Dimension Shift

Mugi

Member
hay thar, we tested some "cutscene" capabilities of the engine for the first time :p
this video also demonstrates the full potential of the scroll and parallax engine we made, along with a demonstation of the dynamic scroll locking and camera offset autocorrection.

https://youtu.be/vmRuO_zL7ck
 

Dirk

Member
It looks amazing, as always. The scrolling from the moon down to the character adds a lot to the feel of the game. I love what you did with the dynamic scroll locking and the camera offset autocorrection. That's something NESMaker is definitely lacking.
I only have a small nitpick ^^
It's something I always look for when I see a crescent moon. The star to the left of the moon shouldn't be visible since it's inside of the moon radius and therefor is behind the moon. It should be moved to the left and/or up.
 

Mugi

Member
i noticed the same thing, and it was moved up after the video was captured. here's the image that is currently in the rom, along with a demonstration for pleasing your OCD :p
as far as the start of the game goes, i keep calling this a "cutscene" but it's really just a neat little effect to start the game with, there will be an actual cutscene at the beginning in the title screen once i get that drawn out.

and yeah, the scroll locking stuff is amazing, this engine is starting to be such a pleasure to work designs with now, since this sort of dynamic mode changing allows me to design all kinds of crazy stages with no worries
about the scrolling causing issues (this code masks off unintended screens, so any screen you're not supposed to scroll into, such as the diagonal corner screens, are always rendered empty.)

we have been spending some 8-10 hours a day for over a week rewriting the scroll code and all the related things to it, and once we get over with rewriting the collision engine that is required to fix some
collision bugs related to vertical scrolling (and horizontal, just like in vanilla nesmaker engine (invisible walls when the edge of the screen is solid anyone? :p)) and get monster handling back into a working state, then it's time to get full force into gameplay stuff...

Atm im slowly recreating the stages and once the intro is out of the way, the next thing for me is a complete redesign and rewrite of the stage selection screen.... now with parallaxing and whatnot, it will be FAB-U-LO-US!!

scenemockup.png moonradius.png
 

Dirk

Member
XD
Very cool, thank you ^^
I actually made a screenshot and put a red circle around the moon, like you did, to make sure I wasn't mistaken XD
 

Woogz

Member
Beautiful work as always, Mugi. That cutscene and screen scrolling transition very nicely. The smoothness in your parallax scrolling is nothing short of impressive.

Hate to gush out so much, but the level of polish in this type of stuff is just admirable considering the limitations you're working with. Keep up the good work :)
 

Mugi

Member
Woogz said:
Beautiful work as always, Mugi. That cutscene and screen scrolling transition very nicely. The smoothness in your parallax scrolling is nothing short of impressive.

Hate to gush out so much, but the level of polish in this type of stuff is just admirable considering the limitations you're working with. Keep up the good work :)

the parallax is nothing short of impressive indeed. considering the fact that this mapper doesnt have a scanline counter, pulling off stable parallaxing just became way harder than it should have been.
 

Woogz

Member
For sure. Sounds like it must of been a bit of a headache to implement. Have you tested it out on real NES hardware yet?
 

Mugi

Member
yeah, it works on NTSC, PAL and dendy.
it had to be separately timed for each though, but instead of making 3 different roms, we just coded it to dynamically adjust timings so that the same rom works on all regions.

due to the color choices of the game though (i use color 2D which is the missing dark gray on the palette) the game wil not look good on an RGB famicom though, since those systems use a different palette and
that gray color is actually yellow in that system :p
 

Mugi

Member
I dont really know much about the matter either to be honest, all i know is that there's like different variations of the ppu in existence, and some of them do some really weird things with the palettes.

nesdev wiki has an article about the matter: https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_palettes
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
If you play your game on a PAL console, the objects will not moving slower (than on a NTSC console)?
 

Mugi

Member
currently objects do, but i might fix that too in the future. Im not sure yet.
i actually kinda like the fact that the speed changes on pal, it's just one of those quirks of the NES which i feel needs to stay there, that pal games just run slower than NTSC ones. :p

the timing adjustment code is doing things at the moment that adjust things like spawning times and animation speeds of the cutscene stuff, so that those work correctly on both PAL and NTSC.

if you want to control behavior of things based on the region, you can use sound_region to determine the region the game runs at. (use my code to autodetect the region with this to make the game always work no matter what region you play with.)
the variable stored for that is sound_region and it's the very first variable in zero page.
you can just write your code to do;

Code:
LDA sound_region
BEQ doNTSCstuff

do PAL stuff here
RTS

doNTSCstuff:
do NTSC stuff here

which will allow you to make different behaviors for PAL and NTSC

the values for sound region are 0 for NTSC, 1 for pal and 2 for dendy (dendy is ntsc with 50hz timing so make it do the same as pal for objects and you're good.)
 

Mugi

Member
there's a lot of wip stuff going on in this one, but here's some things.

1) new title screen graphics and effects
2) new stageselect
3) whole boatload of new clean up for code and a pile of new effects done (screen flasher, cross-parallax)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqdSze0Jl9s

- sound effects on title screen are placeholders, Digit's been busy so no new stuff is done for that yet.
- graphics on stage select are basic design, im still adding details to the tileset and what not, this is just a general look.

next on the work list is tackling up the object system to get monsters working again, this is the last thing that is actually broken due to the scroll engine rewrite (collision engine is pending rewrite because of general buggyness but it somewhat works.)
 

red moon

Member
wow, cannot wait to play again in the future, the changes you implemented are really well executed, I loved the ring jump and use of crystals! Its a beautiful look game as well. That pan down from the tree top below to the ground is really dramatic!
 

Mugi

Member
old title screen < ------ > new title screen
DimensionShift_v0.05_000.png game_045.png

edit: added a little bit of space between the logo and the girl.

this is pretty much the hackiest screen i have ever seen in a NES game lol.
there are portions on the screen that scroll, each of them in different direction, there is a scanline split that makes the text logo load from a different bank than the rest of the graphics to get more tiles in use,
and there's some really shady code involved in making the screen flash when the text logo stops scrolling.
it works but under the hood its a real mess lol.
 

Mugi

Member
I just realized that the last rom I actually shared from the game was the byte-off demo rom, which was a good while ago already, so I figured this would be fun to do.

here's a side-by-side comparison video between the current build, and the byte-off demo rom, which quite nicely highlights some of the advances that happened in the development ever since.
enjoy.~

https://youtu.be/7hXAxQC78No
 

Mugi

Member
well then....

we wanted to make the intro stage overkill, which is why we added a parallax on it amonst other things, but what would overkill be if it's not truly overkill ?

well, now it's truly overkill.

https://youtu.be/M2Tx9x42UVc


the entire thing is now animated, the tree leaves move with the wind, using a pseudo random 16 value array of arbitrary frame delays, making it not static animation cycle.
enjoy :)
 

Raftronaut

Member
Good lord, this is pure Wizardry!

Love the updates, the title screen, the Intro level moon is particularly stunning. Not to mentioned the animated leaves.

I am not sure if I've mentioned this to you before, but on top of all of your incredible visual achievements, The music in Dimension shift is fantastic as well. Is your partner the composer? if so, please let them know they are doing exceptional work :)
 

Mugi

Member
the composer is digit2600, the creator of Silver Island, which won the best composer prize on the Byte-off compo.
 
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