Wonderboy

[alain.treesong]

Excellent project.
Wonderboy is one of my favorite arcade games from the 80s.

@acidbottle
If it doesn't run very well on a vanilla A500, why not target the game to an A1200 (vanilla). So maybe in addition to the gain in fluidity (maybe 50fps at this point), you could add a few more elements and focus more on gameplay than technique. This would make it possible to make a version + of Wonderboy (while remaining in the theme of the conversion of an existing game) and thus would bring novelty. Just a suggestion of course. Bravo for the project anyway.

[Tsak]

Nice work @acidbottle!
I see no reason why this port shouldn't run flawlessly on a500.

Try the following:

1) make all immobile items into blocks with fast blit enabled, you need to include the backs in so this will eat up slightly more ram (as you'll need to have various versions of the same item depending on the back), but you'll get a BIG boost in performance this way. Definitely worth it.
2) make all hazard, immobile obstacles like fires into blocks as well. No reason to have these otherwise.
3) Use sprites as much as possible. Main character can esilly be a sprite as well as his projectile. You'll still have sprites channels left to add in an enemy or two or some other object.

With the above changes you're guaranteed to get a signifficant performance boost with almost zero compromises. The game doesn't move a lot of objects on screen anyhow, so any other stuff made into bobs won't slow the game down. If you want an extra boost, you can try and limit your palette to 16 colors. Wonder boy can easilly be made into 16 colors and I bet nobody would be able to tell the difference (if you do a good job). With the player and other stuff made as a sprites you can get an additional 16 color palette for free (so f.e. you don't need to allocate player colors into your main palette and thus use different colors there for other stuff).

[jotd]

Dual playfield is also an option even if you don't go parallax. 8+8 colors + sprites but you avoid background restore.

All is a question of compromise

[acidbottle]

Thanks all for your encouragement, all comments good and bad are greatly appreciated

I know many will want feature or option x and game design is a largely no win situation. I really want to aim for the feel of the original as best I can. It will not be a 1:1 copy but hope to get close.

@Tsak - great list of optimizations, will be starting on the sprites, which I think just means reorganising the scorpion palette a little bit. The 32 colours give the game some depth, as it were, I had tried 16 colour and it wasnt terrible bad but was begining to get quite a challenge to fit in everything. Will be the last thing I change if everything else fails!

As of this moment I can say it will be fully working on unexpanded 1200s with a view of making it fully A500 OCS compliant once the main engine is nailed!

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by jotd

Dual playfield is also an option even if you don't go parallax. 8+8 colors + sprites but you avoid background restore.

All is a question of compromise

For how i remember WB palette was organised, the 16 colors for everything and a 16 colors player sprite seems easily feasible; on the 8+8 things might get a bit complex (palette changes in example) or might end up with Thunderboy



What i REALLY want to know, though is if from Scorpion the horizontal scroll can be limited to push instead of two directional, that is how WB scroll works

[acidbottle]

Originally Posted by saimon69

What i REALLY want to know, though is if from Scorpion the horizontal scroll can be limited to push instead of two directional, that is how WB scroll works

Good question, you probably noticed that the uphill/boulder section had some janky scrolling, the screen glides more smooth in the original, like the map is scrolling and the camera isnt just following the player.

If this ends up looking worse than Thunderboy .... its game over man, game over

[acidbottle]

Update 1:

Added the end of level round bonus screen. Due to the 4 digit limitation I have had to dial down the bonus score values, for this for the time being at least.

All other scores and values for objects and enemies are now set for area 1 round 1.

Slight change in how the egg powerup is handled. Animation for this is proving extremely tricky to nail (which is basically just a slight arc!!) Its better than it was but still needs refining greatly.

Have converted some items to blocks with fast blit enabled. Also changed a couple more bobs to sprites. This was primarily to make it run smoother on OCS but still a lot of optimising required, likely a palette change to which may be a mission and a half. May try and work on a separate OCS version to tinker with. An ECS system with some fast ram is certainly going to be enough to make it playable.

Can now fall down gaps and restart at checkpoints.

Just invincibility powerup to add on round 1 and this is more or less complete.

Round 1, as it turns out, is a very busy level with many things going on!

Many thanks to everyone who has chipped in with help/advice, especially Earok, Mixel and Ultranarwhal. No way I could have gotten this far without that

[earok]

Sounds good

Just wanted to pop in with some advice regarding 4 digit limitation. There's two solutions:

1. The simplest one is to simply "paint" zeroes on the panel. So for example, instead of awarding 100 points, just award 1 and have two zeroes painted after the element on the panel.

2. If you still need five or more digits even with the lowest zeroes painted on, you could have a "score_low" and a "score_high" variable (three digits each) and update them along these lines:

score_low = score_low + 1
if score_low >= 1000
score_low = score_low - 1000
score_high + 1
endif

[acidbottle]

Cheers earok!

I tried to use the same codeblock that Ultranarwhal kindly posted in the main thread a while back (pretty similar to what you posted above) for both the main score and the bonus score, with the aim of adding the both together. For some reason, despite revising the bonus score variable names, I couldn't get it to work. Will try the simplified version above with x2 3 digit figures, which will more than likely work!

[Mixel]

How are you making the egg arc? I've been using Cpu_platform for things like that but it can be fiddly to get exactly the arc you want.. I've been jumping their Y speed up in the air with a codeblock and having gravity pull them down? (In Cmo that applies for zombie spit, and when Melody throws that box down a pipe in the sewers, probably a couple of other things too)

[malko]

Thanks for the updated news @acidbottle !

[acidbottle]

No worries malko, hope to have a couple of updates a month at least!

@Mixel - my codeblock for the arc is:

set direction actor move_upright
set actor speed to 2.8:-2.8
yield 15 frames
set direction actor move_downright
set actor speed to 2.8:-2.8

change to axe ...

The arc is okay but drops at random depending on the speed I hit it. The REAL issue is that I need the egg to always always land just in front of the player, perhaps the fabled control1_x is needed again here

[acidbottle]

Update 2:

A fair bit has been happening, a lot of it is the boring checks for variables, routines and such. For some odd reason WinUAE is not running from within the editor, worked fine before. This has affected progress of any potential OCS/ECS version at present. Will find a workaround am sure but the priority is getting the game up and running then work on as many optimisations as possible.

Added invincibility angel, works superbly and very happy with it! There is an accumulating score bonus going on here so that has been implemented to.

Egg and powerup routine has changed, it is much much better than it was though not arcade perfect. Trick was to get the egg to land in front of the player, this may be as good as it gets but will go back and polish this another time.

Skateboard is working well, perhaps a bit too much acceleration on pickup, nothing that cant be fixed. This was a challenge but more or less content with how it works. Was never any good using the skateboard for advancing through the level, am sure when it gets some play others will spot any flaws!

Round 2 is near enough done. Added all the platforms, the lift needed a codeblock or 2 to function and may not be fast enough for OCS. Function first though! Squids and other enemies added, love the squids in particular!

** issue with Round 2 only is jumping off screen (top). In the arcade you can go offscreen for second then gravity pulls you back, of course. On at least 2 platforms that are near the top edge, character is jumping off and not coming back! Need a fix

Round 3 started, map graphics still need some work but made some falling icicles which are neat.

Round 4 map gfx near done, will get to work on that this weekend, will probably finish it before level 3! Round 4 is great since I can reuse it for all round 4s in the game.

Half of the games sound fx have been added. Scorpion experts may know the answer but often the fx are not triggered if activated in quick succession. No music yet (aside from 2 bonus related jingles), no idea if I will manage that to be honest.

So that is it in a nutshell, lots still to do. My first target was Area 1 and rounds 1-4. After that can work more on presentation and polish.

Will add some pictures or clips later this weekend.

[malko]

Sounds really good progress
Personally I enjoyed a lot the use of the skateboard

[acidbottle]

New fairy guardian power up.



Clip of Round 2 in action.

Apologies for the sketchy gifs!

[malko]

Waou! Looks amazingly good

[Mixel]

Its really not far from arcade perfect looking, that's awesome! The camera box could be shuffled to the left slightly I think?

(Display / SetCameraBox .. On my motorbike level where I wanted it to have a lot of right hand space i have Left 0, Right -100.. Not sure if this is correct usage but it worked, hehe)

[acidbottle]

You're absolutely right Mixel!

Have shifted the camera box so he is positioned slightly more to the left now.

[saimon69]

am adding the interactions that were missing from my first test then am sending you the mod file

By the way this longplay albeit in japanese seems pretty comprehensive of all hidden bonuses and obstacle positions
[ Show youtube player ]

[nikosidis]

Love it!! Looking perfect!

This game bring back memories. Great game