I've been working on an all-singing, all-dancing object list handler for 2K, and planning out the data structures for objects in that game. The OL handler's just about finished now, and very useful indeed. It handles creation of Object List entries for sprites, and deals correctly with clipping of both scaled and unscaled sprites; performs mapping of objects from 'planet' space to 'screen' space; handles animation and effects (such as spin around a vertical axis, or throb by frobbing the scale fields of a sprite); does X/Y and optionally Z motion and behaviour at boundaries (reflect, wrap or cease). In conjunction with the tiling generator it makes any kind of sprite game easy to get running, as well as being perfect for 2K levels. It's a most useful little GPU overlay. So llook out for little hidden Llamasoft easter eggs in the final game...
Next thing is to begin to beweapon the player ship, put in some prey and predators, and get collision detect and real game stuff happening. I should be getting the final anim of my Iron Camel this coming week, so it'll be fun to make a kinda AMC-level as I get everything running. I'm really looking forward to having some real stuff in my background generator too. At the moment there's some psychedelic stuff and lots of Pythonesque Flossies layered back there, which is all well and good, but I want to see what a real level is gonna look like...
Oh yeah, and we've got the first cut of several of the D2K tunes! More than the three I was expecting... they sound promising, particular standouts at the moment being the Main Theme, which is very funky with FX from original Defender dropped into the mix; Level Tunes 2 and 5; the Bonus Round medley and the Hiscore theme. I'm pretty pleased; very promising for a first cut.
So... next week, more 2K, possibly some Llamatron...
\ (:-) - and I can run Netscape at last on top of Netcruiser! Excellent! /
The Yak Mode has been improved as well - not only do you get to rescue llamas, you also fly a giant digitised Flossie. At the moment, when you thrust, her tail opens and flames come out of her arse - but it remains to be seen if Atari allow me to retain that feature!
We now have a snoot new rendered player ship to replace the drawn one. It looked cool but the renderedness wasn't too apparent in play, so I got my artist to render a few frames of the ship tilting, which are used as you move up and down. It llooks great. This introduced a new problem though - previously the ship's lasers came out of a single laser tube. Now, with the tilting, *two* tubes are quite clearly visible... so I doubled the firepower. You can waggle the ship to offset the tubes and make a pretty effective spread of laser. With all those beams flying about it's a good job that collision detect is so quick on the JagRISC...
Progress during the last week has, I am delighted to say, been fuelled by large amounts of Inca Kola. Since I asked about it on these pages, I've been flooded with reports that you can indeed get the lovely stuff in the US... and have now located a place just up the road in Mountain View which stocks gallons of the stuff. My fridge is full of it, and so am I. *uuurp*
I am also delighted to say that driving out to pick up the Inca Kola was extremely pleasurable in itself, since it was in my shiny new MX-5 with the top down. Yes! Yes! Yes!!
The focus of my attention has now returned to the background generator of 2K, which is very nearly ready for the tender mercies of Ed my graphic artist. I need a tiled, perspective surface for the ground level texture. I decided to use the Object Processor for this... got it working at first, but the raster interrupt service routine on the GPU was all but maxed out updating the parameters of seven tiles on every scanline, and as soon as you started to hit the system with other stuff the OLP'd overrun and go down. So, I thought, simplify it, use one object only.. which works, but you get jaggies due to the relative coarseness of scaling on the OLP as compared to the Blitter. Strike two. So now I'm halfway through implementing a solution which should allow me to do proper tiling with seven objects again, involving a certain amount of precalculation, and only having to update one pointer during the raster interrupt, which shouldn't be a problem at all. Hopefully I should get that running on Monday, and then I'll be ready to get going on doing the first actual 2K level.
I'm also expecting three tunes on CD Real Soon Now, and will have to sort out running with CDBios and all that jazz. Should be cool. Should also mean I'll be able to play Floyd or anything in the background while I'm testing the game - excellent!
\ (:-) - Vroom! *slurp* /