Discussion: ModSurfer

[LeCaravage]

Been waiting for the update sir Because it's kinda cool to read your dev diary.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by LeCaravage

Been waiting for the update sir

Straight back at ya in regards to your game

[arcanist]

Originally Posted by LeCaravage

Been waiting for the update sir Because it's kinda cool to read your dev diary.

Been super busy putting all the pieces together.

Here's a sneak preview:

[DamienD]

Nice

[arcanist]

This update introduces a completed file browser. There was a lot of uninteresting plumbing code here so I didn't make an interim post.

The video below shows how the browser works. The panel on the left gives details about the selected mod. It actually displays the instrument names but this was a common location for artists to write a piece of text about their work.

I introduced a new gameplay feature. If the player misses a block then the corresponding instrument doesn't play. The first part of the video shows this in action. It makes the gameplay a bit more interactive and I really like it.

To give the player time to activate blocks from the side (rather than just the front) the sound can't begin playing until the block has passed. This introduces a small delay that wasn't present in earlier builds. I'm not super happy about this but I think the game might be too difficult on faster tracks if the player can only activate blocks from the front.

For the nosy devs among you I've uploaded the current code to GitHub. Some of it is pending cleanups but it's in reasonable shape. The source code cross-compiles with amiga-gcc. I develop from a Linux system but it would also build on Mac OS X and Windows (with a native C compiler for the meta-compiling steps).

https://github.com/amigageek/modsurfer

I've picked one of my favorite tracks for the second part of the video. It's quite fast and feels great to play. (Captured on an emulated A1200 pending an optimization to start-up time for A500.)

[ Show youtube player ]

[DamienD]

Wow, looking good indeed

Nice progress arcanist

[seuden]

Looking great!

[arcanist]

Track curves did not work out well! I put together a quick prototype and... it just doesn't look good in a game without physics.

The technique is an extension of the method used to move the camera. Each scanline is shifted horizontally by a different amount. By increasing the shift from the bottom to the top a bend is formed.

I think I'm going to experiment with hills/dips instead. I've got about 1/3rd frame time to spare on a 68000 so it'd be a shame to waste the cycles.

[ Show youtube player ]

(Excuse the audio glitches. Something's broken between WinUAE and OBS.)

[arcanist]

I've run through about 100 mods to find bugs and tune the algorithm. I picked 10 of my favorites for a demo disk so far.

Today I've been tuning the difficulty for fast tracks. I think the engine is a bit too enthusiastic about placing blocks in alternating left/right lanes, which requires fast mouse movement. It's more fun to slide left to right and back so I'll probably tweak the track generator a bit.

I spent an hour playing fast tracks today and they're super fun. I've recorded a couple of them back to back in the video below. Getting that "one more go" vibe with your own game is a special kind of feeling.

[ Show youtube player ]

[saimon69]

hmm, i wonder how hard is to implement visibility conditions to increase difficulty (maybe nightlights too?)

[E-Penguin]

That's nothing short of brilliant

[spoUP]

Nice!!!
I bet it could look pretty trippy with raster color bars masked in on the track dividers/edges and notes. A changing scrolling rasterbar maybe varied by a decrunch style effect on snares/whitenoize etc?...

[roondar]

It's looking very nice so far, I like the speed changes during the game

[seuden]

Awesome stuff.

[DamienD]

Personally I thought the "curved tracks" were quite cool; a shame that they are no longer

[Tsak]

Agree. Curves don't need to happen too close to the player but further up ahead, so the road can still be straight at the player's position as it is now. Curves and bumps can really elevate the visual outcome and feel.

[arcanist]

I appreciate all the input.

I'm trying to keep audio and visual elements synchronized in a meaningful way. Perhaps that's more of a demoscene mindset but I've found it useful in this project, which relies heavily on sound. That was an additional reason for dropping curves. I'm not sure what to synchronize them with. Come to think of it I'm not even sure AudioSurf does. I prefer hills/dips because they synchronize well with the beat, which the game can already detect.

Hills are tricky to draw, though. I use the same rendering technique as Lotus and in that game you can't see beyond a hill. The horizon shifts up/down so you're either going up a large hill or down one. It's too big to synchronize with a beat. There's a different drawing technique better suited to this but I've not seen it done at 50 FPS on a 68000.

Still, I have some plans to spruce up the visuals a bit.

[arcanist]

During the festive break I spent some time fixing bugs and polishing up the graphics. I ran out of frame time along the way. A quick rewrite of the most time intensive code (copperlist update) from C to assembly brought the result back to around 70% frame time. Now I have to figure out how to spend it.

Blocks on the track are now colored according to the note being played. This looks better in some mods than others. It works especially well with long pitch slides.

I didn't like the ship sprite so I knocked up a classic boing ball in Deluxe Paint IV and added everyone's favorite color cycling pattern for that rolling goodness.

There's now a basic "sky" gradient to fill in the blackness. I'm also playing with a gradient in the track stripes and edges. The game currently pulses the brightness at the speed of the track. I was thinking of something more interesting to do with it. Perhaps a hue shift as the track completion % approaches 100, or tied to the number of blocks in the area.

Excuse any capture artifacts in the video. I can't figure out how to get OBS to capture 50Hz reliably. I also had to disable WinUAE's lagless vsync mode to record without tearing. The game works fantastically in lagless mode, you can really feel the lower input lag. Props to Toni!

[ Show youtube player ]

[spud]

Looks cool and is a great improvement. I'd love to understand the maths involved in something like this but I think it might blow mind completely.

[ExiE]

Looks really cool, just the ball is not there yet It looks like the ball has no weight and the animation is weird and still the same no matter what direction is the ball moving. But with free cycles, the ball could really roll...