e5frog wrote:
A general thought on these homebrews:
Aren’t we tired of the warning screens now, everyone should know by now anyway. How about just skipping that or instead write something like “Game on!”. 😉
It’s like a standard. All the licensed games have a warning screen, so not having it makes a homebrew seem unpolished. But if we eliminate warning screens, we might as well eliminate adjustment screens, because I’m sure everyone knows what IPD/focus they use.
I’m also starting to wonder if my FlashBoy Plus is broken, no games seem to have any sound at all.
If I’m not mistaken, sound wasn’t completely understood for a long time, or at least only by veterans. See the “Castle of Doom” thread.
// wait for the VIP to finish drawing
while(!(VIP_REGS[REG_INTPND] & XPEND));
// clear flag
VIP_REGS[INTCLR]= XPEND;
I’ve just tried this code on Soviet Union 2010 and it makes everything really slow on emulators, even though I’ve disabled my slowdown loop. What should I do?
Maybe you would see more VB games if you gave authors feedback for their creations. I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but after I released the final version of Soviet Union 2010 I got virtually zero feedback. By telling game authors where they made a mistake or where they succeeded, or giving them (realistic) ideas, you motivate them.
gunpeiyokoifan wrote:
I’m not sure if its safe to use a Japanese VB power tap with a US power supply of some sort or even a Japanese power supply, because I once saw on a Famicom auction that the seller warned “do not keep a Famicom plugged in for more than 2 (I think he said 2) hours in an US socket due to voltage difference”
Like I said before, the tap is really just an interface, and I use a third-party power supply. Have a look at the world map; I don’t live anywhere near Japan 🙂
The Japanese Adapter Tap is only an interface between the VB and a power supply. Any power supply should work as long as it provides 9 to 13 volts DC. I myself have been using a ZX Spectrum power supply with the tap since day one of getting my VB and have never had any problems. I’m not an expert on this, however.
I was too busy to make any real progress recently, but I did manage to rename some variables and even remove unused ones. I guess I’ll just replace existing paragraphs of code with your simplified ones, because I admit I managed to screw things up in some places.
gunpeiyokoifan wrote:
why should anyone hate the Virtual Boy just because they can’t (and refuse to) set it up right? :rolleyes
Because, you see, with modern consoles, you don’t have to adjust anything… except registering for the online service and spending half an hour creating your avatar.
I guess I’m lucky. My stand is a used one, has no cracks, and I’ve had it for about a year. (Of course, the glitchy displays and non-working left speaker are another problem.)
VirtualChris wrote:
So, how is optimizing my code going?
So far, I’ve figured out what the ‘i’ and ‘j’ variables mean – they control what happens with the character at the end of each main loop iteration. Therefore, I’ve renamed them to ‘Fate’ and ‘Fate2’, and changed the ‘if ((i>1)&&(room==1))’ lines (well, they looked something like that – I’m not typing that from my home PC) to an ‘if’ block containing a ‘switch(room)’ with appropriate ‘cases’.
I’ve changed the comparisons of ‘if (example==0)’ to ‘if (!example)’, and ‘if (example==1)’ to ‘if (example)’ (of course making sure that ‘example’ can only be 0 or 1) but I somehow managed to screw up your jump/gravity code; ‘down’ apparently never gets set to 1, so once you jump, you can’t get down. You should use way less variables anyway; the way you make chain reactions (like with ‘i’/’Fate’ and ‘j’/’Fate2’) with them isn’t exactly elegant.
It would be helpful to know what the ‘d’ and ‘z’ variables are for. At a glance, they seem to control the left/right character movement, but I’m not sure.
In general, you really should use arrays to store room information. What if you some day decide to have 3 bats in a room, for example? Or if you decide to have enemies that shoot projectiles? Are you going to create a set of variables for each projectile? I can probably redesign the code to use arrays, but first I want to know whether you understand how to use them – apparently you don’t, considering how you stored the music data in 8 arrays, each containing 3 notes. (I’ve since put it all into one array and simplified the music playback code, by the way.)
And maybe you should use chars and objects instead of BGMaps and worlds for sprites. Copying a BGMap into a world each time you want to change an animation frame isn’t exactly the fastest option, in my opinion. But then again I have a bias towards objects because I used them extensively in Soviet Union 2010.
Gabor wrote:
Interesting interview. Even more interesting that some people make simply wrong statements. Such as:
“Itoi:
Can you also adjust the three-dimensionality of the video of natural imagery we saw earlier?
Iwata:
No, you can’t change the three-dimensionality of something recorded beforehand. You can turn the stereoscopic display on or off, though. In other words, you can only select whether you want it to look three-dimensional or not.”
I am saying: it is not true. For example, the nVidia driver with an LCD Stereoglass (aka shutter glass) on a PC allows the degree of three dimensionality to be changed, in fact gradually (default=CTRL-F3 and CTRL-F4). The change is clearly noticeable. So, along that line, the statement above “…. you can only select whether you want it to look three-dimensional or not.” maybe the way they will make it, but not because it is not possible to change it gradually.
And in Red Alarm (maybe other games too?) it’s also possible to adjust the depth.
It wouldn’t be too difficult to write some code to read a music track from an array and play it at the right speed. Getting it to play in the background, however, is another thing.
The penultimate platform in room 4 (the one on the far right) is the hardest part of the game. Consider lowering it.
Anyway, have you considered having more doors and keys, like in Wario Land? It would make an interesting adventure game. The gameplay currently seems too GoSub-like.
