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Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2018 4:36:58 GMT
To anyone waiting for an update (if any lol): I'm currently doing some real life stuff that got in the way (and no this isn't codeword for "I got lazy", I mean it this time) so don't expect too much this and next month -- work will resume ASAP but you know how life is.
Curves are something that were giving me a headache but I think I'm close to figuring it out -- here's a silly screenshot of a broken curve routine. I'll be back!
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Post by Arkhan on Oct 31, 2018 18:13:23 GMT
I'm not sure what you mean by "reference charts", but I can say that all the docs that were available to the original PCE game-developers are now available to us, and that Hudson's docs are no worse (or better) than the docs that Nintendo and Sega provided to their developers at the time (I was there). But there are definitely things like Charles MacDonald's pcetech.txt that provide extra hints and practical information that weren't widely available BITD, and where other more popular consoles have a greater amount of this 3rd-party investigation & documentation. Now the "easy to locate" part is a big problem for PCE development, especially in an era when people expect a simple-to-find website where they can lookup what they want to know. I believe that having a good wiki available would be wonderful, and I'm glad and very greatful that you've started making one! Unfortunately, like most things, creating one requires a large amount time and effort, and needs someone really passionate about it at the helm of the task ... and most people (that I know) find that documenting things is a terribly boring way to spend their time. By chart, I do mean things on Wikis and such that are a bit dynamic/navigate-able. Archaic Pixels has it only as a 6502 reference, basically. Some other platforms have nice sites/wikis with alot of compiled references that are in HTML as opposed to just having links to scans of crap. It's a big image/chart, and using it involves printing it out since it's clumsy to use on the computer. At that point, I didn't see alot of personal gain from it since I have the same sort of things in printed form already. It also doesn't have alot of the random one off tidbitty info that a wiki would be great to present things in. (From what I recall) Also, the first few links that pop up on Google for it are dead. Having stuff in text-form on a site somewhere means if people go googling around, they find hits with info instead of links to PDFs or zips of documentation that might be dead. That's mostly what I am getting at. We have tons of info, it's just shittily managed in various links online to files. A wiki is something everyone would need to collaborate on, and not be dicks on. I am too lazy / sidetracked to want to be the only person doing any of that stuff. IIRC, weren't you OCRing the PDFs or something at one point? Having .txt'd versions of the PDFs would be great. Slap those bitches up on a website.
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Post by elmer on Nov 3, 2018 7:03:44 GMT
It's a big image/chart, and using it involves printing it out since it's clumsy to use on the computer. At that point, I didn't see alot of personal gain from it since I have the same sort of things in printed form already. OK, yeah, I see where you're coming from there. It really does need to be printed out on paper, and if you've already got the docs printed out, then it's not really needed (depending upon personal preference). Also, the first few links that pop up on Google for it are dead. There's a link to it in my "Programming Resource Links" ... but yeah, that's definitely not the same as having working google links! IIRC, weren't you OCRing the PDFs or something at one point? Having .txt'd versions of the PDFs would be great. Slap those bitches up on a website. Not quite. I deconstructed the existing .pdf files, then spent a couple of really, really, really boring weeks editing every single page in Photoshop to clean up all of the scanning artefacts, and then made new .pdf files with the clean pages, and let Adobe Acrobat do the OCR'ing to make all of the docs "searchable". Not quite the same thing. I've used Acrobat to save the docs in MS Word format, and I'll PM you a link. But be warned ... the conversion to text isn't that great, and there will be a lot of fixups needed to get usable text out of it and into a wiki.
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Post by Arkhan on Nov 5, 2018 5:12:25 GMT
I will look into this more like, next week when I'm actually in-town for more than 2 days lol. Going to NYC until Monday.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 31, 2019 23:52:12 GMT
Update! No I didn't give up yet.
I changed some stuff in the scanline drawing routine since the way I made the road size table resulted in precision loss (it would have been multiplied by 2 during runtime so half the texture for the road would never be used). I was going to upload a video but even youtube rejected it and claimed it was a duplicate, lol.
I'm thinking on a different approach for the road drawing, since it's taking an unreasonable amount of resources from the PCE to work. And maybe finally figure out those pesky curves and object placement.
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Post by gredler on Feb 1, 2019 0:10:02 GMT
Update! No I didn't give up yet. I changed some stuff in the scanline drawing routine since the way I made the road size table resulted in precision loss (it would have been multiplied by 2 during runtime so half the texture for the road would never be used). I was going to upload a video but even youtube rejected it and claimed it was a duplicate, lol. I'm thinking on a different approach for the road drawing, since it's taking an unreasonable amount of resources from the PCE to work. And maybe finally figure out those pesky curves and object placement.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2019 5:43:09 GMT
I cracked the code on the curves... but I was let down baiii HADASAN!!! since apparently there's no signed MA_MUL16 in the BIOS. I don't care much about speed since it's a 1 multiply per frame thing, I just need something that works, lol. I'll be checking tomorrow for algorithms (the one posted previously here sounded promising but I didn't go over it in detail last time) so if anyone knows about anything I can use, post here
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Post by Galahad on Feb 2, 2019 5:48:03 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2019 21:40:16 GMT
The squares trick is always cool to use, but I still don't understand how the signed version of the 8/16 bit algorithms works...
edit: while I still don't know what's going on in that signed routine, the multiply is working now. I wrote a C++ program to dump the 4 512 byte tables and apparently something was wrong somewhere since, for some reason, signed multiplication wasn't working at all. I had to calculate the tables in freaking EXCEL of all things (with a bit of Notepad++ regex for formatting), and after several tests I guess it's working, lol.
I'd finish the curve routine but I'm frankly tired of staring at a screen. Maybe tomorrow.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2019 23:16:04 GMT
Quite underwhelming... but I guess it doesn't look great because 1 - I render the road until the horizon point instead of clipping it a little bit before; and 2 - There's nothing in the road and no feedback to the curves.
Doesn't seem that off when compared to other games but maybe there's a way to improve it -- one way would be to consider Z position but the algorithm is slow as is. Guess I have to think more about this.
EDIT: lol I'm bending the road in the wrong direction! So that's why it feels so off. Yet another thing to fix later
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2019 1:51:36 GMT
I got some inspiration from a Brazilian dude who I found by complete chance on the internet that was making a racing game for the Mega Drive. All my speed problems where obliterated just by having a precompiled table for the curves -- I didn't try it before because I thought it would have been too big of a table. Turns out that with 8kb I could do more than enough!
Aside from the huge speed gain, another advantage is that I can use whatever formula I want to create the curve offsets, aka the curves can look like whatever I want them to be. I was whining previously that I wanted the curve to be tied to the Z value of the 3D scene, and now I can just do precisely that on my PC without any additional cost. Just need to beat laziness haha. I can also have as many curve "styles" as possible if I have extra 8kb banks to spare, which is also not bad at all.
There are some small and one big adjustment left to do, but for now this will suffice. Now I can finally work on everything else that makes a game a game, like a sprite manager, game logic, collision detection, etc. Probably going to work on sprite positioning and "scaling" next.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2019 1:53:19 GMT
but I do intend to deliver a limited tech demo (think F1-Race on the Famicom or Pole Position) next week so look forward to that. Yes the thread is early but I'm making it public so I don't procrastinate and lose interest in this game again, lol.
Next week - "Sep 10, 2018" lmao.
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fragmare
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 116
Homebrew skills: Graphics, Music, Level Design, Annoying Programmers
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Post by fragmare on Mar 3, 2019 3:43:12 GMT
but I do intend to deliver a limited tech demo (think F1-Race on the Famicom or Pole Position) next week so look forward to that. Yes the thread is early but I'm making it public so I don't procrastinate and lose interest in this game again, lol.
Next week - "Sep 10, 2018" lmao.
Hey, if you want any help with the graphics/pixels, lemme know! I love old raster racing games!
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Post by elmer on Mar 3, 2019 4:37:02 GMT
Cool stuff! I'm so glad that you've got the curves working!
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Post by paranoiadragon on Mar 3, 2019 7:27:53 GMT
Nice. Volcano's eh? This going to end up being some sort of Bonk racing game? PC Run-jin??
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