Dimension Shift

Mugi

Member
slowly chugging in more and more of the little things that needs to get done.

- started working on a second tileset now (intro stage, around 50% done)
- fixed numerous issues from stage selection and warp system (monsters were triggering the warp crystal lol)
- fixed sprite parenting on the character in stage seletion (no more glitched hair)
- attack and crouch attack are implemented (still need jump attack and input sanitizing)

grab a test rom with a 5-screen long "level". the crystal at the end takes you to stage select which works, but each stage you warp into is just an empty room and a crystal to get back to the selection room.
i used it for testing the warp code and since i have no levels yet, doesnt really serve any purpose to do anything more to it yet.

test rom (20.01.2019): http://dev9.blacklabel-translations.com/scrn/dd/dimensiondrive_20.01.2019.nes

and just for myself:

Engine:
- powerups - not sure if happening
- companion (possibly permanent) - in progress
- scrolling stages - well.... sort of (bi-directional scrolling in progress)
- animated background tiles - working (cpu hog)
- stage selection, with possibility to revisit stages - complete

- health platforms - working (buggy tile animation, keeps resetting on room re-entry)
- wall-grab tile - not started

graphics:

player - complete
enemy graphics - 1/??? done (lol)

intro stage - in progress (50%)
cavern stage - not started
temple stage - complete
??? stage - not started
??? stage - not started
??? stage - not started

final stage - not started
 

Mugi

Member
Okay, i've been fighting with this stupid thing for 3 days straight now, but here it finally is.
intro stage tileset, draft 1.

this one is rather interesting as i was able to dedicate the entire tileset+screentiles for this, due to moving my static objects (warp crystal and health platform) into the HUD graphics space instead, making them usable with any combination of main/screentiles.

(p.s. this also means that i have 15 blank tiles on temple tiles too to burn out, so sometime in the future, the temple stages will gain some extra detail)

game_045.png
 

Mugi

Member
okay here's revision 2 of the intro stage tileset:

game_051.png


oh look ma! someone's using the entire graphics bank!

asas.png
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Awesome! And your background graphics are beautiful< 3
Ah, c'est magnifique !

+1
I vote for the best NESMaker game!
 

Mugi

Member
ha! i wish.

this late endeavor of getting the path tiles and hud tiles in normal use will greatly assist in the visual side of the project though.
but i still have lots of work with mechanics and whatnot. There's no need for a pretty game with no content. :p
its all learning for me at this point.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
It's nice... and sounds very instructive!
Have you written your rown outines to load the tiles from the path/hud tilesets or you using the ChangeAllTiles/ChangeAllTilesDirect macros,in your screenloads script with hardcoded values specifically for your screens?
 

Mugi

Member
there's nothing to write there.
the Engine fully supports doing this as it is. NES doesnt have a definition of HUD tiles or PATH tiles by design. this is just an arbitrary limitation of NESmaker.
what i did was simply created assets outside of NESmaker, and imported them in.
this currently results in being unable to correctly use screenpainter, or seeing your assets, but the game functions just fine if you get a screen made.
the engine itself doesnt see anything else except a 128x128 pixel bank of graphics. and i just made use of it.
 
Mugi said:
okay here's revision 2 of the intro stage tileset:

game_051.png


oh look ma! someone's using the entire graphics bank!

asas.png

Man I wish I could do backgrounds like this. This looks amazing. Setting goal for myself to practice backgrounds for my games.
 

Mugi

Member
dark_crow_66 said:
Man I wish I could do backgrounds like this. This looks amazing. Setting goal for myself to practice backgrounds for my games.

BentPawGames said:
Love the sense of depth that is created!!


I still think it's repetitive as hell, but aside that it does look okay.

Doing backdrops like this is extremely wasteful though, it eats 24 metatiles for a single thing which you already have to use twice on a single screen. on an entire stage it gets "meh" really quickly.
Building some sort of modular set of tiles you can alter to make it less repetitive is a much better way to do things.

in this particular case, I dont really mind, as the intro stage that uses this tileset will be extremely short. I also wanted something that makes people wow when the first screen loads, so i dumped every possible resource available into it. As it seems that im the first one to (atleast publicly) make use of the full tile bank, it can pretty much be assured that the visual fidelity is above the norm of what nesmaker can pull off.

judging by the response, i guess i succeeded :p
 

Mugi

Member
again crawling a little forward i guess...
made a player "victory" cheer frame that's used for warping, and a spawn / despawn animation.
monster death animation is also done.
im working on something extra neat for stage starts.... more on that once i get it working :p

on assembly side, i've poked a little more into the whole graphics banks business, and while the path code that i dont use still sits in the engine eating space (i'll clean it off later) it has now been completely deactivated.
so my PPU allocation now looks like this:

PPU_chart.png


i havent heard back from Josh yet, but i am trying to get this to become a reality from within nesmaker instead of doing it by hacking the thing like i currently do.
i will keep people up to date on that.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
This a GREAT news. For those who don’t use path nor the hud tiles (when using sprite hud)... it would awesome to get more space for graphics!
Love you guys (yep, Josh too;))
 

Mugi

Member
and after some intense fighting, we now have (wip) audio :p

DD's soundtrack is entirely composed by our own digit2600, aka. J. Sebastiano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFiKfSDXRjc
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Very nice tracks, or fits well with your awesome graphics!
(Glad to see this transition/level in motion... c’est superbe!)
 

Mugi

Member
im like really REALLY pleased with the music so far, it's still a work in progress but there's several tracks for different stages already, each of them better than the other.

not much else has happened in the meantime though, i implemented working jump attack without using an action state for that, so that's done. next thing will be to tackle the wall grab
(my biggest issue with the wall grab is actually that i havent gotten a sprite for the player done for that yet that doesnt look like crap.) and once that is done im finally done with the core mechanics and can return to graphics and stage design.

there's of course lots of other things to still do, i still have to get proper background tile animations, implement money and a hud part for it, make the monsters drop coins, and the health platforms cost to use,
then there's the whole deal with the companion system. I have a semi working companion code as such i can spawn an object that follows you around and it can even attack, but controlling that is a bit of a mess.
i also have a system that "works" that allows the companion to change based on the items you pick up (alpha and beta glyphs in shatterhand) but that's only been tested very briefly so it's still propably full of bugs too.
I havent actually put much time into the whole stuff with the companion yet, as im not sure if i actually implement it at all.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Sounds nice... !
How hard is the music integration. You receive famitracker individual files from Digit2600, and just import them into one fmt file (save as txt and that 's all)? Or you have to modify them, in order to be "compatible" with the GGSounds engine used in NESMaker?
Glad you made it, for adding your extra animations without sacrificing an action step for that (using diagonal directions in action steps maybe?).
Cool for the companion! THAT will be awesome (if the companion helps your player, can shoots, yeah! A nice addition... ). And you need awesome monsters ;)
I see your project is progressing well.

On my side, ... I did almost nothing >_<
Working on my start screen (made a menu, to select "start game" or "musics"...). But I have no music currenlty. Ah ah :p
And wanted to add a areas selection (or level/stage selection). But still working on my 1st level (and it's far from finished), so...
Finding time to work on it, is very difficult.
Oh and I have a working HUD (with a timer like the one on FB).
 

Mugi

Member
we worked through them to make sure they're compatible as is, and worked a single ftm file out as a whole.
it's quite involved but the importing is easy once you get it down with the limitations.

and yeah, the crouch and jump attack on my player are done without action states, so there's a couple of them to spare. The problem with that is that while you only have 8 action states,
you also only have 16 animations (2 directions for each state) so it doesnt really save that much at the end anyway. I'll have to work around that at some point too if i want to add something else.
there's also the fact that if you do states that have attack (like jump attack) you will have to rewrite the way the sprite weapon code checks for directions for drawing, because by default it checks if your player is facing left or right, but if you use diagonals, it breaks up completely (the bitmasks for diagonals dont match the L/R ones.)

the companion thing is cool but it's quite a mess to get to work right, so i might actually discard it until i'm confident enough to rewrite it in a proper way.
 
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