Uridium / Hyper Sentinel

[Trebmint]

I dont think its been mentioned on here, so I just wanted to comment on Hyper Sentinel which is a retro Kickstarter project based clearly on Uridium and being created by Hewson. I'd urge everyone who loved the old Hewson games to back it, as 1. It looks great and any fan of the original Uridium will love it. 2. Without backing this we wont get to see updates of Nebulus... Zznaps... Cybernoid etc etc from Hewson. 3 Just having Hewson back doing retro games is cool

Hyper Sentinel by Andrew Hewson & Rob Hewson — Kickstarter


Cheers and thanks trebmint

[Puresox]

Wasn't Mr Hewson a little Disparaging toward our beloved Amstrad ,in a recent magazine .That should have read before the Forums quirks kicked in.


I am however a massive fan of there games and they brought out some quality pieces for the CPC .

[TFM]

Wasn't Mr Hewson a little Disparaging toward our beloved Amstrad ,in a recent magazine the CPC .

Details please... 




Anyway, this seems not to be a CPC game, maybe it would be good to move this thread to the appropriate place (like other non-retro or so). 

[Trebmint]

Wasn't Mr Hewson a little Disparaging toward our beloved Amstrad ,in a recent magazine .That should have read before the Forums quirks kicked in.


I am however a massive fan of there games and they brought out some quality pieces for the CPC .

If I listened to all the Disparaging things said about me on this forum I'd have left years ago Cool games like this deserve a bit of support imho

[Puresox]

Details please... 




Anyway, this seems not to be a CPC game, maybe it would be good to move this thread to the appropriate place (like other non-retro or so). 

Someone correct me if I am wrong ,but wasn't the front cover of a recent 'Retro Gamer' magazine . Had an Emblazoned quote that Mr Hewson felt that the Amstrad had no soul?!(Or Words similar to that effect)  Their was a thread on here recently that discussed it. It seemed the usual attitude of 'Retro Gamer' to take a dig at the Amstrad at every opportunity. Out of all the comments within the guys interview , they felt it necessary to feature that on the front cover.
I haven't got the magazine so please correct me on any inaccuracies.
But apart from this issue , Hewson were one of my favourite software publishers, and seemed to put some effort into there conversions for our machine.

[Nich]

Someone correct me if I am wrong ,but wasn't the front cover of a recent 'Retro Gamer' magazine . Had an Emblazoned quote that Mr Hewson felt that the Amstrad had no soul?!(Or Words similar to that effect)  Their was a thread on here recently that discussed it.
I haven't got the magazine so please correct me on any inaccuracies.

It was this thread. There was also a photo of the offending cover somewhere but I can't find it anywhere now.

But apart from this issue , Hewson were one of my favourite software publishers, and seemed to put some effort into there conversions for our machine.

My main exposure to Hewson games was through the Amstrad Action covertapes. It seemed that every other issue had a Hewson game on the tape!

[Puresox]

To be fair to Mr.Hewson , My issue is not particularly with what his opinion was toward the Amstrad range. He at least gave us some respectful games that showed effort and flair . As opposed to some of the other companies 'SYSTEM 3' who did not put any significant effort into there conversions . Lazy Speccy ports , that didn't even have the full game a lot of the time .


My Issue is more toward Retro Gamer magazine ,(But we have had this argument before and there is no need to bring it up any futher).
Don't know if the petty attacks have disappeared.
Any avid readers on here?

[Carnivius]

 I've found in the past few months at least they've often had nice comments about the Amstrad particularly on certain games and ports.   Recent issue has pics from Savage, Turtles the Coin Op, and two of those RetroRevivals where they have a lil bit of text about replaying a game from their youth with a big lovely 2 page spread screenshot of the game and the games here were the CPC versions of Turbo Espirit and Rick Dangerous 2.

As for this new game.  I dunno.  I'm much more a fan of Uridium 2 on the Amiga (it's one of my all time fave shooters and I love the graphics and music) than I was of the first game and I'm not into this 'retro-inspired' graphic style.  Could be a fun game though.

[||C|-|E||]

I think that Uridium 2 actually looks much better than the reboot, to be honest  This remake would have been nice if it was made with voxels, like Resogun.

[Carnivius]

Reminded me that a couple years ago I posted concept sprites of Uridium 2's Manta in CPC specs compared to the Manta of the first game.



I still like them. 

[Puresox]

Any progress on your game carnivius? I'll ask in the specific thread

[Carnivius]

Any progress on your game carnivius? I'll ask in the specific thread

Patience.  I've been working on all of them and I'll have some new stuff to show soon.  Just needs polishing up.

[Puresox]

I'm sure your diligence will be worth it . You are a perfectionist no doubt.

[TFM]

Uridium on CPC was from Hewson too. Back the day I liked it, but always ... missed something. Now with some distance... it's just another spectrum port, not a bad one, not a good one. Just one that doesn't even use 4 colors in mode 1, no, just to foreground and two background instead of using all four. Oh well, maybe one day I have to do some kind of remake 

[Puresox]

Uridium on the Amstrad had brilliant tune , The scrolling was fairly smooth , but the issue of it's speed gradiation let it down , It only seemed to have three options ,1- Stop still. 2.Very Slow and steady (pretty much the only option considering the clutter of obstacles) 3.Extremely quick, which was pretty suicidal unless you had a vast knowledge of each of the layouts, and lightening quick reactions. Not only were the speed issues and cramped playing area , the Amstrad version had barriers positioned to a far greater degree than the C64 had . The first level was not even easy going to break you into the game . And along with the heat seeking missiles . The game was just a frustrating affair ,that didn't give you a fun ride . All this said . I don't think it is too bad in how it is programmed and do enjoy challenging myself with it .

[tastefulmrship]

Uridium on the Amstrad had brilliant tune

I still cannot decide if JDR's AY version or Steve Turner's C64 original is best. Both sound amazing... ... But, it's a shame the CPC game wasn't as good as the C64! Fat-pixel (like the C64) would've been better than the obvious Speccy-port we had to endure!



EDIT: I still hope they get hold of JDR to do the soundtrack for Hypersentinel ZX Mode!

[Nich]

Uridium on CPC was from Hewson too. Back the day I liked it, but always ... missed something. Now with some distance... it's just another spectrum port, not a bad one, not a good one. Just one that doesn't even use 4 colors in mode 1, no, just to foreground and two background instead of using all four. Oh well, maybe one day I have to do some kind of remake 

It seems that Uridium was only ever released for the CPC on Hewson's budget label Rack It. I've never seen any full-price release anywhere. That would suggest that Andrew Hewson felt the Spectrum-like CPC conversion wasn't of a high enough quality for a full-price release like the Spectrum and C64 versions.

[TFM]

Interesting, there were much much worse games. Uridiums tune on CPC is awesome. One of the all time top 10 even!?    Scrolling is great, just some GFX improvements and it would be a 100% game. 

[Puresox]

It seems that Uridium was only ever released for the CPC on Hewson's budget label Rack It. I've never seen any full-price release anywhere. That would suggest that Andrew Hewson felt the Spectrum-like CPC conversion wasn't of a high enough quality for a full-price release like the Spectrum and C64 versions.

Wow that amazes me, If that is what happened ? For all my niggles with it , I definitely consider it worthy of a full price release! They were a quality company tho imo. And only a few games were below par.
Battle Valley
Supercup
Herobotix
Zynaps (Controversial choice I imagine, but I find the collision detection a deal breaker)

[ivarf]

They were a quality company tho imo. And only a few games were below par.
Zynaps (Controversial choice I imagine, but I find the collision detection a deal breaker)

I usually hear the C64 boys saying this. Do others here agree about Zynaps?

[Puresox]

I usually hear the C64 boys saying this. Do others here agree about Zynaps?

What the C64 say it about the Amstrad version? Or there own? 

[Duke]

Don't know the C64 version, but the Amstrad version was not bad at all, imo. was a good quality game.
Yeah the collision detection was bad (square), but this you quickly learned to accommodate for.
- I personally spent some good hours with it, good action and the logo + tune + rasters, yay !

I usually hear the C64 boys saying this. Do others here agree about Zynaps?

[AMSDOS]

It seems that Uridium was only ever released for the CPC on Hewson's budget label Rack It. I've never seen any full-price release anywhere. That would suggest that Andrew Hewson felt the Spectrum-like CPC conversion wasn't of a high enough quality for a full-price release like the Spectrum and C64 versions.

Wow that amazes me, If that is what happened ? For all my niggles with it , I definitely consider it worthy of a full price release! They were a quality company tho imo. And only a few games were below par.
Battle Valley
Supercup
Herobotix
Zynaps (Controversial choice I imagine, but I find the collision detection a deal breaker)

That's interesting given Hewson released Maze Mania on their Full-price Label, which is clearly a Spectrum port. I still felt AA were seriously hash on that game, only giving it 60%, I quite liked the graphics on the maze, it's only really the main characters & baddies which suffer from that Spectrum look. But then I'm probably biased since AA gave it away on the Ranarama covertape!

[arnoldemu]

Don't know the C64 version, but the Amstrad version was not bad at all, imo. was a good quality game.
Yeah the collision detection was bad (square), but this you quickly learned to accommodate for.
- I personally spent some good hours with it, good action and the logo + tune + rasters, yay !

I had a quick look.

48c8 performs collision detection for one "map" line for the ship.

4922 is called. Input in HL is "mask" table.  The code reads X (I think) from IY+6, it then reads two values B and C. These are a bitmask.

For the ship the data looks a bit like this:
00000000 11100000
00000000 01110000
00000000 00111000
etc
So 3 tiles wide, and data is shifted probably based on scroll.

The location in the map is looked up from 49A0 based on IY+4. Possibly y coordinate.

The "collision" map is effectively 1 bit per tile. 1 means there is something there, 0 means nothing.

It appears the collision map is copied or scrolled into memory as well as the graphics.

The mask therefore checks multiple cells at one time to determine if there is a collision or not.

If there is a collison carry flag is set.

There are two checks for the ship. One at 55EF and one at 5648. Removing the one at 5648-564d effectively reduces the height of the collision check making it less accurate but a little more easier to play.

I haven't analysed it in more detail to know how it can be fixed properly. Removing those bytes is just a hack.

The check happens always, I would normally check the tiles you are about to move into just before the movement is made this is a little more complex but allows sprites to be smaller than the tiles and collision to be much more accurate, but in this case it's always so it is probably too wide and too tall.

[ivarf]

What the C64 say it about the Amstrad version? Or there own?

Zynaps:
They agree with you in that the collision detection on the Amstrad version is very bad. Just like Green Beret it is a game that is brought forward in many discussions to prove that gaming on the Amstrad CPC is just a waste of time.