November Wheelings and Dealings

Intro

Another month has gone by, and some more stuff has been done. I’ll sum up some of it here

What do I think of the Pi?

You may have noticed the image in an earlier blog post I made. For those to whom it’s unclear, it’s a screenshot of my Raspbian desktop with six instances of HCGE open, each running a different one of my currently-existing games

I decided to finally pick up a Raspberry Pi last month, and went with a Version 2 Model B. Naturally, the first thing I did was get HCGE up and running on it. Since it’s possible to use a mouse and keyboard on the Pi, I’m considering setting up an editing version for it as well if I can manage it, but as of right now the editing stuff doesn’t work. All current games run fine and perform well already, though. At the very least, I’ll try tidying it up and releasing a playable build when I can get back to it

In the long-run, I think I’d like to create a native build for RetroPie too, but so far I haven’t come across much information on how to do that. It’d be pretty neat to have portable Pi builds as another option for playing HCGE games

HCGE Examples

Some of my time was spent cleaning up and updating parts of several script packages I intend to eventually release as examples. You may have already seen some of them in action before - Mega Man, Super Mario Bros, and an extremely basic isometric platformer example. The Sonic the Hedgehog example was already released, but it also needs to be brought up-to-date with and made to conform to new HCGE features and formats that I’ve been developing over the last few months. At this point, none of them are entirely up-to-date, and some even have portions that haven’t been updated for years, and thus use an extremely outdated script style

On a related note, there was an error that had been present in the isometric example for years, which was partially responsible for it having never been released. When playing around with some of the new editor features with that example open, the issue became immediately clear -

https://youtu.be/uTJacnHBVBQ

Within the level editor, you can now see collision boxes for objects. They’re color-coded blue for “Main”, red for “Hurt”, and green for “attack”. This video shows the invisible tile plane used to define collision for the isometric play area along with its objects, and the small blue horizontal and vertical rectangles are collision boxes for objects that serve as priority swappers. These objects are strategically placed so that as the player moves through the level, his draw priority will be updated so that he’s drawn either above or below certain tile planes to simulate a 3D effect. As you can see, some of them are rapidly flickering between horizontal and vertical... that isn’t supposed to be happening. If the player were fast enough to slide through one of these sections while the collision was horizontal, his draw priority wouldn’t be changed and he’d be inappropriately drawn above/below certain tile planes (Ex: he’s beside a taller structure that should be masking him as a “wall”, but he appears to be on top of it because he’s incorrectly drawn last)

Having seen this, I was finally able to track down the cause (interestingly, the objects had no valid animation assigned to them) and fix it. As a result, the draw priority problem on the isometric playfield seems to have vanished. The enhanced editors are going to be very useful

Spinelash

Spinelash has been progressing well. Recently, Markey has touced-up the whip mechanic and implemented damage to enemies, Rick has created new animations for whipping in all ten directions and getting hurt, I’ve done implementation for the new animations and player hurt state, laid out a basis for health and lives system, tweaked physics such as jumping and whipping input leniency and adding a turn-around whip move for whipping in mid-air, and added a complex line scroll effect to the graveyard level, as well as continuing to provide HCGE support for the rest of the team

Check out how the perspective of the shadows cast by the gravestones changes as you pass by. Aside from the code, it also took some skillful drawing, courtesy of Ossiferous Rex

Closing

That’s pretty much it for last month. I’ll be making a follow-up with something that I didn’t want to get lost in the middle of this, so be sure that you don’t miss it!