Update #6
Oh wow, I'm on 'Page 2', such is the result of not updating for 3 months! Anyway, a lot of things have gone on in this update, mainly under-the-hood updates, but still important updates all the same.
The first issue that I had to address was the ~1.1Mb single binary file which I had lazily been using up until this point; all of the assets for the intro and the first level were all stored within the binary itself, which was starting to cause issues. The solution was to keep all of the assets in a separate "data" directory and load and free them as needed. I also wanted to pack the data with the RNC packer. A quick conversation with mcgeezer and he sent me some splendid code to do just that. After adapting it to my source code, the binary dropped down to 90kb and all of my assets are allocated and subsequently freed when the game quits...
Another thing which I wanted to change was the colouring of some of the objects and background graphics; something just didn't look right about some of the colours chosen by PPaint when I recoloured the original graphics from the arcade. Fortunately, these items could be adjusted by choosing 2 or three colours which were only present or used by the tiles above a certain vertical position, therefore the solution was to borrow these colours to draw the graphics on the assets sheet but use the copper at two points to change those colours to the correct ones for the items.
So far I've applied this technique to the brown stones below some of the windows, and the crates which are present along the way. All arcade perfect colours now, well at least these bits anyway
I've also introduced some new features to the map renderer; specifically the guys sitting up in the windows, and the crates along the bottom are now "objects" which are treated separately from the other map tiles. One advantage of keeping the guys in the window with their background window frames is that I can just use a simple A->D 16 pixel aligned copy blit and not have to bother worrying about masks and cookie cutting blits, which saves a bit of time.
Another map feature was introducing trigger points for specific tiles, which can be used to spawn new enemies, or Goons as I have named them in the code, as well as playing sound effects at specific points or watching for the end of level where the sprites are swapped to display ED-209 and the music changes. All of this can be seen and heard in the video, which is here:
[ Show youtube player ]
Next time I hope to have more of a playable presentation after I've tuned and turned on the collision detection routines. Until the next time
Shout outs and big thanks for help during this little phase belong to:
- mcgeezer: RNC and disk loading routines
- saimon69: music and sound effects