KarlosTKG now on GitHub

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

its hard to answer that as I only played it from your save game, its defiantly not easy

My theory goes that by the time you reach this level, you will have accumulated enough to push through. The saved game was totally legit (not just equipping whatever I wanted).

[Karlos]

Another idea I'm contemplating is that each level should have all the weapons you'd reasonably expect to have by the time you reach it, in increasingly easy to access locations. For example, in level A, I hide the shotgun weakly and his the assault rifle a bit better. In level B, the shotgun is just in the corridor waiting to be found and the assault rifle is visible to the player. Level C adds the plasma gun without any challenge (the level is on my replace hitlist anyway).

So for level F, the shotgun may as well be just immediately at the start. The plasma and assault rifles are easy to locate. The minigun is only barely hidden, as is the rocket launcher.

This way, if you progress to a level, just, but missed something, it you don't have to necessarily grind through again to get something you probably should've found by then.

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Another idea I'm contemplating is that each level should have all the weapons you'd reasonably expect to have by the time you reach it, in increasingly easy to access locations. For example, in level A, I hide the shotgun weakly and his the assault rifle a bit better. In level B, the shotgun is just in the corridor waiting to be found and the assault rifle is visible to the player. Level C adds the plasma gun without any challenge (the level is on my replace hitlist anyway).

So for level F, the shotgun may as well be just immediately at the start. The plasma and assault rifles are easy to locate. The minigun is only barely hidden, as is the rocket launcher.

This way, if you progress to a level, just, but missed something, it you don't have to necessarily grind through again to get something you probably should've found by then.

yes this sounds reasonable, it is a shame there wasn't a difficulty setting as that could have been an option but eh.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

yes this sounds reasonable, it is a shame there wasn't a difficulty setting as that could have been an option but eh.

I have a thought about difficulty but it doesn't involve changing the engine. Instead, use some assign add trickery and a startup script that chooses the difficulty and you assign add dirs that contain difficulty tuned versions of the main link file. Maybe even the levels themselves with versions that change layouts slightly. It's a one off selection though. You have to exit the game and go back in again

[abu_the_monkey]

@Karlos

brain fart

https://github.com/mheyer32/alienbre...ficulty_select

uses an unused byte of the built in prefsfile to select a different directory for the levels.
ab3:levele = easy
ab3:levels = standard
ab3:levelh = hard

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

@Karlos

brain fart

https://github.com/mheyer32/alienbre...ficulty_select

uses an unused byte of the built in prefsfile to select a different directory for the levels.
ab3:levele = easy
ab3:levels = standard
ab3:levelh = hard

Is the prefs file even loaded btw?

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Is the prefs file even loaded btw?

its not a file as such just 4 bytes of memory

Prefsfile: dc.b 'k8sx'

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

its not a file as such just 4 bytes of memory

Prefsfile: dc.b 'k8sx'

Sure. I was sure I'd seen some code to persist it. Maybe or was in some commented cruft.

[abu_the_monkey]

I remember Prefsname and Prefshandle were there in the code but not used, seems they were culled at some point.

[pipper]

The prefsname/prefshandle stuff has been in there from the start, but to my knowledge there was no code in there ever reading or writing the prefs file. I think we can expand on that without breaking backwards compatibility.

[Karlos]

The level F rework is now merged back into master, along with some general bugfixes (no ammo for bounce laser, now part of the plasma cell pickup).

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

@Karlos

brain fart

https://github.com/mheyer32/alienbre...ficulty_select

uses an unused byte of the built in prefsfile to select a different directory for the levels.
ab3:levele = easy
ab3:levels = standard
ab3:levelh = hard

Interesting approach...

[abu_the_monkey]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Interesting approach...

it was all I could think of so not to restart the whole game and reassign things if you want to change difficulty settings and keep compatibility with the original (which would always load from 'levels' and so play the standard game)

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by abu_the_monkey

it was all I could think of so not to restart the whole game and reassign things if you want to change difficulty settings and keep compatibility with the original (which would always load from 'levels' and so play the standard game)

This would work, but it only solves level loading. I had planned to change the game link file too to alter stats for aliens, pickups etc.

[tomcat666]

Here is the latest version from Github being played on A1200 with pistorm32lite and rPI4 clocked at 2.2Ghz (around 2300 MIPS :

[ Show youtube player ]

(HD version still being processed) 720p in 50fps ...

Bottleneck seems to be chip speed, I get steady 31 FPS with full window size and all details, but if I press ENTER on num keyboard to make the window smaller I get strady 50 FPS :

[Karlos]

That's interesting. It suggest something like 2.5MB/s write speed (320*256*31 = 2539520). Have you got any memory bandwidth tests that might confirm this?

I'm guessing you never found the shotgun that time...

[tomcat666]

Here is the result of the bustest CHIP on my pistorm32lite:



I guess it is 2.3 Mbytes/s for write.w that is relevant here ? Does ab3d2 do word or byte writes, since the test doesn't do byte ones at all.

[grond]

Actually it should do long writes. Definitely no byte writes.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

Actually it should do long writes. Definitely no byte writes.

Indeed. The C2P is all long. The chip ram write speed even for long seems a bit on the low side there. I'm sure it's more like 7MB/s on my 040 system.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Indeed. The C2P is all long. The chip ram write speed even for long seems a bit on the low side there. I'm sure it's more like 7MB/s on my 040 system.

Yes, it is not perfect (yet) - this is one thing the developers will try to improve in the future for pistorm32. But 4.7Mb/s should give more than 31 fps (theoretically) when doing Long writes. The frame buffer for the reads is in the Fast mem though, right (thats the only thing that would make it half the speed really)?