New Work-In-Progress: Moonshot

I've been a bit busy of late trying to get a new job (I succeeded - I'm off to do games coding in a couple of weeks), but in the meantime a big chunk of retro time came and went, so sadly I missed the RGCD competition. I've checked my code into bitbucket and I'll resurrect it for either RGCD or ABBUC so it's not abandoned, just waiting for a chance to finish it up for a time when more people will be watching.

In the meantime I've been reading the excellent Racing the beam over christmas, which inspired me to have a try at Atari VCS coding.

For my first attempt I've been looking back at various Spectrum and C64 games and remembered playing Bounces, which looks to me like it is a great fit for the Atari hardware - 2 player objects and a ball with some scope for variations and some 2 player action.

I've had to make some changes - in my attempts to make the players look like Knights (I originally wanted to call the game 'Fight Knight' I ended up with something that looked like a robot waring a condom on it's head and I figured I needed a chunky back for each sprite to mask the playfield-drawn bungee chord due to the low resolution, so generic Spacemen/jetmen seemed the way forward.

This is the first test of my display kernel - I haven't added the colouring to the sprites yet (which makes them look a lot more defined), but the main parts of the display kernel are there. I've also got a good chunk of ROM left (for 4K) and RAM isn't an issue just yet so it looks like it's progressing well.

In case you are wondering - I've moved the blanking logic processing down to underneath the play area and put a colour switch in before calling it so I can gauge how much time is being used, so the occasional flicker you see there is the minimal amount of game logic kicking in.

It's been quite a while.

Sorry... I got distracted. Real life and all that.

I have started coding a small C64 game, which I'm not making any promises about at the moment (seeing how I've been AWOL for so long since my last update here). I would ideally like to have it up and running for the RGCD 16k cartridge development competition, however as I've only just started the thing I'm not far enough along to confidently throw my hat into the ring just yet.

Before the Atari folks start booing me off for neglecting their beloved machine I would like to say that it does look like it would be viable on the 8-bit Atari too. It won't be a compromise - it just coincidentally worked out this way when I was laying all the data out and planning how it works. If anything it may be a bit easier with the extra CPU grunt and the more flexible screen display layout.

But Alas - the C64 competition is up first, so that makes it the lead machine. Had I had time and thought of it a couple of months back the Atari would've been getting it first via the ABBUC competition, but what can you do?

Happy birthday my old friend

Yup - it seems that the Commodore 64 is now 30. Thanks for all the fun.

Now let's remind ourselves what it's capable of and why we love the damn thing so much :)

so why even bother doing this kind of stuff?

I think a poster nailed that one right here

'It's also like asking musician's why they still create new music on acoustic instruments invented hundreds of years ago, and why people still listen to such music. Part of the reason is because acoustic instruments have a particular character and a simplicity.'

Amen to that. With the technologies and limitations comes a style. And some of us just like that and want to make more stuff  in the same or similar style.

Cheers Jack

It looks like the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel is no more.

It's pretty safe to say that without the C64 I wouldn't have had so much fun with games, learned to code because 'the game I wanted wasn't exactly what was there' and then kind of accidentally fell into coding as a career. Likewise my family were definitely one of the masses, not the classes, so love or hate his 'get it out the door cheap' attitude I wouldn't be where I am without it.

so cheers for everything...

Those iOS trailer videos that everyone hates doing.

There's always a question on the touch arcade developers forum from someone trying to grab gameplay video for a trailer but they don't want the frame rate fluctuations of the simulator being picked up by screen camera software, or to spend a ton of cash on a hardware solution to capture from the device.

I do most of my coding within a windows framework, and switch to OS X to do a phone build periodically to check my code work, and that helps in this case.

KKapture by Farbrausch is a great capture tool - everything looks silky smooth every time, but this comes at a price. Basically the capture software lies to your software, telling it that it is running at a rock-solid 60FPS and grabs every frame it produces to stitch together a video. Your code is only producing 20FPS? No worries - it'll run slowly but it'll get there in the end and you'll still end up with a full-framerate video. The downside to this is that playing the game at that speed is either impossible or at least looks very unnatural.

To get around this I added 2 commandlines to my Windows framework - Record and playback. In record mode vsync is enabled, locking the gamecode to a constant 60hz framestep, and all touch events are logged to a file, along with the number of the frame they occured in. The random number used to seed the random number generator is also stashed away.
In playback mode the events contained in the file are passed into the application through the framework instead of the real input, so the game can be run through exactly as you played it.

Capture this noninteractive version with kkapture et voila! Nice smooth gameplay videos.

Of course, it assumes that the game will run at 60fps solid when recording input, but on an average PC if the game starts dropping frames this is probably the least of your worries. If your game isn't too heavy and your PC is fast enough you can probably kkapture it at 60FPS whilst playing it. In fact, in the case of Reaxion it runs above 60FPS whilst being captured.

Zynga and originality.

Isn't this bloke just a class act?




Moral of the story is this: If you see a Zynga game you would like to play don't bother - just Google it, find whatever they cloned to build it and go play that instead, thereby supporting the actual creative people who did the work.