emkay, on Sat May 26, 2012 8:09 AM, said:
For such games you don't even get bothered with the limitations of the C64, so you can start thinking of a working game , without writing a "flickering multiplexer" first.
And that's
what i said when you said that the same knowledge used to produce
Thunderfox could translate to code
"games like Armalyte". If you just write something without being bothered with the C64's limitations you get a game like
Radius and that's
leagues away from what
Armalyte does on pretty much any level. If you write something on the C64 with
Thunderfox-style sprite recycling you get
Delta or perhaps
Danger Zone with scrolling and, again, not in the same ballpark as
Armalyte technically.
emkay, on Sat May 26, 2012 8:09 AM, said:
btw: 10 times....
A sprite on the C64 takes one "LDA / STA" command for the vertical position. A 10 line high 3 colour PM object needs an "LDA/STA" 20 times plus clearing routines.... plus the multiplexer.... plus the sorting....
That's not what you were challenged over; to remind you, i was responding to your statement in post #51 that
"Those games - like Thunderfox - took place at the weakest point of the A8. Unexperienced coders hit fast the direct limits of the A8 there and release the "unfinished" game. The difference of work between such game, and to have it all moving freely, is immense. like a factor of 10" (my emphasis) so how the C64 handles things is irrelevant because we're just talking A8. i'll ask again though because i'm intrigued and what you said doesn't tally with my own experiences; going from
Thunderfox to something with free vertical motion on objects, where are you getting that factor of ten from?
For reference, my solution in that video has flicker, yes, but only when
two objects co-exist on the same scanline - the wave data in use was modified to deliberately make those conflicts happen because i was talking about what it does under those circumstances and wanted a visual demonstration. If the enemies are scripted to
avoid conflicts (as in this
second video with the original test waves restored but no sound because i'd left the mute on in A8Win... oops =-) it handles six enemies with occasional flicker at the extremities and only then if an object event is mistimed in the script (that isn't happening in the video, by the way). It still has free vertical motion in the sense that it doesn't matter which object slot is assigned to an enemy at spawn (in fact they change slot order if enemies are shot, the engine always grabs the lowest-numbered available one) and the wave manager can be told to make objects cross and cause flicker if i ask it to but i'll always try to
avoid that in a working game.
(
Callisto is similar in some respects, it has totally free vertical placement of objects but via a sorting multiplexer and i've scripted them to within an inch of their lives to prevent overloading of sprites on a scanline.)
1
) in the 5200 HSC, the game is superb once you work out how to play (use the games Rapid fire setting with bursts of manual fire). Read my comments on 
