Hyperborea Resurrected - real AGA bullet hell danmaku WIP

[Daytona675x]

@all
Thanks again, guys

@vulture
Yes, almost 450, but this number is only valid with those tiny 4x4 2-bitplanes bullets in this particular scene.
However, in practice this bullet size is just too small to be fun, so this test and number are pretty academic

@Tsak
The shots and stuff appear less static on a real screen. But of course you're right, there's room for improvement. It was put together quickly. Right now the only thing that matters to me is to make the engine technically complete so that Torben has something he can really work with and so that we really know the final limits when it comes to level / pattern design. Therefore consider the concrete appearance of all those objects to be prototypes / placeholders

@redblade
To be honest: I had no idea how much CPU time the music player swallows until now. I don't really care because there's not much I can do here anyway. I'm using Frank Wille's ptplayer which seems to do a pretty good job (thanks for that one, Frank, you are in the credits, of course). I just checked, the performance penalty is barely noticeable right now.
No, there won't be a Raiden seeker laser. Firstly because it doesn't fit the planned game mechanics well. Secondly because it cannot be implemented well (or at all) into this engine, with its limited processing budget and sprite restrictions for the weapons.

@str0m
Same here CAVE / Atlus rules! Bought an xbox360 back then only because of the real good ports of these games (that xbox360 is still in use, just for those; if you look closely you can spot it in the last video, near the 2nd A1200. That's why those bigger TVs are mounted on Artic X1-3Ds, so they can easily be rotated... ).
Nothing beats a decent danmaku session when you want to relax, am I right?!

Reposting for convenience due to pagebreak:
[ Show youtube player ]

[str0m]

yes the 360 in Japan had loads more releases like that than in the EU/US. I must pick up a JP one (or just one RGH'd.......). Had mine hooked up to an old TV for a while which I balanced against the wall in TATE mode So many on the Saturn too which is probably my most used console

edit: old photo hah, looks like DC Ikaruga and Mars Matrix on the CRT

[vulture]

@Daytona675x

Dunno how hard it is, but could you make a test at some point in the future with that transparent parallax layer you mentioned? I believe it will be quite a sight to behold!

[Daytona675x]

@str0m
Lovely Spent many hours with Mars Matrix on the DC myself too, ages ago though (don't even know if my DC still works).
Unfortunately Ikaruga is not my cup of coffee - while it's brilliant in every possible aspect I never became really good at polarity-switching

@vulture
Not in the near future (and maybe never, if Torben doesn't want it). Technically it's not hard to do, but the background and ground objects must be designed for this otherwise it will just look shabby at best (effectively this pretty cheap effect is just something like EHB with in this case here 4 instead of 6 bitplanes, so the effective background palette becomes 8 colors + 8 variants of those which are set to lerp towards the desired cloud RGB value; and then you just endlessly scroll the 4th bitplane which contains a big 1 bit cloud mask).

But something else has just been implemented today, and I suppose you'll like the result even more than a cloud layer
Will prepare a fresh video this weekend.

[vulture]

@Daytona675x

ohhhh...can't wait

[Cris1997XX]

Can we commission you guys to port Cave's bullet hell shooters to the Amiga?

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

@all
Thanks again, guys
@Tsak
The shots and stuff appear less static on a real screen. But of course you're right, there's room for improvement. It was put together quickly. Right now the only thing that matters to me is to make the engine technically complete so that Torben has something he can really work with and so that we really know the final limits when it comes to level / pattern design. Therefore consider the concrete appearance of all those objects to be prototypes / placeholders

@redblade
To be honest: I had no idea how much CPU time the music player swallows until now. I don't really care because there's not much I can do here anyway. I'm using Frank Wille's ptplayer which seems to do a pretty good job (thanks for that one, Frank, you are in the credits, of course). I just checked, the performance penalty is barely noticeable right now.
No, there won't be a Raiden seeker laser. Firstly because it doesn't fit the planned game mechanics well. Secondly because it cannot be implemented well (or at all) into this engine, with its limited processing budget and sprite restrictions for the weapons.

Banging tune, those drum samples
I can understand that the Raiden Seeker Laser would take a lot of calculations from the game.

Looking forward to seeing Torbens work in the future

[Daytona675x]

New WIP video #4
[ Show youtube player ]

What's new?

Apart from some internal improvements and smaller addons / changes:

- bonus stars
In this video these are created out of stronger enemies' bullets on enemy destruction.

- different bullet variants
In addition to the default 8x8 orb, this video also shows 16x16, 4x4 and straight thin directional laser beams.

- bullet stress test
As promised, this video contains a 4x4 bullet stress test at the end. Up to almost 450 such bullets are on screen simultanously, game still running at 50 fps. Of course this is a pretty synthetic / academic test: in the real game we won't use tiny 4x4 bullets for such stuff because it's hardly playable and in contrast to this scene there will be moving enemies as well.

This will be the last WIP video for now because the engine is fully prepared (apart from bug fixes and some further optimizations).

Cheers,
Daniel

[vulture]

Wow!!!

[roondar]

It's so cool to see so many bullets on an A1200. Great stuff again

[malko]

[CFou!]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

New WIP video #4
[ Show youtube player ]

What's new?

Apart from some internal improvements and smaller addons / changes:

- bonus stars
In this video these are created out of stronger enemies' bullets on enemy destruction.

- different bullet variants
In addition to the default 8x8 orb, this video also shows 16x16, 4x4 and straight thin directional laser beams.

- bullet stress test
As promised, this video contains a 4x4 bullet stress test at the end. Up to almost 450 such bullets are on screen simultanously, game still running at 50 fps. Of course this is a pretty synthetic / academic test: in the real game we won't use tiny 4x4 bullets for such stuff because it's hardly playable and in contrast to this scene there will be moving enemies as well.

This will be the last WIP video for now because the engine is fully prepared (apart from bug fixes and some further optimizations).

Cheers,
Daniel

impressive work

[carrion]

Truely impressive. I love bullet hell shooters and I like to code amiga so this thing here is double impressive to me. I'd love to hear/read about technical details of how you implemented parts of the engine.
And beeing pixel artist myself I'd love to see new pixel art instead of the reused Battle Squadron. Game so far looks and plays Amazing.
Waiting for more...

[buzzybee]

Originally Posted by Daytona675x

@all
@redblade
To be honest: I had no idea how much CPU time the music player swallows until now. I don't really care because there's not much I can do here anyway. I'm using Frank Wille's ptplayer which seems to do a pretty good job (thanks for that one, Frank, you are in the credits, of course). I just checked, the performance penalty is barely noticeable right now.

If I may just jump in, since RP3 uses the exact same, totally amazing PTPlayer by Frank Wille: Frank's Code takes up about five scanlines most of the time, up to 10 - 15 scanlines in rare cases. So its CPU footprint is almost negligible.

[Daytona675x]

New WIP video #5
[ Show youtube player ]

Yes, I know, I didn't want to make another one for now, but I changed my mind because this one shows a much more polished version and is therefore the better last video for the time being.
So what's new?

- level enter and exit transition
I think it turned out quite nice - a homage to both Dodonpachi and one well known Amiga classic

- main menu
This one is now fully operational. It also includes a cheat menu - the required cheat code mechanism to enable it is already inside too
The menus can be controlled by keyboard now too.

- background palette change
As I previously said, the engine supports on-the-fly palette changes automagically.
For the foreground (usually floating enemies) this has already been shown.
However, the background was drawn for the deprecated first engine some years ago, so at the moment it just has 16 colors.
For this new video I took Torben's original level art and messed around with the colors a bit, so that now at least the water area at level start uses a completely different palette.
Also, one of the train ground enemies comes with its own palette now (the red stripes and lights are green).

- more foreground palette changes
And while I was at it, I also gave those flying test enemies more crude test color variations

I also updated the map-conversion tool. Torben can now simply use TilEd and its layer feature to directly edit maps with different tilesets / palettes per tile-row.

Cheers,
Daniel

[malko]

Whaou

[vroom6sri]

Double whaou!

It looks incredible.

[TCD]

Looks great Keep them coming

[vulture]

magnificent!

[Predseda]

I like how the bullets turn into collectable stars after their launcher is destroyed!