cool cat game
what's unreasonable about this though?
Making Graphics Like it's 1993
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#42Every time I think about graphics programming, I think about how we did it in the mid 90s when I was in high school messing around with exactly these things. XOR operations to drive animations, writing directly to memory, etc. (Clearly I do backend stuff now...)
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#43A great writeup of excellent work!
The flight simulator / magic carpet easter egg in Microsoft Excel 97 used that same shaded-colormap palette trick, plus some dithering:
https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/about.html
I'm impressed by your sprite pipeline and gibs animations. Your attention to detail and navigation of constraints have really paid off, I can't wait to play this sometime
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? Doing this with modern OpenGL would be much simpler than the software rasterizer solution. I think I'm gonna have to do it anyway, because some players claim they get nausea when playing at such low resolution (320x240), and the only way to give them higher resolutions that perform reasonably is to have it hardware accelerated. Renderer is abstracted away already, but the real difference would probably be occ…
Unless you plan on rendering the level on some very retro hardware (think S3 Virge, maybe Voodoo 1) you can render the entire level in OpenGL with just zbuffer and alpha tested sprites and it'll run perfectly fine - if anything with such low polycount, chances are you're going to make the renderer slower by trying to do occlusion culling on any GPU released in the 21st century :-P. If you pack the geometry in a few v…
The synthesis technique would be to build the DOOM-style BSP tree and then construct a bunch of meshes for use depending on which portal space you're currently in, but .. as you say, you don't need to do that because it's at most a few hundred polygons.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#45I just noticed that this might be one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist: the cat has a calico pattern, and those are almost always female ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_cat ).
A lot of boomer shooters nowadays have a female protagonist, e.g. Selaco[0], Supplice[1], The Citadel[2] and its sequel[3], Zortch[4] (and its upcoming sequel[5]), Nighmare Reaper[6], COVEN[7], Viscerafest[8], Hedon[9], etc. If anything i'd say that nowadays there are way more boomer shooters with female protagonists than not :-P (combining the tags "boomer shooter" with "female protagonist" on Steam search gives 143…
143 results means it's relatively rare.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#46>> What this actually means is, the constraints I have foolishly imposed upon myself are as follows....
Those kind of constraints can lead to increased creativity, and can also influence the overall style of a game. It's part of the reason early 80's arcade games had so much diversity.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#47If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;)
If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0
With that you can fire up https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, https://www.aseprite.org/ for something more modern.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#48Graphics programming in the early to mid 1990s was pretty fun: write pixel data into the memory-mapped video RAM and it appears on the screen! A pointer to 0xA0000 was all you needed - no API or anything. The reason for the non-square-pixel 320×200 VGA mode they mention was that the video buffer took 64000 bytes, which fit into a 16-bit segment, making addressing it easy in 16-bit code/CPUs.
Until VGA came along....the story was much more complex.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rare shooters with a female protagonist It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate. Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be ei…
Not a "shooter", but the "No One Lives Forever" franchise is another example of a female protagonist in a first person game. Edit: I completed forgot Chell from Portal, too!
Unreal actually also has a female protagonist.
https://unrealarchive.org/wikis/the-liandri-archives/Prisone...
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#50This is so great. Another fun trick we used in the 90s was palette animation -- by swapping the palette you can create incredibly cool effects at a low runtime cost.