Frantic (2600)

[+SpiceWare]

That would be better as a menu option. I'll look into it when I resume work on Frantic in January.

[WildBillTX]

That would be better as a menu option. I'll look into it when I resume work on Frantic in January.

 

Thanks, that would be great for the kids. I have a young cousin who loves to play my 2600 but get frustrated when the games get hard. Another suggestion would be adding a "0" setting to Robot Shots to keep the robots from firing.

 

Keep up the awesome work, you're really pushing the limits of what the 2600 can do.

[KevinMos3]

It's looking outstanding! The number of robots on screen has become ridiculous... I mean that in a good way.

 

It's currently VERY difficult with the size of the new explosions. I like the idea of using only the core of the humanoid body in collision detection. The running animation looks great, but the way he kinda leaps forward makes it difficult to judge when you're moving close to a wall. Your idea should solve that issue. Also, what about making the last 2 frames of a robot explosion not harm the player? That would help a lot with the difficulty, plus it might be more realistic since a straggling spark or two probably shouldn't kill you.

[+SpiceWare]

Frantic's currently set up to fully populate a room if the Right Difficult is set to A. I did that as it makes it easier to test how long the routines are taking to run (ie: how soon does the screen start to jitter)

 

Is it bigger? I didn't compare my placeholder explosion with espire8's.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

By the way, I tried the latest version of Frantic to see if it would play at all on my modded FB2 (previous versions never did) and this latest one finally sorta does. At least i get past the spinning Harmony logo now. What I end up with though are three views of the title screen, one on top of the other, and when I go to launch the game I get a rolling screen (but I can't tell if my character is moving or not). Almost looking like a PAL game playing on an NTSC TV. And yes, I definitely downloaded the NTSC version.

 

Any hopes these little snags might be ironed out for us modded-FB2 players out there?

 

I'll just re-iterate my question as it seems to have been lost in the conversation. Can the recent improvements that almost make Frantic work on a modded FB2 eventually allow it to fully work?

[+SpiceWare]

it wasn't lost, I thought it was a rhetorical question.

 

As before, it's a problem with the FB2 hardware. It's not going to work without a valid A12 signal.

[espire8]

 

It's currently VERY difficult with the size of the new explosions. Also, what about making the last 2 frames of a robot explosion not harm the player? That would help a lot with the difficulty, plus it might be more realistic since a straggling spark or two probably shouldn't kill you.

 

Is it bigger? I didn't compare my placeholder explosion with espire8's.

 

Not at all. I used the exact same number of lines and width for the new explosions.

However, as KevinMos3 mentioned, I also noticed how difficult it were while play testing.

 

As it can't be the size, maybe it's the explosion's duration. There's 13 frames for the new as compared to the placeholder's 4 frames.

The idea of the last 2 frames not harming the player sound good, but those last 2 frames are such a small portion of the rest of the 11 frames that there may not be much of a difference.

I'd propose speeding up the frame rate of the first 4 or 5 frames (2x) and leave the remaining frames at it's current rate (3x) so the explosion won't stay on the screen for a long enough duration that a player won't run into it so often as when shooting at close range.

Point blank range, by the way, always were and will be fatal -.

[DT Kofoed]

Just played the latest build of the year, and I'm loving the new explosion-sparks-showering-down animations. The human animation is super smooth; though maybe a little too bouncy for my taste, it's still nice to see done well.

 

I do, however, miss the voice work terribly! If the game doesn't call me "chicken" for escaping a room while leaving robots alive, then what motivation do I have to kill 'em all? Any chance on getting these bits back in the next version?

 

I look forward to what you'll be bringing to my VCS next year...

[+SpiceWare]

The performance hit to work around the ARM bug is why the speech was removed. I don't see that coming back as there isn't enough processing time to unpack the sample data. The space that held the samples was repurposed for the extra animation data.

 

However, I will be adding AtariVox support when I resume work on Frantic in January. I'm hoping Frantic inspires the completion of the AtariVox Rev 2.

[+SpiceWare]

As some of you may have surmised by the change of my avatar, Chun-Li's been once again put onto the back burner due to RL issues all around. For me I had my folks visiting from Africa for a few weeks over Xmas & New Years, and then I got sick.

 

Next month I plan to resume work on Frantic.

 

I'm going to initially see what I can do to add back digitized sample support. While working on Chun-Li we figured out a number of things to speed up the ARM code. Also, the initial sample unpacking routine was written to run in a single frame. It took maybe 8 scan lines of processing time. By making the routine a little bit more complex I can just unpack a small part of the sample on each frame, unpacking the entire sample over multiple frames (ie: if I unpack 256 bytes per frame, it'll take 1 scan line of time per frame over 8 frames). I need to learn about ADPCM - my data packing shrinks a 2K sample down to 1K, but from what Tjoppen posted here that can be shrunk by half again to 512 bytes.

 

The tradeoff of adding back sound samples will most likely be reducing the frames of animation used for the various characters.

 

Speaking of graphics - one thing I'm wondering is if using smaller graphics would make the game play better. Having a shorter humanoid would, in theory, make it easier to maneuver around the maze w/out killing yourself by running into the walls above/below the humanoid.

Edited January 20, 2012 by SpiceWare

[cd-w]

Cool - it would be great to have the speech back in the game (without needing an AtariVox).

 

Chris

[KevinMos3]

Speaking of graphics - one thing I'm wondering is if using smaller graphics would make the game play better. Having a shorter humanoid would, in theory, make it easier to maneuver around the maze w/out killing yourself by running into the walls above/below the humanoid.

 

I think the size of the humanoid is good as is. The problem for me is the running animations. The player sprite has too much bounce in his step almost like he's leaping forward as he moves. This makes it hard to judge when you're getting too close to an obstacle. If the running was smoothed out, I think it would be much easier to control the humanoid with precision and avoid killing yourself.

 

edit: Sorry, I just noticed I said pretty much the same thing in post #253 above.

Edited January 24, 2012 by KevinMos3

[espire8]

Speaking of graphics - one thing I'm wondering is if using smaller graphics would make the game play better. Having a shorter humanoid would, in theory, make it easier to maneuver around the maze w/out killing yourself by running into the walls above/below the humanoid.

 

Hmm.. that sounds like a good approach. The humanoid is presently a couple lines taller than the robots.

Darrell, if you like, I can look into updating the humanoid sheet if you want to do a test build to use that idea.

 

I'll also see about updating some sheets to use fewer frames if the need arise to have the voice back, - which was the original goal anyway.

 

I think the size of the humanoid is good as is. The problem for me is the running animations. The player sprite has too much bounce in his step almost like he's leaping forward as he moves. This makes it hard to judge when you're getting too close to an obstacle. If the running was smoothed out, I think it would be much easier to control the humanoid with precision and avoid killing yourself.

 

A couple of lines do account for the bounce. I'll see about reducing that affect along with Darrell's idea.

Edited January 24, 2012 by espire8

[+Nathan Strum]

I think reducing the bounce would be helpful. While it looks great, it does make it tough to determine your exact position.

[disjaukifa]

I think reducing the bounce would be helpful. While it looks great, it does make it tough to determine your exact position.

 

+1 to that. It looks great, but I am constantly running into walls because of the bounce!

[+SpiceWare]

Hmm.. that sounds like a good approach. The humanoid is presently a couple lines taller than the robots.

Darrell, if you like, I can look into updating the humanoid sheet if you want to do a test build to use that idea.

 

Don't do it yet - when I start back on Frantic I'll make a test build that lets us select the max heights (robots as well as humanoid) that just truncates a static image. That'll be enough to figure out if shrinking helps, and if so what size(s) we should go for.

Edited January 24, 2012 by SpiceWare

[+SpiceWare]

I should note that I think the height is more of an issue in the Frenzy variation due to the smaller partitions in the maze room.

[+SpiceWare]

When I started back on Frantic a couple weeks ago I decided to review the code. In doing so I came across something that made me go hmmm , so I created a clean project and took a little detour. The detour looks like Frantic did way back when:

 

but if you look closely, you'll notice that there's 1 additional object being displayed.

 

Yep, while reviewing the code I figured out a way to rewrite the kernel to update ENABL (controls display of the ball). Using the ball will let me display up to 6 onscreen shots (I plan to use them to support 2 humanoid and 4 robot shots).

 

A bunch of the C code needs to be rewritten to work with the new kernel, but I think the additional onscreen shots will be worth the rewrite. In short, Frantic's been rebooted.

 

My next post in this topic will be when the game's playable again. Until then you can check my blog if you want to follow along with the reboot.

Edited March 12, 2012 by SpiceWare

[+SpiceWare]

Still a lot to be done, but it's playable again. You can now have 2 shots active at the same time, and the robots can have up to 4.

 

Set the Left Difficulty to A for Frenzy rooms, B for Bezerk rooms.

 

Right Difficulty to A maxes out the # of robots in each room (just for test), B is the normal number of robots.

 

Select takes you to the "menu" (just a rainbow screen with last score)

 

Reset starts a new game.

 

ROM

frantic20120318.bin

Edited March 18, 2012 by SpiceWare

[TrekMD]

Very cool!

[IG-88]

Tried it out but got this debugger screen right out the get go. Old version worked just fine....

[+SpiceWare]

You need to use at least version 3.5 of Stella. Prior versions would crash, so I used to post 2 versions of the Frantic ROM, one for "Harmony" and one for "Stella".

[+SpiceWare]

• New look for diagonal shots.
  
• Robot explosions back in place, utilizing the new 2x sprite feature.
  
• Doors are back in place.
  
• Special room objects for Frenzy (Left Difficulty = A) in place. Only Big Otto does anything at the moment.
  
• Evil Otto can be killed in Frenzy variation.
  

There's still work to be done with the Otto features.

 

ROM

frantic_20120319.bin

[IG-88]

You need to use at least version 3.5 of Stella. Prior versions would crash, so I used to post 2 versions of the Frantic ROM, one for "Harmony" and one for "Stella".

That was it! Thank you very much. Am REALLY liking this game!

 

Do you have plans of putting it on a cart and selling it?

[+SpiceWare]

Thanks!

 

Yes, it'll be available in the AtariAge Store when it's done. A couple of my other games are already there, Medieval Mayhem and Stay Frosty, one of the mini games found in Stella's Stocking.