ThesiusXIII - Forest Blast Tech

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Thesius XIII - Forest Blast Tech

      I started this yesterday.  So far it's represents about two hours work.    The demo is created largely from (95%) cut-pasted tidbits from the PB example pack.    The art work is stock PB artwork.  The Tree.jpg ( Blink) and the ship is from the Trillion art pack (Pincho Paxton) that was given to us like two years ago.  ( I must put that together at some point, although i guess this is it )

     The example demonstrates the basic frame work of a horizontal shooter.   The player is  flying past a forest which is being  flooded by water.  (ie Ballistic Blaster Style)  Looks a bit like an old psygnosis game which I still can't recall the name of.  

   Looking at the picture, it's probably difficult to see just what is going on in the shot.  Basically it's 3 layers.  Scrolling backdrop,  250 rotating sprites and two screen sized post processing effects to create for the flooding effect (Variable Alpha & sine wave -  Creative - not ).  The demo is locked at 45 fps btw - it runs quite nicely..

   Written in PB1.62.

   Get Source Code Here


  Watch

  Watch Thesius XIII Tech Demo Video on youtube

 

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   It's a bit hard to see, but the blend and ripple get heavier towards the bottom of the image, sort simulating depth.   If you look closely the water line is running through the player.   

   I'm not exactly going to put a great deal of effort into this, just a proof of concept. 

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Update V001

     Here's another hour or so of  messing about.    The main changes are that buildings in the foreground.  These are on the near plane, so the figther flies in and around them.  The idea is that  the tech is sort of simulating an underwater city environment.   The water line is bobbing up and down with sine wave  displacement.    Don't ask me what the forest  backdrop  represents now.   It's just whatever media I had sitting around thrown together.     The buildings from the Trillion art pack also.

     Some of the builds are transparent, some are  solid.  The player sort of flies between them.    The score and the health meter are drawn direct to the screen, but I probably should post process them also.    Also need something to show the top of the water more clearly.   Anyway, here's a few pictures of the current running demo.

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 Pic #2

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Sounds interesting.

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 Pic #3

  This one has 150 sprites,  some explosion animations  + full screen cross fade running in & out.    Basically the drawing process is done, although i'm going to change how the buildings work.   Temped to make a little dropping tool to layout some level, but I really can't afford the time.     I'm not intending on spending a much time on this, it's just showing that with a little bit of thought you can make some interesting stuff.    Even in PB1.62.   

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Will you be posting the code to this, so that others can "borrow" your routines to enhance their games with a bit of effect candy?

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    I'll post the code at some point.  But there's nothing that is being done here that you don't already have in your example pack!  

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Update V002

   Previous shots of this were a more a proof of concept than game demo, ie. while it moved you couldn't actually play.   Today my aim is to get a basic game  running.  So far we have  player controls / simple weapons / particles.   Next comes a alien frame work.    I'm not really writing much, more grabbing bits of AXIS framework and customizing it to suit.

   While traditionally these type of games have used a very snappy digital control mechanism via the keyboard, or digi joystick/joypad.  This time around I wanted to try something different (for me at least).  So I've been experimenting with mouse control.    While it's hard to tell how it'll feel when playing,  i'm pretty happy with the result on it's  own.

   Some more shots.

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 pic #5

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Update V002b

    In this shot you can see the make ship alien controller + alien bullet controller running.  It's a bit hard to make out due to virtually everything being alpha'd in the scene.. for no other reason than cause I can . 

    Also, the tech now has full pixel perfect (rotated/scaled) collision between  player and aliens & alien bullets, and  course between player bullets to aliens. 

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Update V004

   Finally getting back to this demo.  Current tasks are building an environment manager & level loading frame work.   I can't say a lot of thought is going into it, but the idea is to have a open set of document that the level designer could customize to build new levels.   

    Bellow you can see another fairly samey looking couple of shots but this time there's a basic version of the environment manager running.  The manager stores the passive scenery objects in the world.   It's job is to show what objects that are in view at whatever position the player is within  world.  It also handles perspective projection of the objects, so the scene is a little more accurate depth wise.   

      I've fine tuned the player a bit more, mainly how it acts when you collide with alien objects.  So now it kinda feels like there's real impact them you hit something and vice versa.   Also, since scenery objects can be in front of the player, the engine will alpha's foreground objects out, so you can still what's going on behind them.   Which is what the shot's bellow are trying to show. 

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 pic 8 -  You can see the player/aliens behind alpha'd out full screen buildings

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I presume this is all happening without any/too much slowdown?

Excellent stuff

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    In these types of extreme cases  the physical rate will obviously vary.   We're pushing  at least  4->5 meg of pre & post processed pixel data to produce one frame here.   Which is just overkill, but fun    If you look closely you'll notice there's 5 buildings lined up all each alpha blended over each other. I.e the extreme case.    While you can see and play fine while full screen stuff is front of you, it's rather disorientating to do so.