PVB slowly dying?

good point. but let me say that the vb community has always been quite small. just like the number of new threads. you can absolutely not say the site is dying, in fact it’s steadily getting more hits ever since.
the number of really enthusiastic people is very small, though. less then half of the people registered here ever posted a single thing, much less posted their collections or highscores etc.
i personally would love to see development discussion again and some activity in the dev wiki, the vb dev scene is really dead. jorgeche’s demo seems to be the only thing being worked on atm.

Yeah, I agree w/ KR155E… the VB community has always been small, but I think it’s actually growing more popular than it has been. The dev scene has definately been quiet though 🙁 . I’ve actually been doing a lot of dev recently, but nothing exciting for me to talk about yet :/ .

DogP

Hi, well I hope that my project could help a little to incentive people to make some games.

I have been doing some design changes to the project which has grown a lot (it takes almost 256K now), making it some kind of object oriented through oop’s features emulation.

I think that it has now some cool capabilities that allows to create content and display it in a fairly easy way.

My deadline is August, so I hope someone at that time will be interested in this project and use the engine to produce some cool games (I have to admit that I’m not a designer or artist.. yet 🙂 ).

In its actual state, the engine reads from a table of arrange of ints, the char definition, bgmap definition and functions pointers to load dynamically the objects in a world, freeing memory (both dynamic and graphic memory) on the fly depending on whether an object is visible or not, allowing to create worlds with more variable environments (not fixed chars and bgmaps loaded at the beginning of a level).

Currently I am only using bgmaps, and by the moment don’t have plans to use objects, mainly because I use every world layer to show one single character or object, so world layer ordering is made in real time, which conflicts with the way an object segment is displayed.

I will send a new demo to KRISSE soon.

Hi, my first priority is to provide an engine that could be somehow be easy to develop for. In order to achieve that, every character, background, textbox, etc, is defined as an array of ints, then each one of these entities are loaded in a table, which is used as the index to load the entities in the world. Here is an example:

First define a char group, then a bgmap and load in their respective table:

charTable[0]=(BYTE *)CHAR;
mapTable[0]=(BYTE *)MAP;

then define a character:

const int LEFTFOCUS_MC[] = {
//GAME LOGIC
//xVel, yVel, zVel, speedMultiplier,
0, 0, 0, 0,
// xAcel, yAcel, zAcel,
0, 0, 0,
// CharacterLogic
0,
//RENDER
// numFrames, numFramesPerDirection, numCicleFrames, actualFrame,
1, 0, 0, 0,
//chDefinition, numChars,
0, 53,
//bgmapDef, cols, rows, mapMode,
0, 48, 28, WRLD_BGMAP,
// display, pallet number, affine fx, hbias fx,
WRLD_LON, 0,
};

and load that character in the respective table:

characterTable[0]=(int *) LEFTFOCUS_MC;

finally, define a game world:

const int FOCUS_WR[] = {
// GWORLD.xSize, GWORLD.ySize, GWORLD.zSize,
384, 224, 0,
//initial screen
// position, x, y, z,
0, 0, ZZERO,
// number of number of number of number of
//map characters, scrolls, backgrounds, textboxes
1, 0, 0, 0,
//mapchar list x, y, z, focus
0, 0, 0, ZZERO*(-1), false,
// backgrounds list
//obj characters list x, y, z,
//text boxes list x, y, z, interactive
//text interface
};

I have been thinking and it could be easy to develop a tool that allows to create worlds without to worry about generate the code to fill the tables: characterTable[0]=(int *) LEFTFOCUS_MC; and to don’t have to track the indexes to load every structure, but this isn’t a priority right now…

At the moment I am working on testing all the stuff I already defined in the previous post, and adding features such affine rotation over each axis, frame rate control, and hbias fx.

So if there is anyone interested in aid this project and create such a tool, it would be of great help and I could explain the way the engine loads all these stuff.

you can find several demos with good documented source in the games > homebrewn section. have a look at runnerpack’s “Hello, World! Demo” or lameboy’s “VeeBee Cursor Demo“, those are the ones which got me started.
also have a look at the documents section. and if there are any questions, there’s always our nice community. ^_^

Hi, great to see someone else interested in VB development, I will release the code of the engine I have been working on September, maybe you can join Krisse and I to develop the game we are creating.

jorgeche