MaxCoderz

This will now be the official thread for discussion, suggestions and showings-off for my current project, Jackal. I'll try and dig out the important stuff from the other thread so we can continue here.

As you may know, Jackal is a game for the NES where you drive a jeep around, shooting tanks and soldiers of the brown color, while rescuing your little green buddies. Here is a page with a better explaination of the game.

As promised, I said I would start this thread up when I had something to show off. Obviously, this is a work in progress, but here we go...



Now before you say anything, I know. The masked sprite routine needs work. Is there a way to rotate right with 1s going into the 7th bit? Maybe perform a meaningless operation to set carry, then rotate in? Sigh...the public learning process requires some humility. =]

I also need to say that I hugely appreciate the sprites that were contributed in the other thread by Madskillz and Stickmanofdoom. They helped me draw the ones I'm using, but for now I'm using 8x8 for everything, so you'll be looking at my ugly jeep sprites for now. I don't think they're too bad, but I'm just not a great artist.

Contributions:


Stickmanofdoom

Madskillz

Things to work on / fix:

masked sprites
terrain graphics
map design
shooting / weapons
enemies
...and actually finishing the nes version so I can see what I need to do.

Basically this project is in its infancy, but I hope that with the support from everyone here I can see this through to the end. Thanks everyone.

As far as rotating a byte, try 'rrca'.

Looks cool so far, but is that tile-by-tile scrolling?

A stroke of genius and the discovery of the 'scf' instruction has brought a fix to the masked sprite, as shown by the temporary drive over of solid tiles.



The old mask was drawn within a loop of basically ionputsprite, drawing the same way with the same shifts. Putsprite uses 0s in place of empty space when it shifts (as it should), but I needed ones there. It's amazing. I was looking through Cobb's guide and Sean's guide thinking 'there must be a way to set the carry flag so I can rotate those 1s in. Low and behold there it was. scf. This fix works for now, but I might try and find a proper fix for it later.

tr1p1ea, yes this scrolls tile-by-tile. I have it moving 2 tiles at a time because it felt very jittery when moving just one tile.

Wow, thats super cool. I like how its goes slow through the mud and stuff .

Looking good already! I wonder how the game will work out, I've never played Jackal but something similar for the PC which I enjoyed really much. Hopefully this will rock aswell .

Well I am posting this here...yes Tr1p the horizontal sprites are actually a tad bigger...I'll have to fix that...or I could just make the vertical sprites a bit bigger...I'll fix it later today.

Great work so far Blueskies...I hope you can make this true to the original! If you do that, you could have a hit on your hands!

sorry for the double post, but it has been a few days so...Well I redid some of the horizontal sprites...they look closer to the other ones now!


Comments, questions, etc. always welcome!

It can be very time consuming drawing sprites, especially in 8 directions. Ive just been drawing some sprites, 8 dirrections with animations (for each direction) ... well you only really have to draw 5 sets as you can flip some of the horizontal ones .

nice jeeps madskillz. I'll keep these around in case I end up using 16x16 sprites. For now everything is 8x8 though.

so any update blue?

wow, that looks a lot like my original 'Destructorama' game for PC. can't wait to see this on a calc.

eh, no. School, work, and the track take up almost every minute of my day. I barely have time to sit on the couch and enjoy a beer. Next quarter though I'll be able to break this code out and work on it some more. I definitely have a plan for this game that I've been laying down, but no actual code yet.

well, IF and WHEN you get around to it, could you add smooth scrolling? snapping to grids annoys me even though it is easier to make saved games that way.

You could just change the direction you shift and use sl1. It may be an undocumented command, but you won't have to deal with the carry (saving a few cycles).

Looks nice keep up the good work.