Carnivac's CPC pixels

[rexbeng]

...and above everything else, development on/for the CPC is about having fun. Surely there's some kind of competition involved in this but I don't see anyone doing this expecting some kind of reward other than recognition of his effort by others with the same strange hobby, and some love spredding .


So, please do whatever you like and lets discuss after we see the results 


I see your 2drs and raise you 5 


rb

[TFM]

IMHO people should talk loud about something they already have prooven to be able to do. Others maybe should not talk so loud. As we say in Germany 'Schuster bleib bei deinen Leisten'.

[Puresox]

I personally think Turrican II is bloody awful graphics and playability, on the other hand Turrican 1 Was fantastically playable and graphically great and leagues ahead of its follow up. It was 64k as well ?

[Puresox]

I take back what i said about Turrican II , on further looking at the game , I reckon the play ability is pretty good and there are some beautiful graphical techniques in it. It was quite an ambitious game . With pro's and cons with both versions . 

[Carnivius]

Just to bring this thread back on-topic after so long I thought people might like to know I'm still working on Cosmic Prison Commando.  I've heavily revamped both graphics and the code now to make it more 'realistic' for conversion to CPC someday.

Graphics are redone cos the originals were rushed for the contest back in 2008 and I'm much more experienced with the palette and resolution now.  Tiles have been redone to look better yet more efficient.  The messy over-dithered parallax mountain landscape has been replaced by simpler but more effective static tiles.   There's a lot more recycling in sprites now.  The legs of the player character Jack are re-used for the zombie troopers and the main villain (before his planned transformation into the megaboss of the game) and it's possible to play as those in alternate modes.   As they all begin as prisoners on the prison ship before the game starts it makes sense they all have the same prisoner trousers/boots anyways.  The walking droids now share their leg sprites too (and the flying versions are simply just the top half sprite with no leg sprite).   Jack also has a little 16 pixel high robot buddy (who is 'reprogrammed' from a type of enemy) that goes into tunnels and areas Jack is too big for.  To cut down more on sprites Jack's idle animation is gone as is his 'hair' movement when he runs (the top half is static and adjusts it's y position in time with the run for the 'bobbing' motion).   Despite the cuts, I've improved both the shaping and the shading of the sprites.  Basically the idea is trying to make more out of less.

Also the code has been 'downgraded' in some ways to feel more 8-bit in scrolling and movement using Turrican II for reference.  Screen size is slightly smaller to help with scrolling and speed (again using Turrican II's screen size).   I've been getting a lot of assistance from Daniel Remar who is well known in the indie game scene for creating the games Hero Core and Iji.  Seems my project inspired him to make a similar platform shooter based on a different era of vintage gaming (in his case, the MS-DOS days of PC games) and since we're making similar games there's a lot of idea and code sharing.
There's less enemy sprites on screen at once (again I rushed the old one so I did tend to drop a load of enemies into one area in quite a few places) and there's slightly more emphasis on exploration and completing a level 100%.

Here be a recent screenshot. 




I'd still like to find someone who can produce authentic sound effects and all new music.  The current engine still uses the quickly made sound effects I created in SFXR back then and I would like some produced with a CPC and the current music is still the SwitchBlade title screen theme and the Glider Rider bike theme.  Again I would like all new music in CPC formats that are perhaps similar in style and mood to those tunes (cos they fit so well) but clearly new. 

[ervin]

Absolutely beautiful.
I have to say - I really love your work.

Just wondering, what sort of movement would you be aiming for in a cpc version of this?
Would character-based movement be acceptable, where all sprites (and the scrolling itself) move pretty much like the turrican games, and AMC?

[Carnivius]

Thanks.

I'm not quite sure what 'character-based movement is' but when I described I had made the scrolling and movement more 8-bit style I mean a lot of it (including scrolling and movement of the player and enemies) now goes in 8 pixel movements vertically and 4 pixels horizontally (obviously since it's 'wide-pixel' it looks the same distance as the vertical).    The game runs at a deliberately low frame rate to make it easier to code it in that slightly jerky way.   The jumping is very much like Turrican now where it feels almost like temporary levitation rather than the more 16-bit jumping it had in the old demo and again jumps up and falls down in 8 pixel movements.  The only things I can think of not strictly on a 4x8 grid movement are projectiles fired from certain character's guns such as the player character and the green droid in that screenshot.  The horizontal motion is aligned to the grid but their vertical position is not as they have to look like they're coming out of the guns and having to align the guns to the grid would have put a lot of limitations on the sprite designs.   Round projectiles fired from things that don't have an obvious gun (such as the flying sphere-shaped droids) do align on the grid. 

I'm terrible at explaining things. 

[ervin]

Yep, that all makes sense.
A 4x8 grid is pretty much what I meant.

It's used really well in Turrican 2, as it allows the game to run really fast, and consequently it looks quite smooth, even though technically it isn't.
It'd be ideal for cosmic prison commando.

[Carnivius]

Ah cool.  Yeah, I think I actually somewhat prefer it scrolling this way than when it was silky-smooth in the old demo.  I don't know why.  Maybe I'm just that retro...

[Carnivius]

Just examining CPC Turrican II again cos I'm working out different ways of doing a smart bomb sort of attack so trying to see what may or may not be possible on a CPC.

Turrican II has quite a few sprites going on during it's crazy ultimate smart bomb thingy.  The CPC version actually has a lot more going on during it than the Amiga version's same attack.  Feels like it has more 'impact' to it.



The same attack in the Amiga version for comparison.  Skip ahead to about 11:45 to see it.
Turrican II, Amiga - Part 1 - Overlooked Oldies - YouTube

Just has me pondering... 

[ervin]

It does indeed have more impact - in fact the cpc version looks quite chaotic compared to the Amiga version's more conservative smart bomb.

Having looked at them both a few times, I don't know that the cpc version has more sprites on-screen...

However, this is a classic case of doing more with less.
What they've done is to shake the screen using the character-based scrolling method, and flash colours quickly. And that makes it look particularly violent. It's very clever and very effective.

[Carnivius]

Having looked at them both a few times, I don't know that the cpc version has more sprites on-screen...

Looks to me like it does.  Look at the diagonal line of blue sprites appearing in the CPC version (starting from Turrican's gyroscope form).  That's his normal 360 weapon maxed out in there using a lot of sprites.  The Amiga version doesn't even use it's version of that weapon during the attack.

However, this is a classic case of doing more with less.
What they've done is to shake the screen using the character-based scrolling method, and flash colours quickly. And that makes it look particularly violent. It's very clever and very effective.

Yeah.  I'm certainly gonna do some of that (already got screen shaking code running and certain things set it off if they exploded or if I need a 'rumbling')  although colour changing is something that was easier on the older computers than modern ones.  On an 8 or 16 computer they used indexed palettes and it was easy to change the value of a colour and the sprite to appear in that new colour.  On modern systems it's not quite that simple it would appear.  At moment the only real options I seem to have are to have pre-recolored versions of every sprite that ever changes colours (kinda messy and not very flexible as every single colour variation would need new sprites) or this trick of saving the sprite out into temp folder in gif format, having the game actually modify the hex value of the gif file to change the colour value and then loading it back in.  Which if done a lot can potentially be quite slow.  Another option is that I can recolour things to one colour (which is what I use for when things get hit they flash solid red or when invincible you flash solid white) and that by splitting every sprite into it's seperate colours I can easily change each colour individually.  But this means a single 16 color sprite now would then be consisting of 16 sprites and to do that for every sprite and tile in the game would really be a headache-inducing mess.  Oh well, I'll think of something.   

[ralferoo]

Currently reworking 'Cosmic Prison Commando' in the hope a CPC coder would like to code it for a real CPC.

Just googled for that... the youtube video looks really nice!

[Carnivius]

Just googled for that... the youtube video looks really nice!

youtube video?   I wasn't aware there was still one.  I never made one myself.   If there is one on there it's likely of the old 2008 demo which I'd rather people ignored as it's not really what the game is like now. 

edit:  Just found it.  Yeah I had no idea that video existed.  Hm, the guy playing seems to hold the fire button down almost all the time and the sound effect sure gets annoying.  Never really occured to me people do that.  I tend to only shoot when there's something to shoot at.  Am pondering what to do about that.  I had been thinking of gun upgrades being limited ammo, so you wouldn't just keep shooting or else you'd run out of good ammo and be stuck with your default weak but infinite ammo.

Cheers for mentioning that video.  Given me something to think about.   

[Gryzor]

I'm pissing my pants with what I'm seeing here.

[Carnivius]

I'm pissing my pants with what I'm seeing here.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  Either way I certainly don't want to be responsible for urine-soaked underwear...

[Carnivius]

Little robot found gems!
(that be the little robot buddy that the main character sends out to go into tiny tunnels to collect goodies and activate switches and such.  He's just in this not-small cave shot for testing purposes.)

[MacDeath]

Dude you're still as good as I imagined...

[Carnivius]

Was getting a bit bored of the outdoors tiles so for a change I've started to revamp the castle tileset.  This screenshot is a mock up testing them. Quite happy with how they're looking so far (though still need a lot of work).  The old bricks were far too bright and noisy.

[McKlain]

Hey Carnivac, if you still need help in the sound department give me a shout 

[Carnivius]

Hey Carnivac, if you still need help in the sound department give me a shout 

Thanks!  Will do!

[sigh]

Looking good.

How do you control the robot?

[MacDeath]

still I don't remember my CPC having that much heavy scanlines effects on real monitor...


My EGA had as his native resolution was 640x350 so when it displayed a 200 vertical resolution you effectively had black lines between colour lines.


But not on CPC as it is well scaled with the RGB monitor native resolution (768x272...) you actually don't have scanlines effect.

[Carnivius]

Looking good.

How do you control the robot?

Still trying out some ideas for that.  The current and most likely is that there are 'switch-over' points just before a section the robot is required for, indicated by a tile on the ground where you press down and the robot jumps out of Jack (he's really stored in the backpack but there won't be enough animation to show that accurately). Jack then stands still while the player controls the robot to do whatever needs to be done then you make the robot jump back into Jack (often he's where you left him and other times something the robot did makes Jack now appear in a new location) to make the robot disappear and transfer control back to him.  They're only shown together in that mock up castle shot like that so I can see they both stand out well enough against these new tiles.

still I don't remember my CPC having that much heavy scanlines effects on real monitor...

I don't find them 'heavy' at all.  To me they're natural and what I use in every emulator and retro game where the option is available (even on PS3 re-releases of old games) as I find modern displays too 'clean' for low resolutions and this is the best and easiest way to break that up without adding extra colours and messing up the pixel work.  Even CPC emulators have it (on WinApe it's done by having the option 'Render both pixel lines' turned off in the Display menu, and JavaCPC has a scanlines option in it's Video settings which I use too).   This is my preferred method of displaying low res games on modern monitors and TV's.    The game does have options to turn it off though and to make the lines various degrees of transparent (but I hate that cos then it adds extra colours and that annoys the hell out of me).

[McKlain]

Well, you may notice the scanlines on an Amstrad monitor, as we all had to have the monitor pretty close to the computer. But on a big CRT tv, you don't use to play that close (an so, you barely notice the scanlines).