Inviyya - OCS Shoot Em Up

[Tigerskunk]

New build of the game...

[ Show youtube player ]

Collisions are off...

[Gzegzolka]

Nice work

[malko]

Nice, nice, nice !

[DamienD]

Heya Steril707,

Very happy to see that you're back on this

My friend, don't ever worry about what others say about your work if negative... they just don't know the full picture / story behind it.

If you are happy, that's all that really counts and the majority of others here on EAB are with ya, trust me. Respect!!!

[Tigerskunk]

Thanks Damien...

[Amiga1992]

Echoing Damien's feelings, glad to see you back and bounce off the hate.
New version looks cool, I see you tweaked the main ship a lot, and also there's some pleasant dithering on the graphics !

[Amigajay]

Nice update! I agree the ship looks much better when moving and not distracting like the previous build, good work!

[vulture]

@Steril707

Ditto from me m8! Haters will hate, your work has been stellar so far, colour me impressed!

[Tigerskunk]

Thanks, guys...

[kriz]

Looks great, have followed the development for some time and love it so far.. !! Keep on the great work Steril707 !!

[Trachu]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Dual playfield and some semiclever use of 5 sprites for the planet background, sprite 6 is the scrolling starfield, 7 = shots, 8 = cockpit overlay in the foreground.

Thanks to Codetapper for maintaining his site, which gives me all kind of creative ideas like this...

Ok so lets reveal more secrets, shall we ;-)

From what i can say player ship is drawn by Blitter in background playfield. It seems to be 33px wide? Strange coz it requies another memory access.
Or maybe you just use some upscaller which distorted the screen.

Why backround playfield is based on 4 colours and with multiple repeats. My guess is memory conservation?

When you hide the planets for what do you use sprites? My guess is enemies and some additional colours in front playfield.

The game looks for a good successor of R-type and I would bet many enjoy it including me, but the more i look at your vertical dithering the more i hate it. Sorry but standard dotlike dither would suit here better.

Another tip for you and anyoneelse is that you could easily create 5colour sprites using only 2 hardware sprites.
The key is that if you set ATTACH bit (16colours) but you would not allign them together, each sprite is using different set of 3 colour registers. Someone might say then why not to use 6 colours sprite then. Well in order to have something which fits together you need at least single unified colour which glues them together, Whts left is 2 colours for left and another 2 for right part of the sprite.
Looking at your player ship its shape would be perfect to utilize it as a sprite with some minor modification. In this way you could expand background playfield to 8 colours and even more when used copper.

Thats my 2 cents. Hope it helps

[Gorf]

The game looks for a good successor of R-type and I would bet many enjoy it including me, but the more i look at your vertical dithering the more i hate it. Sorry but standard dotlike dither would suit here better.

I like it. It embraces the scan-line look.

Why backround playfield is based on 4 colours and with multiple repeats. My guess is memory conservation?
.....
In this way you could expand background playfield to 3 colours and even more when used copper.

So you suggest to expand the number of colours from 4 to 3?

[Trachu]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I like it. It embraces the scan-line look.



So you suggest to expand the number of colours from 4 to 3?

Suit yourself, I prefered previous version graphics. Very detailes with so little collours
[ Show youtube player ]

I meant 3 bitplanes 8 colour.

Bottom line player ship would look very nice with blueish cockpit and reddish fangs at the back.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Trachu

Ok so lets reveal more secrets, shall we ;-)

Let's go...!

Originally Posted by Trachu

From what i can say player ship is drawn by Blitter in background playfield.

First off, I guess we should differentiate between the old version and the one I have now. I rethought some things, because I never really liked how devoid of colour everything was in the old version.

But in both versions, the players ship was a Blitter Object in the foreground.

Originally Posted by Trachu

It seems to be 33px wide? Strange coz it requies another memory access.
Or maybe you just use some upscaller which distorted the screen.

It's simply a scaled UAE-Screenshot. Probably doesn't make much sense taking widths from it.
All my objects are 32 px wide.

Originally Posted by Trachu

Why background playfield is based on 4 colours and with multiple repeats. My guess is memory conservation?

I only use 2 bitplanes on the background, because then I can use the 3rd bitplane for transparency effects (e.g. special weapons), see here:

[ Show youtube player ]

And even in the old version, those transparent tubes were made with that effect..

Originally Posted by Trachu

When you hide the planets for what do you use sprites? My guess is enemies and some additional colours in front playfield.

There will probably be no more planets in the new version.
I wrote a sprite multiplexer for the new version, and use the sprites in attached mode for having 16 colour enemies, which makes for a much more colourful look. So the background planets are gone right now...

Maybe with some trickery and extra time I will put them back in, who knows?

Originally Posted by Trachu

The game looks for a good successor of R-type and I would bet many enjoy it including me, but the more i look at your vertical dithering the more i hate it. Sorry but standard dotlike dither would suit here better.

Well, that's your taste then, I like the new look a lot. I usually abhore dithering, especially crosshatch, and that's why I didn't use any in the old version. But then I found some stuff a dude was making for the C64 which employed this horizontal line dithering, and I kind of liked that a lot.

Looks much more classy and "tech", in my opinion.
So that's the style now, and it's too late to change that, unfortunately...

Other than that, a big change in my engine was that I don't use tiles anymore like I did before.
I can freely draw a level in GIMP, for example, and just process it through a tool that i wrote, which puts out a file that has the tiles in interleaved mode in it, plus a level map.
Very convenient.

And also the reason why the new version of Inviyya looks lot more organic and colourful.

Originally Posted by Trachu

Another tip for you and anyone else is that you could easily create 5colour sprites using only 2 hardware sprites.
The key is that if you set ATTACH bit (16colours) but you would not allign them together, each sprite is using different set of 3 colour registers. Someone might say then why not to use 6 colours sprite then. Well in order to have something which fits together you need at least single unified colour which glues them together, Whts left is 2 colours for left and another 2 for right part of the sprite.
Looking at your player ship its shape would be perfect to utilize it as a sprite with some minor modification. In this way you could expand background playfield to 8 colours and even more when used copper.

Like I said, I already use 16 colour sprites, and the background is 4 colours because I want it that way..

Originally Posted by Trachu

Thats my 2 cents. Hope it helps

Off course... Every comment is valuable to me..

Thanks for taking the time to write, Trachu!

[Trachu]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Let's go...!

First off, I guess we should differentiate between the old version and the one I have now. I rethought some things, because I never really liked how devoid of colour everything was in the old version.

But in both versions, the players ship was a Blitter Object in the foreground.

Hi steril, nice to see you share some thoughts.
Sorry I will mix your almost finished project but i think such conversation would be beneficial for the future projects.

First of all I am very well aware of vertical dithering. It is used right now in the HAM6 converter i help develop to simulate RGB15 in RGB12 space. What we have now is the mixture of standard and line dither because only line looked very bad and i still cant adjusted to it.
Take a look here how nice can Amiga OCS display look like.
http://www.imagebam.com/image/df0bea737965403

I also noticed you had no dither at all in original graphics and i suggested you to use some, but what you did is overkill and ruin the whole effect. I shouldnt go too modern when you dont have to.

OK so using 3rd bitplane for special weapons is smart choice, but you need to expand the graphics because it does not fill the whole screen.
Also there is a psychovisual trick you applied here. Human vision is the least aware of changes of Blue colour. If you would change background colours to more Blueish you could hide banding even better.

So your spaceship is BOB in foreground. The disadvantage of this is those 4 colours you need to keep constant in the whole screen. The foreground contains seprated top and bottom and with only 7 colours changeing only 3 is not too colourful.. I am not talking here about right or wrong but about the consequences of the particular choices.
You have chosen your player to be BOB and you have all 8 sprites free to use for other things. Because yo use 32px wide 15color sprites you can have only 2 such object in single line utilising all 8 sprites, unless you made some trick here

Those are your choices, but take a look at the alternative:
1. We keep the background as is, so 2 bitplanes plus 3rd for special effects
2. The foreground is splited at top and bottom each utilised completelly different colours plus some copper tricks to enhance it further
2. The player ship is 5 colour object using the attach bit trick on only 2 hardware sprites.
3a. We have 6 sprites left which we can utilise for 3 waves of totally independent enemies each with different 3 colours.
3b We cane have 2 waves of enemies. One is 3 colour, the second is 15colour
3c We can have only one wave opf enemies all of them 15coloured. We would have left with 2 hardware sprites which could be utilised for independent missiles.
4. Missilies are either BOBs or in case of 3c hardware sprites

I am not sure how your multiplexer works but maybe there is a way how to double the sprites in 3c approach.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Trachu

I am not talking here about right or wrong but about the consequences of the particular choices.

Indeed...
The thing is though, in the end it's just a decision for this or that, since we are working with a very fixed amount of tools at our hands.
Six bitplanes, eight 16 pixel wide sprites, 2 playfields, and the copper to mix things up a bit.

And then it comes down to what ->I<- want to see in the game and its visual style, by shifting these tools into the place where I need them.
Every decision for an effect is also a decision against another effect in an Amiga game.

Somebody else (e.g. you ) would decide differently how to shuffle these things, which I understand.

But then, in the end first off I have to be happy about the way my game looks, not somebody else, since I am the one spending a lot of time coding and pixeling for it.
Personally, I think the new style looks a lot better than the old one, and responses so far have been good.

You are free to think different, off course..
You simply cannot make everybody happy with the way a game looks or does not...

Anyway, thanks for sharing you thoughts and ideas, maybe I will use some of them in future projects...

[DamienD]

@Trachu; personally I really like the new look.

Obviously you are welcome to give advise to Steril707 but at the end of the day it's his game and he will do whatever he likes with it; end of.

Why don't you create your own game and then you can use any method you think is best?

[Tigerskunk]

@DamienD: I think this kind of discussion is rather beneficial, and even if personally I will stay with the way the game looks, this exchange of ideas might be interesting for other people who want to code something..

So, everything's fine...

Plus, I'd rather have some discussion in this thread than none...

[Trachu]

Originally Posted by DamienD

@Trachu; personally I really like the new look.

Obviously you are welcome to give advise to Steril707 but at the end of the day it's his game and he will do whatever he likes with it; end of.

Why don't you create your own game and then you can use any method you think is best?

You are of course right it is his game and his decision, however you obviously missed the point of this discussion ;-)

It is really sad that even logically argumented disscussion is recognised by some people as some wrong. No its not wrong because we are exchanging ideas and it is not a critic at all, coz the very essence of disscussion is that you have two sides with different opinions.

And you should know as moderator i already did some creation for Amiga game here on this forum, so I am more than capable for making the argument here.

[DamienD]

Discussion is fine; what it seems to me though (and hence why Steril707 has had to tell you multiple times that it's the way he likes it and it's his game / decisions), is that your are trying to enforce your methods.

Maybe it's just the way you come across / word things.

Anyway, enough from me...