Suggestions

SuperNatetendo

New member
Here's a handful of suggestions I feel could really expand what NESmaker can do:

General -
+ Might be less confusing if graphic banks was renamed as "Background Assets" or something of the like. Palettes could be "Background Palettes". Monsters could be "Sprite Palettes"
+ Maybe Grey Out functionality that isn't implemented yet. Like, Target: "player1" "player2" in the input editor. "Jump Speed" "Defense" "Strength" in the Object Editor, etc.

Game/Monster Objects -
+ I see there's something of custom hurt/spawn code - would love to be able to access that via "defined scripts"
+ Been mentioned before, but being able to select null tiles would really help on sprite conservation.
+ "Flip Frame" would probably be more accurate as "Flip Frame Horizontal"
+ Being able to name action steps would be nice. :)

Overworld Editor -
+ Path tiles are so versatile, but I'd love to be able to place them in a way in which they could "connect" to other objects besides the same path. This would be helpful with some very cool graphical effects. i.e. paths leading into doors, rivers under bridges, etc.
+ Painting a NULL tile with something other than pressing 5 or 6. I'm using all my background assets, so having a sort of ERASE function would be ideal.
+ I don't think day/night is something in every game. So maybe finding another name for these would be ideal. Maybe just naming it "Normal" "Variant" "Normal - Triggered" "Variant - Triggered" or something of the like. I could see some areas needing some variants/multiple states than just two.

Text -
+ Having access to more "End of Text Actions" would be great. Personally, I'd love it to be a list similar to the input list, where you could write specific scripts and just put them in as needed.

Scripts -
+ There are some constants that are hidden in code, that are not in defined scripts. HURT_TIMER, INVINCIBILITY_TIMER, RECOIL_SPEED_HI/LO are just a few that I commented out and then manually added to my User Constants. Maybe there just needs to be a thorough check of that kinda thing.

Features I'd love to see next -
+ Saving
+ Shop/Menu Builder
+ More Special Screens
+ Animated Tiles
 

SuperNatetendo

New member
Bumping this for a big one that's more of an engine thing than anything else -

Been really having trouble with projectile counts and other effects that I'm drawing on-screen eating up my max object limit. Especially since I'm implementing 2-Player.

Having a separate object code for simple effects and projectiels that doesn't use so many variables/RAM would obviously be the ideal in a lot of situations (action platformers and space shooters specifically). I'm so bad with ASM I don't even know where to begin in making this happen, otherwise I may have tried myself. But, I do think this would be a beneficial engine change (and selfishly, would save me alot of headache)
 

Mugi

Member
there is a thread somewhere on the forum for reducing slowdowns, which deals with doing a separate simplified collision detection for objects such as projectiles to help with slowdowns.
there also is a discussion regarding saving i think in tutorial requests that is so comprehensive that actually implementing saving based on that thread is actually entirely possible.

joe already said that animated tiles are coming in 5.0, as such im still sitting on my chrram code. however, since i once made you a promise that you will get your waterfalls, if you insist, i can give you what i have regarding bankswitching.
be warned though, implementing it into your game is not going to be easy.
 

SuperNatetendo

New member
Mugi said:
there is a thread somewhere on the forum for reducing slowdowns, which deals with doing a separate simplified collision detection for objects such as projectiles to help with slowdowns.
there also is a discussion regarding saving i think in tutorial requests that is so comprehensive that actually implementing saving based on that thread is actually entirely possible.

joe already said that animated tiles are coming in 5.0, as such im still sitting on my chrram code. however, since i once made you a promise that you will get your waterfalls, if you insist, i can give you what i have regarding bankswitching.
be warned though, implementing it into your game is not going to be easy.

I'm not even so much talking about slowdowns, but rather hitting my max object limit because effects and projectiles store so many variables in RAM at once. I'm getting some overflow and other problems because of attempting to create too many objects.

The first post is somewhat old as well. I just didn't want to create a new thread.
 

Mugi

Member
ah yeah the variable space is actually very limited, I requested a feature to display the amount of remaining bytes for uservars for 5.0 exactly because of the ambiguous way it's defined, and you dont actually have that much to deal with.
one way to squeeze some extra space out of variables is that if you have some that are basically just on/off type things, you could use bits instead of bytes, and store multiple things in the bits of one byte.
another thing is to set constants for things that dont absolutely require to be variables, or simply hardcoding some values.

in my game, i go around some things by using extrenal assemblies that are doing things based on already existing variables,
for example, i have a single variable called currentstage, which is linked to a multitude of things ranging from controlling what graphics are loaded, if the player is hidden, what boss is loaded on boss warp, what monsters are thrown out by monster spawners, where to warp when you reach a warp point, so on so on. There's only so much you can really do with that unless you start getting real hacky with the whole ram management.
 
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