Anyone Try Zot Gbax Edition?


skeezix

Internal Development
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(Trying to sneak in under the GPfinalwar and Gigadrive cheering ;)

(Tried the GBAX minigame, Zot to the Past?) Runs well on everyones units with no crashes? I know I didn't get time to make fancy levels, but hopefully someone was amused with the included stuff ;) But being a cross platform kit, I'm curious to know if it runs well on everyones units, as testing across six OSes is tough ;)

jeff
 
I tried it, Skeezix. :D

It runs very well. The only weird thing in Zot to the Past is the trees. They appear and disappear as one big whole unit instead of scrolling off the screen. Like, an edge of a tree will go past the screen and the whole thing will instantly disappear. Same thing happens with them showing up on screen. It's almost like really bad clipping in a 3D game.

Other than that, it runs great! I can't wait to try to make something with this engine. :D
 
yeah the tree clipping got a little goofy; ie: Due to the cross platforming, its careful about viewport versus backbuffer versus screen .. it shoudl let things get outside of viewport but within backbuffer for rendering sake, so that its all smoothly rendered; this works well as it all moves very nicely as you can see. However, the trees are sufficiently large sprites and the backbuffer I think isn't karge enough to hold the whole tree outside of the viewport.. so as the trees approach the edge of the viewport the engine gets worried about them being too big for the stripe around the viewport and suppresses them. I'll have to increase backbuffer size to allow for larger sprites. However there must be some little issue there, since they vanish as they approach the viewport edge and not the backbuffer edge.. ah well :)

As long as she's solid; took a loooot of hours to track down a couple memory corruptions that were causing occasional hiccups; I think I nailed them, but hard to see until everyone gets at it :)

jeff
 
It ran fine on my machine... only thing I don't actually understand is why my sprite changes while moving pretty weird (e.g. sometimes looks like a colored sun, then like a triangle, etc.).

And there is an area on the screen which is just pitch black where I disappear behind...

Is all this okay?
 
Try the GBAX minigame instead of the other demo levels (which are to show how the script works more than be playable ;)

In the demo levels the player changes shapes based on direciton, to illustrate how you can change the artwork for animaiton based on movement direction.

ie: in the GBAX minigame, it uses "left facing" artwork when moving left. So try that one ;)

jeff
 
I tried it now, the engine runs pretty nice, but the Zelda clone isn't that fun to play. Sorry, just being honest, I tried it three times and wasn't able to read the last message after my death, because you push it away when you hold down the button to shoot and then it resets. Maybe a death animation or holded frame would give you enough time to release the button to select continue or whatever the second option is. ;)
However I had a look some time ago on the Zot Engine and it sounded pretty simple, maybe I'll have a go and show you a much crappier game by myself. :p
 
There should be a competition where you have to remake old games using this engine. Like you could remake baloon fight/Joust, donkey kong, lunar lander and all kinds of other games with this scripting engine. Did anyone make an example of a side-scroller in this engine yet?
 
Dan Fury posted on May 3 2004 at 12:07 PM said:
I tried it now, the engine runs pretty nice, but the Zelda clone isn't that fun to play. Sorry, jut being honest, I tried it three times and wasn't able to read the last message after my death, because you push it away when you hold down the button to shoot and then it resets. Maybe a death animation or holded frame would give you enough time to release the button.
However I had a look some time ago on the Zot Engine and it sounded pretty simple, maybe I'll have a go and show you a much crappier game by myself. :p
*g* The game levels never got finished sadly. As long as she runs I'm pretty happy. Making something so portable is a right pain ;)

Yeah, I mean to add a key gobbler before the dialogs pop up, so you don't miss things.

The plan for the levels was the forest being an overland tieing sublevels together; poke around the forwst level looking for entrances to sublevels where the jewels are hidden, etc. Too much debugging and tuning prevented it though (wanted to get the "-5" style damage indicators going, and had to catch a showstopper bug that showed up on the Zodiac version but was present in all versions, etc.)

Time permitting I'll either grow the Zot to the past minigame, or work on a new game. Or clone Gauntlet and Time Bandits which was the whole point of it :)

jeff
 
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Enslaved posted on May 3 2004 at 12:12 PM said:
There should be a competition where you have to remake old games using this engine. Like you could remake baloon fight/Joust, donkey kong, lunar lander and all kinds of other games with this scripting engine. Did anyone make an example of a side-scroller in this engine yet?
Its not a truly general purpose engine (if it was, it'd take a lot longer to write, and be a lot hardwer to script for). A simple shooter shoudl be doable however, so if anyone wants to give it a go they'll have to bug me for some things I'm sure.

Its more suited towards top down run and shoots like Gauntlet, or simple RPGs (zelda-like), though it shoudl be able to do simple platformers (mario) as well..

ITs growing, so I'm not sure what its limits are ;)

jeff
 
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Oh ok, but how many layers could it have? Like could you have scrolling backgrounds? Get back to work, you said before you work 16 hours a day! BTW I'm at school so I shouldn't be talking.
 
Enslaved posted on May 3 2004 at 04:19 PM said:
Oh ok, but how many layers could it have? Like could you have scrolling backgrounds? Get back to work, you said before you work 16 hours a day! BTW I'm at school so I shouldn't be talking.
You're at school on a bank holiday?!? Or aren't you UK-based?

(If you are, then your school are right wossnames :( )
 
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Enslaved posted on May 3 2004 at 12:19 PM said:
Oh ok, but how many layers could it have? Like could you have scrolling backgrounds? Get back to work, you said before you work 16 hours a day! BTW I'm at school so I shouldn't be talking.
"Layers" depends; right now it has a tile-layer and 3 sprite-layers.

I will likely add support for a "floor" layer that tile layer can show through to, allowing for a parallax feal. I may add a "roof sprite" layer, which would be treetops.. they would reposition based on viewport, to give the feel of parallax. But those sorts of things hit performance, since rendering the same pixel multiple times kills thjroughput, but we'll see..

jeff
 
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I've been wanting to make a new game based off an 80's cartoon mini series. But with the look and feel of Zelda.
 
Josquius posted on May 3 2004 at 01:41 PM said:
I've had a brief look at it and I don't get it.
Yet to try it on my gp32 as I have lost my link cable :(
What don't you get?

ie: On a PC, download, run, pick a level (like GBAX mainly) and see it ;)

On GP32 you'll need a link cable or card writer to get all the datafiles over..

jeff
 
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at first I thought it was not very good, bnut when I saw the GBAX gameI think I finally understood the purpose of the engine!! :)

it's great :D so keep up the good work!

(no errors here btw)
 
Josquius posted on May 3 2004 at 02:00 PM said:
It needs a special launcher and all which I have never heard of before.
As said I've just had a brief look.
No special launcher; just run the .fxe like you would any other (ie: You need Freelauncher, or whatever launcher you're using). But if you're running any homebrew, you've got freelauncher already :)

jeff
 
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skeezix posted on May 3 2004 at 05:44 PM said:
Try the GBAX minigame instead of the other demo levels (which are to show how the script works more than be playable ;)

In the demo levels the player changes shapes based on direciton, to illustrate how you can change the artwork for animaiton based on movement direction.
Ah, yes, that explains everything :)

The engine looks pretty good for a start :)
I may try creating some games if I find the time...

But keep it going, it's a very flexible engine already :)
 
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