Just curious about everyone’s progress so far… how many people are planning on participating, what are you planning on making, how many of you have actually started, and those who have started, how is the progress going?

I plan on making a Super Mario Kart game. In the first week I spent a fair amount of time working on it, and it’s been coming along pretty well. I haven’t worked on it much since then though, since I’ve been working on other projects, like the VBTV adapter, and the VB link<->USB adapter. I should be starting back up on it again soon though.

Anyway, currently I’ve implemented a simple Mario Kart engine using Affine. The engine works great with just a few bugs to work out. There’s minimal to no collision detection implemented yet. I have music that I snagged from a MIDI of the SNES version, and I have a simple engine tone.

Still needing to be added is collision detection, other racers, items, AI, link support, better music/sound, more tracks/characters, and of course all the stuff that goes along with being a game, like menus and stuff (plus whatever else I’m forgetting).

So… how about everyone else? I’ll upload a ROM of the current build, probably tomorrow night when I get home from work, so everyone can see some progress… and hopefully encourage everyone to keep working on their games 🙂 .

KR155E: Is it possible to make it so only registered users can download an attachment (or is it already like this)? It’s not really a big deal, but I’d prefer that WIP versions don’t pop up on ROM sites, and maybe requiring a login may help that.

DogP

that’ll make a great entry, looking forward to it! 🙂

i am also working on a game, blox 2 to name it, but of course not for the compo.

about your other question: everyone can download attachments and there’s no way to change this without hacking the forum module. :/ you could put a password on the file and only give it to trusted users per pm.

so, what’s everyone else having in the works? or is anyone else working on something? 😉

[DogP]

Cool… what enhancements are you planning for Blox 2?

Anyway, here’s the link to my current Kart version: http://virtual.boy.home.comcast.net/VB/kart.zip … I did password protect it, but I guess it’s not a big deal if it gets out… it’s pretty crappy right now, so people that waste their time downloading it expecting a “game” are the ones that really lose out 😉 . That said, please don’t send it to any of the ROM sites… of course a version which will hopefully be much better and playable will released by the end of the competition, which is why I’d like the beta versions to stay just in the VB community. The password is Beta_Kart.

So… anyone else have a preview, or at least want to chime in and say what you’re working on?

Edit: BTW, this doesn’t work properly in the emulators (AFAIK)… it partially displays, and then crashes Reality Boy when you turn a little bit (at least the version I’m running), and Red Dragon doesn’t display the Affine stuff correctly. Plus, there’s audio… so, basically… run it on a flash cart 😛 .

DogP

• This reply was modified 16 years, 5 months ago by DogP.

ohh the demo is very promising!, I would not be nothing programming but could help you in the creation of graphics if you are interested!!

[KR155E]

i tried it on hardware and it already rocks! looks very cool using 3d effects. i also like the idea of using the right dpad for looking back or to the sides, btw. 🙂

blox 2 is a complete recode with several new features. it will announce it (and probably release a demo to some people) soon, when i worked out a small bug and made some more additions.

• This reply was modified 16 years, 5 months ago by KR155E.

That Mario Kart Demo looks very awesome! It’s gonna look great when it’s done! Can’t wait to play BLOX 2 Kr155e!

Supernice, you should add a lot of offtrack spirtes like trees,etc… so you get a better speed feeling. I tried it on the Red Dragon and it worked fine (just some screen flicker sometimes). Btw, you should put the player at the same high as the floor where the kart touches not at the head like its atm. Im shure you already know that but that was something I thought you should fix. Anyway, super awesome 😀

Bruno: Which version of Red Dragon are you using? In .38 on my PC I get a very ugly misdrawn track… and Reality Boy .82 crashes when I use multiple Y BGMaps.

I do still have some tweaking to do w/ the camera and kart position, but I’m not sure what you’re explaining… are you talking about the parallax? If so, you need to try it on real hardware… I think the parallax is correct (or at least close)… the emulators don’t do parallax correctly on affine worlds (the track is actually 3D w/ the distant parts further away, and the closer parts closer). In the emulator (at least RB), the entire track is drawn at the same parallax.

DogP

I get the same ugly results as you in Red Dragon DogP, but you should try Reality Boy .83 (10/05/2005). It looks very good there and there are no crashes either. Good work btw 😀

Edit:
It’s the 0.82.2 win alpha package, but the title bar of the emu actually says 0.83

Ah… I looked on DT’s site and the newest he has is 0.82.1… I didn’t think to check here. This version works better 🙂 . I’m not sure about the parallax now though… this version does do parallax in affine, but reading the readme he says it’s not perfect… and I’m pretty sure I tweaked it on hardware to look correct. But, it has been a while since I’ve run it on hardware, and I have made a lot of changes since I looked at that specifically, so who knows 😛 .

DogP

Oh sorry DogP. I meant Reality Boy, no Red Dragon. Yes I was talking about the paralax, the affine world appears with different viewpoints so its 3D, but the kart appears to be kinda floating or so. It should have the same paralax offset distance as the floor where the tires are touching it. I suppose this is because of the emulator, and if not I suppose it will be very easy to change that paralax because the kart always at the same distance from the viewpoint (so its just a constant value). Anyaw, awesome work. I hope you will make the source code available once you release your work and/or the constest finishes.

Btw, does the VB have enogh power to do a lot of affine transformations? Because if it has it, it would be awesome to have a track made of 32×32 sprites deformed so you can use them as polygons. You could even make a tombraider game like that, with a lot of blocks making a textured 3d world.

[edit] having a closer look at the 3d effect (I use crossing my eyes with RB) it looks like the track comes nearer from far away but suddenly at the high of toads top of the head it start going further way again. Lol, very strange and maybe its just the emulator.

[Edit 2] Ok, it was kinda my fault. I had to swap the displays because I was seeing the image for the right eye with the left eye and so on. So now I see it alright toad appears to be under the track (when you are on the sand you can tell). So he just needs to have to pop out a little bit more 😀 (if this is not just the emulators fault)

I just checked on real hardware… I’m pretty sure the parallax problem is in the emulator since it looks pretty close to perfect on hardware, and obviously bad in the emu.

The VB can do more than one affine transform… how many it can handle before it starts dropping frames… I’m not sure (no more than 32 though, since there’s only 32 worlds, and you can’t do affine on OBJs). Affine stuff can be CPU intensive as well though, since you have to compute the affine table. Simple transformations are quick to compute, but complex transforms can take a long time since multiplication and division take much longer than others, and if you use floating point, that slows it to a crawl.

DogP

So is nobody else participating? Does that mean I get 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes for submitting this? 😉

DogP

Are you using floating points on you mario kart? And how many matrix do you need to convert a plain sprite into perspective? Ah and how big can the circuit be? Cause there is a size limit on bgmaps, or do you use more worlds for the circuit.

Bruno schrieb:
Are you using floating points on you mario kart? And how many matrix do you need to convert a plain sprite into perspective? Ah and how big can the circuit be? Cause there is a size limit on bgmaps, or do you use more worlds for the circuit.

when you load it in red dragon and use its debug features, you’ll see that the track is made of 2 x 2 bgmaps.

I don’t use any floating point anymore… initially I used floating point to get it looking correctly, but then converted it to fixed point to get it running full speed (and all the affine hardware is fixed point anyway). You need one affine table per affine world… the table size depends on the size of the world. And yeah… I use 2×2 bgmaps, although you can use more if you want bigger tracks.

DogP

😯 Wow, it’s been a while since I visited the page. A programming competition huh? Hmm… I might have to start putting some ideas down on paper. (And reading through some documentation.)

Looks like DogP is going to win at this rate. 😀

Just out of curiosity, what if we don’t have the hardware to test our software? So for example, it looks great in an emulator, but not so great on the system?

I think it’s all based on votes, so if it looks good in the emulator, and we vote for it, I think it could win 😉 . Of course it’d be nice for it to work on real hardware, but I’m sure there’s not enough differences between the HW and emu that with a little help you couldn’t figure out why it’s not working right on HW.

And really… I hope I don’t win… I’m going to put a lot of effort into this, but my goal here is to release a game people would actually want to play, and if someone else makes something better, then that means hopefully we have two or more new games that people (including me) would actually want to play.

And even though this is a competition, if anyone has any questions or needs any sample code… I’d be glad to help out any way I can. Of course I’m not gonna give out the source to my game, and I’m not gonna write a game for someone else to submit, but I’d be glad to give out skeletons programs to get someone started, or chunks of code to help someone add something specific. I think it’d be really cool to see a bunch of new games pop up… even if they are just simple games.

DogP