On the merits of Excel and running out of space

Monday, 12th September 2005

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Latest video. [2.29MB AVI]

You chaps probably don't know what a major headache it is trying to get clear, non-wobbly video... rolleyes.gif

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I gave up in the end and went for the "propped-up against a wall with camera on stack of books" approach. The reason I cannot, therefore, appear to play the game very well is because I cannot see the screen. All I can see is a faint, inverted glow and have to guess where I am. Not fun.

Here are the major updates since last time:

  • Removed Blackadder theme rolleyes.gif
  • Altered colour contrast on title screen, added wipe to clear it in imitation of original, restructured code for better fades, changed timing, added sound. Title screen is now complete.
  • Rewrote entire code for checking bullet collisions with buildings on the ground from scratch. It now works perfectly.
  • Levels now "start" correctly, so the ship moves in from the bottom, the start platform moves towards you very fast until they are in the correct positions, at which point gameplay commences (much smoother than just dumping you at the start position with a full level already there).
  • All levels now mapped correctly, in order, with correct palettes for backgrounds AND sprites. Levels that end a zone with a platform rather than with the face are flagged as such and the correct end is substituted in now.
  • Each level can be pointed at a 'replacements' table, which lists "replace tile X with tile Y". Tiles are swapped around properly so that levels appear more varied.
  • Explosions are now fully implemented (2 kinds, background and foreground - with very slightly different animations) and working.
  • Path-based enemy attacks are now in full working order, using paths generated with a combination of my graphical calculator and Excel.
  • A couple of other new enemy attacks have been added.
  • The game now sports a BBC Micro font which can be used for proper text display.
  • The "epilogue" to the game is fully coded (type-writer effect for final message copied from original game, including sound effects and fades).
  • Each level now begins with a summary screen (sprite limits meant that displaying all your lives at the start of the level was impossible, so is now done on an interval screen). The screen displays the zone name and a number of lives, the number of lives being surrounded by orbiting space-ships (the number of those being the number of lives left).
  • The game now fully works on hardware (should now work on old hardware - not checked, as I do not have an old BIOS-less Game Gear) and in all emulators (I was not initialising the display correctly).
  • Destroyed terrain tiles are not updated live to the name table in the fairly intesive loop - they are saved to a list of destroyed tiles, which are then read off directly and updated when needed in the intensive graphics bit.

I've probably forgotten a lot of stuff. Bear with me.

There have been a number of "WTF" moments reading back some of the source. Take, for example, this gem:
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Some explanation is needed here - this is from the code that handles the special case when you have shot a 2x2 square building and it lies out of bounds of the name table. The name table is my grid (32x28) of tiles indices that each point to an 8x8 tile in the VRAM. As the view point moves up this map, new tiles indices are written to it, or old ones are adjusted when something is blown up. The worst case scenario here is if the 2x2 tile lies just above the top of the name table - which is what the above code has to fudge. Look at this:

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(I love debugging emulators!)
This shows all of my 32x28 tilemap. That funny white rectange is my view rectangle (it's currently half-off the display, and it loops around). If you look at the top and bottom edges of the tilemap, you'll see a ring has been shot out. Naturally, the bottom will have been hit first. What happens in this case is the address of the tiles that have been erased is decremented by a whole row of map points (there are 2 bytes to a spot on the name table, so I go backwards by 64). In this case, I find that the address is above the start of the tilemap so I add on 64*28 (which is the entire size of the table) and add it back to get back into the bounds of the table itself. As you can see, it was a successful operation in this case, but only because I was writing back HL this time and NOT the accumulator! No wonder my sprites were becoming destroyed as I was writing in completely the wrong part of the VRAM...

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This is the screenshot from the emulator of the screen display for the above tilemap (the sprite layer is not displayed in the tilemap, for obvious reasons).

I'm still not getting very far with my quest for music. sad.gif
The only bit of the game that has music is the title screen, and that's not so much music as a weird noise (here is an MP3 of my Game Gear's rendition, this is the original from the BBC Micro). Even though I have specified that the noise channel (the one that produces the high beeping noises) to use the highest frequency, it's still lower than the Beeb. All the other notes are correct, though.

Latenite has got yet another update - project support. (It looks more and more like VS.NET every day!) Rather than create messy proejct files and stuff which makes distrubution tougher, I thought I'd go the easier route of just allowing people to stick directives in the file with the ;#latenite:main directive. You can now ;#latenite:name="name_of_project" and ;#latenite:project="file_name"[,"project_folder"].

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Click for larger image

Skybound Visualstyles (which I'm using to fix the weird .NET XP interface bugs) looks lovely but hugely slows down the app - only really noticeable with so many hundreds of nested controls like me and when moving large windows on top of it forcing repaints, so now the XP styling option is saved away (so you can revert to boring standard grey if you like). Latenite now saves window/splitter positions when you close - a first for an app by me! grin.gif
In fact, Latenite is also my first app that needs a splash screen, it takes so long to get going... sad.gif It's only about 2 seconds, though, for it to track down all the tools, load all the documentation, add all the compiler scripts and present itself, so it's not too bad.

One overlooked piece of software is Microsoft Excel. People seem to develop a hatred of it, especially in people who end up trying to use it as a database application (it appears that this is what 9 out of 10 smallish (and some not so small!) companies do).
I have been using Excel to create those smooth curving paths for some of the enemies to follow. First, I prototype them on my graphical calculator (lots of trial and error involved!):

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..before transferring into an Excel spreadsheet.

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Click for legible!

The Excel spreadsheet is set up so that column A is the steps (usually 0 to 256) in ascending order. Column B is the X coordinate, column C is the Y coordinate.
Columns E and F serve a special purpose - they contain the differences between each element in columns B and C (so E3=B3-B2, E4=B4-B2 and so on). Columns G and H "fix" the values - if it's negative, make it positive and set the fourth bit (just add 8). This is for the internal representation of the paths. Column I contains the data I can just copy and paste into the source files - it starts with the initial (x,y) coordinate, and then has a list of bytes. Each byte signifies a change in (x) and change in (y), with the lower four bits for (x) and the upper four bits for (y).If the nibble is moving the object left or up (rather than right or down), then the most significant bit of that nibble is set. For example:

%0001 - move right/down 1 pixel
%0011 - move right/down 3 pixels
%1001 - move left/up 1 pixel
%1100 - move left/up 4 pixels

...and therefore...

%11000001 = move right one, up four.

Poor Excel has suffered a little bit of neglect from me - I used to use it to generate my trig tables. WLA-DX, the assembler I learn to love more and more every day, supports creation of a number of different tables - including trig tables - with a single directive. Just specify .dbsin (or .dbcos) followed by the start angle, how many bytes of trig table you want, the step between each angle, the magnitude of the sine wave and the DC offset and away it goes.
People still using TASM, STOP! Use WLA-DX. It's ace (and free, not shareware!).

You can never have enough pictures in a journal (hey, you should see this page load on our 700 bits/sec phone line at home!)
Here's the full list of sprites:

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The last ship being after the explosions is a mistake, but it's too much hassle to change. I'm really pleased the way they've come out - I'm no pixel artist. smile.gif

I'll finish off with a few assorted screenies.

misc_01.pngmisc_02.png
misc_03.pngmisc_04.png

...I would have done. I should have done. However, when taking those screenshots I saw a glitch in the graphics. As an exercise for the reader, can YOU spot where the bug is?

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(and it's not in one of those external functions I wrote - this is why copy-paste coding is bad, 'kay?)

Oh, (possibly?) final last thought popping into my head: one thing I really miss from the BBC Micro era is the comfortable keyboard layout. I mean, look at this small photo of a Master 128 keyboard:
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Click for bigger

You might think that that blocky monstrosity would knacker your fingers, but that's not the reason. It's the fact that rather than squash one hand's fingers onto a small cursor pad (or the even sillier WASD), you balance movement between your two hands - Z and X for left and right, : and / for up and down. (On a modern UK layout, that'd be ZX and '/). The space bar is now conveniently accessible by both thumbs, and you can reach around most of the rest of the keyboard with your other fingers.
The Game Gear is an ergonomic handheld (unlike the uncomfortable Game Boy), so I'm reckoning that I can balance the controls between hands - ← and → on the d-pad can control left and right, and the 1 and 2 buttons can control up and down. I will offer multiple layouts, though, as otherwise that might confuse some people. wink.gif

Anyway, I hope you find this journal interesting. It seems a bit all over the place - video, pictures, rambling, odd bugs, nostalgia... The only thing that's an issue is my rapidly shrinking GDNet+ account web space!

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