/v/ - Video Games

That's pretty cool, I mean a nearly 40 years old platform still getting games.

/agdg/ here. While I don't work with older hardware and languages like this, it's still bloody fascinating to see, and a lot of my own optimization techniques are borrowed from older games like this.

He also mentioned working for on a DOS port, if anyone's curious.

He should use 4x4 tile clusters to store the map rather than a raw 1x1 tilemap as he did.

A lot of memory and storage space wasted.

>>14041747

Think I know how 4x4 tile clusters work in my head, can you explain briefly how it would save memory? Would be nice if he upgrades the game and improves the ai and adds all the features he wanted. I feel like compiling a list of improvements he could implement.

>real-time

Lost my interest there. With this interface and keyboard controls its going to be shit.

>>14042180

The trick is that you create those sets of 4x4 tiles, and the map indexes point to those sets instead of the individual tiles.

You lose a bit of the freedom of edition etc, but well, the map itself gets 16 times smaller.

On the video, he uses 24KB of memory for the raw 1x1 tile map, but if he used this compression, and used for example 256 clusters, the cluster list itself would use 4KB (16x256), but the map would be shrunk down to 6KB, thus getting the map down from 24 to 10KB

Many oldschool games like mega man use this very trick.

>>14042207

why not 8x8?

>>14042530

You're probably not getting too much repeated patterns at this point to take advantage of.

>>14041614

Now this is autism I can admire, looks fucking cool.

>>14041614

>buying a joke

4cucks get out

I think he said that there may be plans for another game, and any advice on memory optimization would likely be appreciated. David seems like a pretty affable fellow, and he's done quite a bit of C64 and Vic20 programming. Alas, I have no nostalgia for the Commodore, as I was too poor to have one in the eighties. I have several right now, but with the power supplies being the most shitty design imaginable (everything encased in a solid brick of epoxy resin), I don't dare use them for very long, lest one of the power supplies fuck off and fry the system or disk drives.

>>14041614

8bit guy is pretty alright.

We need more fat balding old men who look like they diddle kids in gaming.

>>14043022

He was talking about msdos or Amiga, maybe a few other systems. I was hoping he'd try to improve the c64 version, free up some memory and add more to it, push it to the limit. That would in my eyes be a real accomplishment.

>>14043708

I don't think he's that interested in code optimization and pushing the system to its limits. He just seems to enjoy making games for old systems.

>>14043731

>>14043708

But how can someone not push it to the limit after listening to this song?

>>14043731

Yea, but he had a lot more ideas to put into the game, and game developers on the c64 were known to do some amazing things to make games work. I think it's a damn shame he didn't contact or reach out more successfully to the c64 demo scene, considering there still is one.

>>14046411

>considering there still is one.

Oh yes, there is and it's very healthy actually.

http://csdb.dk/

http://www.lemon64.com/

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+64&page=1

I will post some jewtube C64 demos because why not :^)

>>14050929

>>14050929

>>14050929

Check part at 11:56, whole demo will blow your mind.

>>14043022

You can mod a c128 power supply to work with a c64. IIRC that's what I did when my c64 power supply melted, back in the days. They are nice and big and serviceable.

>>14043731

Overcoming limitations was a big part of what made developing for those systems fun.

>>14050929

>>14046411

>c64 developers were known to do the impossible

Why do you keep restating this so insistently? Some devs probably did some great work near the limits of the hardware but I'd imagine the majority did not, similar to every other system. Why do you seem to think it's such an important criticism of this game? Maybe he didn't get all his ideas for features in but no game dev ever does.

>>14051017

He IS right, almost all C64 game devs used various tricks to get shit done.

Have a game that has blast processing scrolling speed without blast processing hardware of SEGA as an example.

I recommend you watching "Ultimate C64 Talk" and "Behind the scenes of C64 Demo", both of them explain plenty of hacks and tricks used extensively both by games and by demos.

>>14051052

as interesting as mayhem in monsterland is, keep in mind it came out in 1993. The C64 was 10 years old by then and a lot of odd tricks were found at the time. It's not really reasonable to compare what the game achieved to what the Genesis was capable of.

Not to undermine the achievement of Mayhem in Monsterland, but it's important to understand the environment in which its achievements were made and to see them more as what can be achieved with mastery of the odd tricks the hardware is capable of under highly specialized circumstances.

>>14051052

That's an interesting misconstruction of my point

>>14051096

This game do feature some interesting effects, but this one in particular is just regular HDMA fuckery, not unlike your standard top gear/outrun clone.

As cool as this is, and I'm sure the guy had fun making it, I have to say he picked probably the worst genre for the platform considering the performance and interface limitations he ends up having to accomodate.

>>14051017

Because it's 2017 and he made a game for a system that's 35yrs old, there is a community still tinkering away trying to squeeze more out of this machine, he could have done the same. I'm not bashing 8-bit guy, I just wish he went all in. I found the part in making of the game video very interesting, how he had to juggle around with free memory.

>>14054462

Did you just pull a currentyear + 2?

I always wanted to make an NES game, this fills me with determination.

>>14054909

This might be interesting for you, then.

also

>Undertale quote

>>14055102

Many classic gaming forums are full of people who are willing to provide some useful tips, especially if you're showing off your project that has gotten beyond the idea stage.

>>14054909

http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=7155