OType

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 11:45 pm

Here's an idea, or should i say i have always been a bastard for this kind of thing. Just showing some cool effect and not following through.

Fire with left ctrl, move with cursors

http://www.defence-force.org/ftp/forum/ ... emos/d.tap

Just a demo, so can't kill anything yet.

Done some lazy sunday afternoon when i got bored. Sometimes you just gotta do the code, ignore the attribute clashing, just do it!

TheSpider · Post by **TheSpider** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 2:30 am

Pretty cool Twi!
Extremely smooth animation and great eye candy.
Looks like it would make a fantastic game once developed.

Symoon · Post by **Symoon** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 12:38 am

Wow, wonderful !
As usual, I'd say

Chema · Post by **Chema** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 11:35 am

Symoon wrote:Wow, wonderful !
As usual, I'd say

Yep. Twilighte usually does wonders with Orics...

We are getting used to his Master level

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 9:40 pm

Chema wrote:We are getting used to his Master level

I was abonomably crap when i first did graphics back in the 80's. "Practice makes perfect" and "By Trial and error" as they say.
I still use HIDE (albeit modified for my work on Wurlde) for all my graphics. Working in PSP or other PC Paint packages is much less hands on and there is rarely any guarentee what you draw will work on the real mc'coy. :S

However as i pursue Wurlde, i become more and more aware that we still need a graphic Editor on the Oric that can handle the moving of large objects either smoothly (pixel level) or colourwise(byte level).

Loriciels Lorigraph was a fantastic Package but it is really only useful for B/W creations.

I think Dbug started an interesting paint package, but can't remember how far he got with it (i think he got fed up with no mouse), Dbug?

HIDE now has the ability to dump an area of the screen to a .byt xa compliant list in the printer text file but it is still buggy and very very slow.

One of my age old pains when writing editors is that it is not easy to access Sedoric and Cassette commands outside of BASIC. Me and Symoon did some work in this area but its still not perfect.

Post by **Dbug** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 8:14 pm

ULA Paint did not go very far, sadly.
It's one of the 10 projects I started and never finished :p
Actually the issue was not the mouse, it was more the fact that I wanted to get the disc drive load/save + overlay memory

Chema · Post by **Chema** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 1:00 pm

What I think would be extremely cool is a paint program which runs on Win32 (for instance) and which emulates the Oric's screen, so you could get the benefit of a modern application (mouse, disk, advanced features...) while still being able to see the result (more or less).

It shouldn't be too difficult to do with Visual Basic or something like that, and could include many features (attribute editing, pic converting, animations, zooms, exporting to .byt or bin files...)

Just imagine the difference between using the WHITE map editor on Windows (even if it was buggy and just a hack to develop Space:1999) and doing the same within the Oric :/

Cheers.

P.S. Dbug, any news about the clipped polygon filler?

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Mon Jul 07, 2008 2:04 pm

I must agree with Chema. If ever i do graphics, it is always on the emulator these days, i then capture from emulator to PC and convert to text .byt rows. This way i always know what i have designed will work on the real machine. And that is very important to me.

If an editor existed on the PC that allowed the same level of control as HIDE but with additional screen area moves then i would use it.
Things like physically moving an area of the screen in pixel steps is a real pain in HIDE or other paint packages on oric.
Having a mouse and a nice array of graphic tools would be really cool, especially if it also allowed the graphic to be eventually dumped to an xa compliant .s file.

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Thu Jul 16, 2009 11:26 am

Anyway as shown at CEO and over a year since last mentioning(read above date!), the secret project of Otype was revealed.
It is looking really different to the original screenshot above(i will post some here soon) but it is (i believe) the way to go.

Sources for Otype will be uploaded to DF's SVN soon. Would be fun to make this a group project

Not sure whether Chema is too preoccupied atm but would be so cool if you could get involved in it

ibisum · Post by **ibisum** » Thu Jul 16, 2009 3:10 pm

Nice one, I look forward to seeing the code for OType personally .. really like that kind of game myself, and if there were more games like that on the Oric, I'd definitely be checking them out !!

One thing - why not hack up a paint mode into an emulator? Surely its just as easy for the emulator to dump a byteblock of pixel contents to a known-good file format?

Post by **Dbug** » Thu Jul 16, 2009 3:27 pm

It is of course still possible to do like I do: Paint everything in a PC painting program that supports "grids" (mine is alligned on a multiple of 6 pixels), paint knowing the constraints, and convert to the Oric using a conversion tool (like PictConv).

Not fool proof, requires a good knowledge of what the oric can do, but it is doable.

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Thu Jul 16, 2009 4:16 pm

Personally (and i must have mentioned this before) i use HIDE on the Oric to design most of my graphics. Any object manipulation is done by printing the screen to a file, editing in PSP then PCHIRES to convert back to Oric. I know it sounds like a laborious way of doing things but it works for me.

I'd like to think at some stage i'll get some time to improve HIDE to manage the manipulation of larger graphics (like moving, mirroring, copying, pasting etc.) but no time atm.

Someone did mention in another forum that it would be cool to have a windows(or linux) based paint package exclusively limited to Oric screen constraints. I'd definately use that.

Chema · Post by **Chema** » Thu Jul 16, 2009 4:57 pm

Twilighte wrote: Not sure whether Chema is too preoccupied atm but would be so cool if you could get involved in it

Would be indeed nice, but I am quite busy at work and with the Elite clone.

In fact, I was waiting until I had a more definite version to ask for your help in this...

Anyway there will be allways time to work on Oric and experiment new things, and this one (even if i don't know the game itself) seems another challenge!

About the drawing program... At least I suggested that on this same forum. Something emulating the Oric's screen would be very nice to develop and experiment with graphics.

Oh, and the same goes for music and sound effects

Twilighte · Post by **Twilighte** » Thu Jul 30, 2009 10:33 pm

I guess i ought to upload some captures of the Otype game..

The title..

The title is the finished version and on dieing on each level will display that levels sprites animating over the title screen.

The first (and currently only) level..

The game is a two player vertical shoot-em-up. The scrolling is smooth ( two pixel steps) and uses a little complex method but does provide a screen buffer which removes all flicker.
All sprites have shadows aswell as masking the background themselves. This improves visibility and the appearance that they are at a height above the landscape. However the code does not currently support the dynamic movement of shadows to give the impression of differing heights on the background (would be fun but alot more work).

Since Impossible Mission dev started i have improved the method of masking the sprites against the colour backdrops and this could be implemented into OType.

Larger sprites are possible by linking smaller sprites together and i already have designs in the pipeline. The code has also been designed to handle these but the current version has a bug that prevents them behaving correctly atm.
No sound has been done yet.

I need to speak to Dbug when he gets back from France about sticking this into svn. For the moment tho you can get all here..

http://www.defence-force.org/ftp/forum/ ... ources.zip

The working title of this game was SWIV hence the folder in the zip. That folder contains all the xa sources for the game.
Also in the zip is the disk holding the map editor and a tap file that the Map editor on the disk will attempt to load so stick it in the current tape dir.
Notes.s in swiv folder i think holds info on the keys for the map editor.

Ideally i would like to let someone else take over this project(Chema, Dbug). I can give guidance as to how the mechanisms work and will help with graphics, sound and levels but i am now occupied with Impossible Mission so will not return to it until that game is released (no ETA though)

ibisum · Post by **ibisum** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 12:41 pm

This. Is. Beautiful.

Jaw-droppingly beautiful. If I'd known, all those years ago, that I'd one day be seeing such lovely graphics on my Oric .. sheesh.

Beautiful!