Robocop AGA

[dlfrsilver]

just brilliant !!!

[DanielAllsopp]

Update #5.1

Here's a super-early executable for people to try. Sorry it's all INCBIN'd at the minute so it's over 1Mb in size but should run directly from hard drive. I don't hold up much hope of it running on anything other than a plain-old A1200 or A4000: I have an issue with the blitter when running on my emulated 060 A4000 here, but YMMV.

Robocop AGA

Let me know anyway.

[dlfrsilver]

Hi Daniel, on my A1230, 1,3mb chip and 28mb of fast, i get 'insufficient memory' error code 10.

[jotd]

needs more chipmem. boot without startup

I love arcade-perfect intros. Relatively easy to create, but a lot of work and immensely satisfying.

[DanielAllsopp]

Yeah, it’ll require a lot of free chip memory right now as it’s one massive ball of data. As JOTD suggests, run it without startup.

[DanielAllsopp]

Originally Posted by jotd

needs more chipmem. boot without startup

I love arcade-perfect intros. Relatively easy to create, but a lot of work and immensely satisfying.

Exactly, and one of the reasons I jumped into the intro scenes when I did. Easy to do but I’ve learned a lot whilst doing them; copper loops, horizontal sprite multiplexing, audio, multiple copper lists, scene switching, palette changes, horizontal copper waits, interrupts, proper keyboard handling, text output.

So yeah, simple scenes but lots of gained knowledge and of course, immensely satisfying when complete.

[TheoTheoderich]

I love your work

Thank you for all the videos where we can see how you have created the game.

I try to learn BlitzBasic and i know...sometimes creating a very small scene is hard work, but you can learn a lot from it

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by DanielAllsopp

Yeah, it’ll require a lot of free chip memory right now as it’s one massive ball of data. As JOTD suggests, run it without startup.

Daniel, is it possible to break up the program and data ? This would allow to use less memory than using one huge chunk of data ?

[DanielAllsopp]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Daniel, is it possible to break up the program and data ? This would allow to use less memory than using one huge chunk of data ?

Of course, this was always the plan; I just got carried away with including the data in the binary as I went on. In hindsight I should have stopped and addressed it earlier as it's now sort of "out of control" and definitely needs looking at before I move on.

Fear not

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by DanielAllsopp

Of course, this was always the plan; I just got carried away with including the data in the binary as I went on. In hindsight I should have stopped and addressed it earlier as it's now sort of "out of control" and definitely needs looking at before I move on.

Fear not

Thanks

[DanielAllsopp]

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

[acidbottle]

Nice update Daniel!

Those under the hood style changes may not sound interesting but know how huge an impact they have on the project as a whole, so is good to hear. PPaint is really solid but isnt without some issues, I also initially used it for palette crunching but alas now shifted over to paintshop pro!

Look forward to the taster.

[dlfrsilver]

Absolutely awesome !

[DanielAllsopp]

Update #7

Quick update, despite it being a while since I last did one. Lots of things under the hood though, and the intro has been finished off

Basically, there were a few "issues" with the double buffering system I had implemented which caused problems when running on real hardware, and which also exposed other issues with Amiga's with Fast RAM. This has all been solved, and I can confirm the game runs fine on a bog standard A1200, and on a 060 A4000.

Another issue was down to the fetch mode used; I was using a 288 pixel wide display (16 pixels either side to draw tiles before scrolling) with a fetch mode of 4x, which if I'd read the documentation correctly, means that I would have needed 64 pixels either side of the screen, which is doable by changing the fetch start, but not with the number of sprites I needed for the parallax background. I might add that thus far during development, this 4x fetch mode with 16 pixel fetches was "working" in the version of FS-UAE I used for development, however when moved to WinUAE, the beta version of FS-UAE or a real Amiga it went tits up pretty quickly!

Therefore compromises mean the screen width is back to the arcade width of 256 pixels, with a 2x fetch mode and 32 pixels either side of the screen.





Worth it for a couple of sprites in the background? I think so, at least it's arcade accurate and using the bigger fetch mode gives me more time with the blitter, which is the main takeaway here. The intro screens shown in the video below though, they're still all 320x256.

The main RoboCop sprite code has also been completely re-written. He is no longer blit to the screen as a full frame image but rather he is split into two from the torso due to the many combinations of poses and moves he can perform. I also only blit the actual size of the frame instead of my previous solution of having one single BOB which was always sized to the maximum width and height of the entire frameset.



Added lots of little things to the intro, including the scene transitions, cursor, sound effects etc:

[ Show youtube player ]

Until the next time!

Shout outs and big thanks for help during this little phase belong to:
- roondar: advice and ideas for transitioning scenes
- phx: vasm/vlink help
- a/b, galahad, stingray, phx, mc6809e, paraj, roondar, DanScott, mcgeezer: Help with my double buffering, blitter routines and Fast RAM issues

[dlfrsilver]

Superb.

[jotd]

I love spot on arcade intro sequences!! I hope you can end this project. This is big.

[VincentGR]

Beautiful!!!

[modrobert]

Impressive! Five ED-209's out of FIVE.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jotd

I love spot on arcade intro sequences!! I hope you can end this project. This is big.

This shows that well programmed, awesome softs can be done on A1200, even with the lack of update on the chipset.

[malko]

Not an easy project but great results so far