Tinyus Open Beta Released (OCS Gradius port)

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by trydowave

First tried this on the A600 vampire 2 and it zipped along at an incredible rate so I thought id try it on my stock A1200 expecting to see potential slowdown. I was wrong! Truly impressed with this. No slowdowns that i could see apart from a tiny bit at the start of level 3. This happened when a ton of enemies and bullets were on the screen as well as having full upgraded weapons.

I tried it on my A500 with half meg and it said it didn't have enough memory to run? is there a way to get it to work as im interested to see it even if it runs a little slower? I think even at 25fps this would be the greatest horizontal shooter to grace the Amiga 500.

Well done. Looking forward to the final release.

You must have 1MB on your A500. Almost all games require that. AmigaKit have a nice 0.5MB for your A500. Cost almost nothing.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by zero

Thank you so much for this. As a coder who used to work with the Amiga I'm really impressed by this, it's really something special!

The stars look like one sprite re-used by the copper, and the effect is really good.

In stage 2 there is a lot of vertical scrolling as well, very impressive as it requires a lot more blitting to keep the scrolling moving, and there is still a lot on screen.

The lasers are very impressive. They are "attached" to the ship so the whole laser is being redrawn as it moves.

There is a lot of collision detection going on as well, would love to know what system is being used for that. Bounding box might be a bit slow for such a large number of objects and there is collision with the background as well as enemies!

The sound is outstanding too, the sounds effects and music are all there and sound great.

Honestly when I saw this I thought maybe it was an 030 and RTG or something, looks more like a PC Engine game.

Thanks for your kind comments.

If you want more information on the tech you also read this thread:
https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=105725

The lasers were relativly easy as they are just a single blitted line. It was even quicker to blit all 5 lasers then the 10 bullets you can have otherwise. On Amiga this was far easier to achive then in the arcade where they had to chain tons of sprites to do so

Regarding collision detection i first tried hashed morton codes, but this was too slow in the end. Then i tried sorted Y buckets, but still too slow. In the end i was using a simple O^N compare but i skipped every 2nd item
and jittered the start item each frame. With enlarged hit boxes this was fast and accurate enough to ship.

The arcade music is technically quite simple, but the compositions are great. So that was fun to redo. The hard part was to recreate the soundfx without sampling them. They have a lot of 'notes', instead of just being noises. Fortunately PreTracker supports having 'patterns' for each sfx and so it was possible to mimick them. In the end all sfx only use 4 or 5 tiny samples alltogether (128 bytes each).

>Honestly when I saw this I thought maybe it was an 030 and RTG or >something, looks more like a PC Engine game.

Thanks I think most PC Engine games could be nicely redone on Amiga..

[Suicyco]

Unlike I claimed earlier, two buttons on a CD32 controller work just fine - sorry about the misinformation.

Regarding the issue with the game not giving you a new ship after dying - it happens at least on an A500 and I've seen it at least on levels 2 and 3.

There are no blue power up capsules, but I don't really miss them.

[trydowave]

Originally Posted by nikosidis

You must have 1MB on your A500. Almost all games require that. AmigaKit have a nice 0.5MB for your A500. Cost almost nothing.

sorry.. that was meant to say "A500 with half meg upgrade". it still doesn't run though.

P.s. I have 3x Cumana external floppy drives hooked up to the A500... could this be the problem?

[JoeJoe]

Each device takes up memory. Either kill DF1-4 with a boot block or disconnect the drives.

[Amiga1992]

Wow this is amazing! Such a great port again. I just cannot help but wonder what you'll tackle next.

And you made it so quickly!

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

>(Bug?) Ship speed doesn't reset to slowest at death (don't remember if >this was in the original).

That was by intention. The game is otherwise really unplayable in later levels (at least in my view). So you always fall back to speed=1 instead of 0.

Man I wouldn't mind if you take more liberties and make the game better, maybe add a special "Amiga" mode where power ups are "-1'd" instead of reset to zero? And leave an Arcade mode for those who, for some reason, like to suffer :P Lots of these Gradius games have special modes added when ported, so it wouldn't be out of character!

To me this always made Gradius unplayable. if you lose mid-level, your chances of ending that level are very tiny. If you had a downgrade, it would be a lot more enjoyable.

[Don_Adan]

Perhaps difficulty level can be added.
Easy (Akira idea)
Normal (current version)
Arcade (with reset speed to 0 after death, and maybe some other changes)
Some people likes to play easy games, some people likes to play very hard games.

[Amiga1992]

I don't mind hard games, but I think Gradius is just done wrong, in this aspect. Reliance on being powered up to finish a level without the chance to power up appropriately after a checkpoint means the only strategy is not to lose a single life after you passed the first checkpoint.

Games like R-Type had this more balanced, usually letting you get the minimum necessary powerups to proceed right after the checkpoint in question. This solves the problem without dumbing down the difficulty to baby levels.

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by Akira

I don't mind hard games, but I think Gradius is just done wrong, in this aspect. Reliance on being powered up to finish a level without the chance to power up appropriately after a checkpoint means the only strategy is not to lose a single life after you passed the first checkpoint.

Games like R-Type had this more balanced, usually letting you get the minimum necessary powerups to proceed right after the checkpoint in question. This solves the problem without dumbing down the difficulty to baby levels.

This is originally arcade game port. Most arcade games was made for money. You must be killed fast and without easy restart. Of course after some time of playing and used many coins you can play some arcade games to the end without Continue.

[nikosidis]

I think this game is clever in respect of difficulty. After I learned level 1 it is easy to go though.

[spoUP]

Now, who's gonna port wonder boy 1?

[spoUP]

Forgot to say, Abyss massive, this is the coolest port to come to the amiga since.. maybe forever! One of my alltime fav games, and the execution here is fantastic in every way!

AWESOME JOB!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

This is originally arcade game port. Most arcade games was made for money.

R-Type was also an arcade, made for money, and it was a lot better designed/more balanced.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

Easy (Akira idea)
Normal (current version)
Arcade (with reset speed to 0 after death, and maybe some other changes)

Arcade - you just die
(without anything hits you)

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Akira

I don't mind hard games, but I think Gradius is just done wrong, in this aspect. Reliance on being powered up to finish a level without the chance to power up appropriately after a checkpoint means the only strategy is not to lose a single life after you passed the first checkpoint.

To be fair Akira; virtually all arcade Shoot 'Em Ups are like this...

[Retro-Nerd]

Try Gradius II. This is much harder at times.

[MrClump]

Suggestion: would it be possible to have the power-up select respond to the mouse buttons as well as the space bar? Taking your hands off the joystick to reach all the way over to the keyboard keeps killing me. :-) Or is that because I am rubbish at Gradius, as much as I love it?

[MrClump]

Originally Posted by MrClump

Suggestion: would it be possible to have the power-up select respond to the mouse buttons as well as the space bar? Taking your hands off the joystick to reach all the way over to the keyboard keeps killing me. :-) Or is that because I am rubbish at Gradius, as much as I love it?

I didn't realise there was two button support, so I've finally modded by ArcadeR joystick to use two buttons and now I am rocking!

[Havie]

Tried this tonight and wow - amazing! Always loved Gradius (although not as much as Salamander). Keep up the great work!

[trydowave]

Disabled the Cumana drives on my A500 and fired up Gradius again and it worked. It was great on the A1200 but after reading some comments and the games intro screen I was expecting some major 'Barbarian plus' level of slow down but was in fact pleasantly suprised!

The game ran totally smoothly and slowed down to an exceptable level when full lasers were equipped and tons of bullets and enemies swarmed around me. There nothing here that Gradius III wasnt doing on the snes; minus the flicker.

If I had this on the ol 500 back in the day I would of been pleased as punch and right now, for me, its contender for best horizontal scrolling shooter on the Amiga. Only Turrican 2s flying stage beats it for me but I wont count that as its a sub game.

Amazing job!

p.s.... please do Rastan next