Greetings to all.
First of all, thanks for your comments. Now I *have* to finish this project... no excuses
I suppose this is a good opporunity to jump in and introduce myself...
I have been out of the Oric scene for several years after Fabrice and I released Pinforic due to personal reasons, but in the meantime I decided to do something I promised him then: learning assembly programming on the Oric. I started out with some little routines (and the help of one friend of mine, who is quite an expert in other systems).
I allways remember my feelings when I first saw Knight Lore on the Spectrum. I allways wondered how they did it, so it was a good opportunity to learn something, while checking if something similar could be done on the Oric, where very little games use masked sprites, and not to mention isometric perspective!.
NOISE, which is on beta version, is quite a general engine, where some of those routines I made years back are used. I made the C interface originally to be able to test it easier, but eventually thought it was a good idea to keep it. There are stil some things to be done here, like cleaning code and some bug catching, but most important of all is optimizing for speed. I have done my best, but with my lack of experience (most notably in older routines) I may have overseen something. However, the most CPU intensive code is the one that rotates graphics and masks and I don't know how that could be done faster (I ever considered having them pre-rotated in memory, but that would take *a lot* of bytes). Maybe there are other points that are "eating" my CPU cycles, but...
Other modifications for the next version could include a new format for the room map in memory (so adding new levels is not so memory expensive) or new strategies for rendering (current ones are not the best for speed, but I did not find another way to do it).
WHITE, on the other hand, is restrictive. It does not use many of the features of NOISE like the ablity of moving and detecting collisions up and down, at least yet, in favour of a higher level of abstraction for the programmer. It handles, for example, the frame animation, but restricts it to 4-frame as well as the size of sprites and an improving collision detection, easier to handle throug callbacks and hiding other details from NOISE collision detection. It is still on a very alpha version and I wrote it with the idea of serving my purposes for a small demo of the engine, so it will probably be modified to suit the programmer's requirements, like adding gravity and/or the ability to jump.
At this moment it manages a map structure which I think could serve most purposes. Those four rooms in the test program take up 80 bytes.
I would like to finish WHITE and the small demo before anything else because it is a good strategy to catch bugs and noticing what should be done and what can wait for a new version
Then I will surely come to you with help on many issues, like optimization or design matters.
Finnaly I declare my total inability for drawing decent graphics and I am even worst with sound, so don't expect anything better than this in these fields (terrible graphics and no sound).
Twilighte wrote:
I wonder if it will be possible to have multi-level rooms like in Head over heels and Fairlight. That would be dead cool.
Indeed NOISE supports so (you can move vertically and collision detection is performed also), but it is still not implemented in WHITE. There are many minor things that should be dealt with... Definitely it is something interesting to include, anyway, like gravity.
Twilighte wrote:
I have a fair number of graphics for isometric, and have also worked on the 3 pixel step instead of 2 (Angle of line) which seems to be less acute but more 3d on the oric.
3 pixel? That sounds interesting. So a character moving will do so one pixel down and three pixels across? Does it mean the graphics aspect ratio is not 1:2 but 1:3?
