Getting together for developing a Game?


I can add a full screen layer of transparency in my GLBasic app without too much of a problem, but if you have more than 2 layers of full screen stuff the framerate plummets.


Adding a few transparent clouds onto a 2 layer scroller won't do much harm, but lots will have a dramatic impact.


There are ways of faking parallax, including some that has been seen already (not full screen, but layers) and this generally works well. Also just having one main layer and a slow moving repetitive background (eg the mountains in SOTB) works well.
 
I'm sure, the Pandora can handle this stuff pretty well, that 16-Bit consoles already did 20 years ago with not even sweating. ^^ I often play Sonic the Hedgehog just for all the Parallax Effects in the Backgrounds. :D


I really like all the tricks they did back in the old days, to generate so much stuff on the screen, even with limited Hardware. When I remember correctly. the Megadrive only was able to display 64 colours directly but with clever using of palette and other tricks, it looked like so much more.


Maybe, your project could also benefit from a reduced palette but I'm not sure if colour depth has an performance impact in that case.
 
16-Bit consoles already did 20 years ago with not even sweating
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There are many differences between the pc systems of today and gaming systems of the past - they are not the same, despite the apparent power increase with modern tech.


For instance the Megadrive and SNES had smaller screens (320x240 - that's less than a 1/4 of a Pandora's) to update and dedicated chips that dealt with pushing pixels fast and nothing else - the MD had three dedicated panes for scrolling too. There was little going on in the background (no OS concerns) and only a limited number of control inputs to look for. Images were displayed in 8 or 16bit colour (or less) and sound was dedicated. The Pandora is a limited Linux pc and not a games console. It does games well, but it's a pc and not a console.


It's possible to come up with something similar to what was produced in the 16bit days, but it's not possible to do things in exactly the same way as the tech doesn't allow that.


Let us worry about these issues - we'll work around them and come up with something worthwhile ;) :)
 
Fusion_Power said:
"We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better...stronger...faster.” :D
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Certainly if we had 6 million dollars!!! :DEdit i watched like 3 or 4 seasons of this show years ago.The mid 90's.Very cheesy but sincere and alot of fun.I really like the show.
 
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Come on, if you can emulate the megadrive in software, it means the Pandora is also capable to do it!


Maybe this means you have to program your own functions to push pixels on screen in layers. There must be a way.
 
ekianjo said:
Come on, if you can emulate the megadrive in software, it means the Pandora is also capable to do it!


Maybe this means you have to program your own functions to push pixels on screen in layers. There must be a way.
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Even with dedicated Chips, they used every "dirty" trick to pull out everything of the old Consoles. If I remember correctly, the "linescrolling" Parallax effect was somehow done within the framebuffer, it was based on the effect that various BG lines were updated/moved slower/faster than others during building up the images on screen. So you basicly get many different moving Parallax Layers "for free". But of course only a simple sidescrolling Effect without transparency or anything like that.
 
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Im currently experimenting with doing multiple parralax layers with GLES2, since it should be able to handle minimum 8 textures simultaneously I think there oughta be a way of having s single polygon layer do multiple texture layers cheaply.
 
mjohansson said:
How can I upload a file?
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You do a reply with advanced settings "More reply options" at the bottom right corner.

Wrath of Khan said:
Not sure if it's relevant as im not a coder but here's a link showing some tricks coders did on some classic amiga games.Agony, Jim power etc.http://www.codetappe.../sprite-tricks/
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I didnt check the link but it's probably not relevant, from what I know of the Amiga and games development on that machine. There was a lot of hacking on the different co-processors to get some crazy effects on screen that the hardware was not capable of in the first place...
 
Ok, hope this works, can someone try to compile this GLES2 code? You need eglport.c and .h, I didnt include them here. If there are any errors hopefully its just a misspelling or small detail, I dont use any GL commands hardly, and I think I looked at the ones I did, but if theres a wrong GL command you can ask or look at info on the GLES 2.0 reference pages, some commands wants an f, i or v at the end of name added, but thats mostly old GLES 1.1 stuff I think.


If it does work, then check framerate, dont look at the left part of message, that amount of frames per 5 seconds or something, the interesting per 1 second is to the right, and when you exit program a message prints saying max textures, can you say how many it says?

Forgot to click ATTACH file...

pandshoot.zip
 

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Didnt someoone mention network play? If its possible it might be cool to play 2 or 3 simultaneously, but mayby thats to messy?
 
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