Dimension Shift

Mugi

Member
jorotroid said:
Holy crap! That's awesome.

Thanks!


also as for why am i not running after Joe correcting his facebook posts, is because im quite sure he's aware of the state of the engine my game currently runs on.
i've had plenty of coding related discussions with him over email and whatnot in the past.
I believe he said himself at one point that nesmaker is just a frontend for project management and just because you dont use it to do EVERYTHING EVER of your game, doesnt mean you're not using it.
i do use nesmaker a lot but i also do things a lot that i dont use it for. Again. it all boils down to one's own opinion of what counts as using nesmaker.
There's also the fact that the whole game wouldn't even exist without it, neither would this scrolling code, or any of that litlle i've learned about assembly programming during these couple months i've used it.

at any rate, this thread is a wip thread for a game im making so if you want to further argue about whether or not i am using nesmaker to do so, i wouldn't mind if that was done on another thread :p
 

Mugi

Member
start screens are boring, no ?
it's just a screen, maybe blinky blinky if you add sprites... bleh,
off to the bin goes startscreen.

say hello mainmenu.asm :) (WIP)

menustructure.png


2 new "special screen" chr's and a tile based palette shifter for texts longer than 8 sprites per scanline. (draw 8x8 tiles hooray!)
overengineered? yes. Pretty? yes.

thats the goal atleast, will take a while to code.... and manually draw nametables :p
will be left to seen how much of this actually makes it in (also, we're nowhere near of implementing saving since no idea what we're saving yet, so it's just a mockup for now.)
 

Mugi

Member
thanks!
they look less beautiful when packed into the space they require lol...

menuchrtests.png


this whole menu will be quite the overkill, the new chr's alone eat half a bank, and i dont even want to know how large the nametables will be when im done writing them x_x
 

Mugi

Member
I figured i'll write up something to let people know that we're indeed still working :)
the start screen has been bothering me for an eternity now, so about time something's being done to it.
 
Wow this is really great! I love the pixel work you have going here. I've been having such a hard time getting my tile set the write way and hopefully I can do the same by making the grid my self saving the bmp and transferring it over. I enjoy doing my sprite work on photoshop. I must study your background im not a stage designer artist. I stick to character and monster making but i need to do it lol
 

Mugi

Member
fjamesfernandez said:
Wow this is really great! I love the pixel work you have going here. I've been having such a hard time getting my tile set the write way and hopefully I can do the same by making the grid my self saving the bmp and transferring it over. I enjoy doing my sprite work on photoshop. I must study your background im not a stage designer artist. I stick to character and monster making but i need to do it lol

I always do my graphics work in paint shop pro and just draw it into a canvas that is suitable for converting into an asset directly.
for normal tileset chr's (BCKCHR**.BMP) i simply just draw a 8x8 tile grid into the picture, and draw my tiles over it, then remove the grid, change the colors to the RGB format needed and throw it in nesmaker.

the special screen chr's such as the above i do a little differently.

for these i always draw a 256x240 mockup of a screen, and then order the elements of the mocup into a linear fashion vertically (this is important because of the next steps)
after that is done, i throw the vertically rearranged graphic into shiru's screentool and have it crunch me a tileset such as the above with all the dublicates removed.


the reason why arranging the file you load into screen tool vertically is important, is because screentool reads the loaded file from left to right, top to bottom, and the produced tileset is seuentially ordered,
so arranging your graphics in that way causes the tileset to come out clean.
 
Mugi said:
fjamesfernandez said:
Wow this is really great! I love the pixel work you have going here. I've been having such a hard time getting my tile set the write way and hopefully I can do the same by making the grid my self saving the bmp and transferring it over. I enjoy doing my sprite work on photoshop. I must study your background im not a stage designer artist. I stick to character and monster making but i need to do it lol

I always do my graphics work in paint shop pro and just draw it into a canvas that is suitable for converting into an asset directly.
for normal tileset chr's (BCKCHR**.BMP) i simply just draw a 8x8 tile grid into the picture, and draw my tiles over it, then remove the grid, change the colors to the RGB format needed and throw it in nesmaker.

the special screen chr's such as the above i do a little differently.

for these i always draw a 256x240 mockup of a screen, and then order the elements of the mocup into a linear fashion vertically (this is important because of the next steps)
after that is done, i throw the vertically rearranged graphic into shiru's screentool and have it crunch me a tileset such as the above with all the dublicates removed.


the reason why arranging the file you load into screen tool vertically is important, is because screentool reads the loaded file from left to right, top to bottom, and the produced tileset is seuentially ordered,
so arranging your graphics in that way causes the tileset to come out clean.

Awesome. Thanks for the ideas. I just started to do that last night. I was already drawing my stuff in photoshop, I just didnt know at that time that i can save it as .BMP and it will transfer it over with the corresponding name. I love that transferring over keeps it with its color and its completely clean and organized. I mention that I was having trouble because all this time I thought BG Assests can be mirrored and boy I was wrong. So I had to redesigning again, and again to make sure everything was fitting. Sadly I lost a lot of details I wanted forcing me to think smaller.. Still looks good but I have to edit some stuff around so it doesnt look so boxed. So lets see. Love the work you putting in to your project. The hard work is being admired. I hope I can follow the same foot steps.
 

Mugi

Member
finally got my flasher and got to play Dimension Shift (and trollburner) on hardware muahahahh.
looks pretty neat-o *thumbsup*

also, first time in a literal forever since i touched my NES, man.... my controller is so rekt xD

on another side note, I finally got to see how the detectTVSystem assembly fares, as I played DS on a PAL system, and the music is indeed playing as it should, meaning that the audio autodetection routine I implemented
does indeed work :)
 

SerafukuSoftware

New member
Here I go fanboying again, but damn Mugi, Those screens are gorgeous. I just love how technical everything looks. Like I imagine those special screens would genuinely look good on a CRT.
(A little late but congrats on getting a spot in the Byte-Off Competition for graphics too)
 

Mugi

Member
thanks.
I'll display how the menuing works more once we get it coded up. We're gonna work on that during the weekend now.
sans that, I finished redoing the temple stage last night and I've been doing a whole load of code cleaning on the engine. at the moment we're sitting at 1KB or so free on bank 1F, a bit over 2KB free on bank 14 and I cleaned up almost 2 entire banks,
so while the new menuing system takes an entire bank (18), we still have 3 empty banks and another that has only like 100 bytes used so we should be fine as far as things go.
Some of th eempty banks will be used for cutscenes etc, and if it comes to that, we have enough space to assign another dynamic code bank to go along with bank14 (although it'd be a massive waste of space to dublicate most of the bank for basic functionality.)
 

SerafukuSoftware

New member
Did you redo the temple stage in terms of like a complete layout overhaul, or minor changes to fit in with your restructured/efficient code? Either way it sounds like you and your team are making great progress with what extra space you've freed up. You've caught my attention with cutscenes, now those I'm excitied to see in future updates. Keep it up man!
 

Mugi

Member
it's a complete redesign of the stage.
The temple that was in the byte off demo rom was made for the demo, and it was also designed with a 2 directional scroll in mind.
the new temple is more than twice the size, and takes more liberal use of vertical movement like the cavern stage does.
 

Mugi

Member
it's quite a mess of a code but it's coming along.
still have to get the soundtest finished with the new look and then deal with the whole "intro cutscene looping" and a possible dev logo once we manage to figure out what we're calling ourselves xD
for now it's just "FIX94/Mugi"

but yeah, this sure beats the static "press start" screen :p

ps: the SFX enable disable actually works too. We added an extra check into the sound engine to completely disable sound effects if the user so desires. (no idea why someone would want to, but oh well xD)


edit: this is also extremely wip and subject to 100% change over time, but here's the very first look ever to something of how the general idea of stage 3 (laboratory) might look like :p
This is the transition screen between stage 2 and stage 3 (first draft)

stage3_tileset_test12.png
 

Mugi

Member
one tiny bug left in soundtest that causes 2 tiles to color orange but aside that, new menu system is fully implemented and working.

https://youtu.be/3Exyc6o-mcU

:)
 

rimoJO

Member
Wow! This looks very, very good, and I can't wait to try it someday!
...because the link in the first post is broken.
But the game is amazing!
Also, NESM has a dark mode?
 
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