like that. I decided to take the small job of creating greyscale sprites for it 'cause I like drawing spaceships. Anyways, most of them are done and can be viewed here: http://www.calcforge.org/forum/index.php/topic,27.0.html

[Ranman]

Awesome looking sprites... You just missed a Pixel Art contest featuring spaceships.

The game sounds good so far. Are you planning on rotating the sprites to support the 20 directions? If so, are you going to rotate them at runtime? Or, are you going to draw all rotated sprites beforehand?

Keep us up to date as details emerge!

[spengo]

He says he has something that can rotate the sprites automatically so I don't have to draw a bajillion rotations of each sprite. I don't know how it works exactly, I'm not the one doing the coding.

[DJ Omnimaga]

wow cool stuff sdpengo, you seem pretty great at pixel art, i hope this project gets finished

[Tyler]

Yes, I am going to allocate a ton of space for the ships than I am going to use joeyadam's rotation functions from ExtGraph 2.00 Beta 5 to rotate them. This means with all these ships I will need a loading bar. Oh well, it should not load at startup any longer than 4 seconds at the beginning  B)

Now the trick is to try to speed up the rotation process   :dang:

[DJ Omnimaga]

cool, now if only I didnt quitted calc programming and had a 68k handy

[Ranman]

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QUOTE (Tyler @ 18 January 2006, 9:20)

Yes, I am going to allocate a ton of space for the ships than I am going to use joeyadam's rotation functions from ExtGraph 2.00 Beta 5 to rotate them. This means with all these ships I will need a loading bar. Oh well, it should not load at startup any longer than 4 seconds at the beginning  B) Now the trick is to try to speed up the rotation process   :dang:

 Are you going to rotate dynamically, or just once at startup?

[kalan_vod]

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QUOTE (xlibman @ 18 January 2006, 9:31)

cool, now if only I didnt quitted calc programming and had a 68k handy

 You don't have to program in order to play a game! (though it may be usefull to have a 68k for playing the game  :dang: .

[Spellshaper]

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QUOTE (kalan_vod @ 18 January 2006, 17:08)

QuoteBegin-xlibman+18 January 2006, 9:31--> QUOTE (xlibman @ 18 January 2006, 9:31) cool, now if only I didnt quitted calc programming and had a 68k handy You don't have to program in order to play a game! (though it may be usefull to have a 68k for playing the game  :dang: .

well, there are still those emulat0rz...

[Tyler]

QUOTE

Are you going to rotate dynamically, or just once at startup?

At startup of course  B)

[Tyler]

I uploaded a screenshot of vti loading up Star Blaster, the Game Intializer is just about complete.

QUOTE

This Evening I made the loading screen and sprite rotater. I have allocated ~70KB of ram so far for the Double Grayscale Buffering and Rotated Sprites. It takes about 12 seconds to load the game at startup (I needed a loading bar) and the game itself is ~14KB on calc, but I cannot see it inflating in size for a while becaus e I think the Sprites take about 10KB of that. Well, thats all I have for you right now Tongue

http://www.calcforge.org/forum/index.php/topic,28.0.html

[Ranman]

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QUOTE (Tyler @ 18 January 2006, 18:25)

QUOTE Are you going to rotate dynamically, or just once at startup? At startup of course  B)

If you have a finite amount of directions to rotate -- I believe you stated 20 -- then you could create a lookup table to assist with fast dynamic rotating.

It might be worth a try... you could save 70Kb of RAM.

[Tyler]

That is a good idea except that it would slow the game down too much rotating them in game, and I dont want a data file with 20 rotations of each sprite. So it is best just to do it this way :-)

[Ranman]

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QUOTE (Tyler @ 20 January 2006, 0:36)

That is a good idea except that it would slow the game down too much rotating them in game

Not necessarily... Look up tables can be quite fast. With a lookup table, there is no trigonometry or floating points to mess with.

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and I dont want a data file with 20 rotations of each sprite. So it is best just to do it this way :-)

You would not need 20 rotations of each sprite... only 1 original sprite. But, you will need 10 lookup tables to rotate each sprite in the positive direction, then a mirror function to get the negative direction. There are other fancier methods too.

[Tyler]

Would you be able to PM me a code example? Maybe I could do this before I continue on.