2 PLayers - Xenon

[kevin]

Here's a warts an all pic from the infamous xenon tech demo (infamous coz i've been rambling on about it for months now.. )  anyway it shows the camera and passable types/arrays can be use to maintain 2 player games easily.  There's still some things that need ironing out though, but for a quick demo, it's getting there.

[Fash]

Looks to be a nice framerate there atm.....will  be interesting to see what sort of frame rate you get when you have some enemies on eavch split screen as well...
Things look to be moving on nicely mate !
:D


Oops, didn't notice before I posted that there were some enemies on the screens (DOH!).....
Ok, what's the  frame rate like with losts of aliens on then?
;)

[kevin]

Well, both frames are already populated with aliens, although the primary alien type in view here unfortunately, just happens to be the asteroids, so it all blends into the foreground map layers.   There's aso a second map behind it, plus the static backdrop.  In this picture, Camera 2 actually has a fault with render maps to the view port here though.

On the continuation of this tech it can pretty much drive 2 full screens worth of aliens in both views and not drop bellow the 50fps cap. If the cap is removed it seems to run over 100fps on average.   So there's a fair but of fuel left in the tank.

[Fash]

Nice one !!!!
DO you think when say an XM tune is playing ans some souds as well that they willl use much processor time, or will we still have lots of fps spare ?

[Fash]

Oh yeah, how soon till we see an alpha release of the tech demo in it's current stage with the split cameras etc ?

[kevin]

No it shouldn't be any slower the the tech is here, as i'm laying mp3's in the background constantly.  PLaying those prolly eats 3->5 fps.. So XM should be less than that.. (should :) )


we'll release a demo of tech, once i'm 100% again (been sick the past week, had hoped for a new years day release..) and it's working correctly.

Currently I just want to set up both side so it shows player 1 and player 2 are playing two difference games at once..

[Fash]

Look forward to that then !
Have you created some sort of wave editor for the aliens now then ?
Did you ever see DXcreator ? That had a wave editor (well, a path motion thing) built into it....In fact there were a few good points about it when it was about......I wonder whjat happened to it....As far as I knew there were doing a DX Creator Evolution or something like that with 3d commands in etc, but then their website went down and they were no more !
Spooky eh ?
;) :ph34r:
SOrry to hear you've been ill mate...hope you're feeling better now !!
:D

[kevin]

Have you created some sort of wave editor for the aliens now then ?

Nah there's not...  It would make sense adding something though for the map editor tool for path creation.  You'd have to write the code to drive the bad guys though.   It's still a language at the end of the day :)

Did you ever see DXcreator ? That had a wave editor (well, a path motion thing) built into it....In fact there were a few good points about it when it was about......I wonder whjat happened to it....As far as I knew there were doing a DX Creator Evolution or something like that with 3d commands in etc, but then their website went down and they were no more !

I think i've seen that one, but can't be sure now.  

I'm feeling much better this morning that yesterday...still coughing like an old mule though..

[kevin]

2 Players:
========

   Well, it's taken a couple of days to work through the finer points of the camera/sprite system (and cough up a lung, man it's January as I've the cold from hell) , but this shot is now showing a 2 player game running through 2 separate cameras.  If you pay careful attention to the screen shot you'll see the bad guys/player/bullets etc are not present in camera 2 and vice versa.

  This is achieved through 2 really basic, but extremely useful commands. The first is a Collision class identifier and the second is the sprites visible in camera flags. The collision class lets you check collisions between certain types of sprites. You can class them however you like. So the calls to the spritehit command , can only check for intersects with the matching classes.  While a simple addition, it's a pretty powerful one though.  Anyway while that takes care of the isolating the collisions, the SpriteVisToCamera settings, let you toggle what cameras can see what sprites/maps/items etc.  

 In this scene the 2 cameras are created on screen 0 .  Camera #1 is 0,0,320,480 ( x1,y1,x2,y2  ).. and camera #2 is  320,0,640,480     both cameras are focused on the scene matching y positions and X positions.  As you can see, their rendering separate scenes, from the one pool of data. While this tech demo doesn't do it, I could push this even further and separate the data arrays also.  The functions to control the aliens/bullets are generic, this combined with pointer arrays or just normal array passing, lets you maintain different data sets for the 2 games in process.

 So this camera system can now be used in two ways.  For good old fashion split screens (or cut screens even), as well running allow you to dynamically drive 2 players in different parts of the game.  Side by side.  

The mind boggles..  :)

[las6]

looks nifty!

makes me want to do "24"-ish cutscenes. ;)
how's the fps doing when you add more than 1 camera?

[kevin]

The tech is actually capped, although i don't appear to have mention this before.  Running 3 isn't a big problem, so here's running 4.   While it didn't seem to slow down at all while i was testing, theres soemthing a tad wrong still with the sprite in camera support. not entirely sure what as yet.

[Fash]

That DOES look interesting !
And with no slowdown (to speak of yet) theres some great possibilities :)