October Progress Stuff

Intro

So, as was the deal when I started this campaign, here’s some stuff about what I was up to last month. Not a lot to actually be seen this time, unfortunately, but I have been making progress, and I can tell you a little about it

Fantastic Demo

The first thing was readying the Fantastic Franklin Concept Demo release shown in my last post. Not a whole lot to do there, though, since the bulk of the work was done in September. The update was somewhat delayed due to a pending matter that still hasn’t actually been resolved, but it’s taken so long that I couldn’t justify just waiting around any longer

Sonic the Guinneahog

Regarding that issue, you may remember this blog post from just a day earlier. I had decided that, instead of getting involved with something that I may have to stop in the middle of soon, I’d try out something new. Obviously, the image is from Sonic Megamix, but there’s a little more to it, and I thought it’d be fun to have a no-comment presentation to see what kind of reaction it’d create

To finally explain it, that image is one of the earliest results of my experimentation with enabling and using the 32x from a game like Sonic Megamix. I was still trying to sort out usage of the 32x Framebuffer, and so I tried to fill it with a recognizable pattern. Naturally, I didn’t get what I wanted, but instead got a repeating diagonal pastel gradient on the top/left, and a bunch of garbage on the bottom/right. The pastel appears in the background with the garbage in the foreground due to a feature of the 32x framebuffer where 1 bit of a 16-bit color value is designated as “priority”, allowing you to display any one pixel from the one framebuffer either on top of or below the complete Genesis graphic image

I spent some more time with it and eventually got a correctly-displaying image, and then moved on to the bigger tests - using it to enhance Megamix’s Special and Bonus Stages if a 32x is present. The currently-planned versions of both stages make use of the SegaCD’s graphic scale/rotate hardware, which isn’t bad, but suffers due to the Genesis’ own DMA speed; The rendered graphics can’t be copied to VRAM fast enough to keep up with 60fps (with current Special and Bonus Stages running at 20fps and 15fps, respectively). For those who understand what I’m doing with the core engine remake and how the game will benefit from it, it unfortunately won’t help the Special and Bonus Stages, because they, as the original Sonic CD Special Stage, use a different engine that has always run primarily on the SubCPU, and are therefore practically maxed out already

The results were disappointing; there was no significant speed increase when attempting to use the 32x DMA to copy the raw bitmap buffer created by the SegaCD graphic hardware to the 32x Framebuffer. It’s possible that rendering for these stages could be processed entirely by the 32x to gain a bit more speed (maybe up to 30fps at least?), but since the 32x has no actual graphic rendering hardware but instead relies on the developer writing/having his own rendering software to run on one of the SH2 processors, that’s a project for another time. I’m still interested in potential enhancements using the 32x (with SegaCD fallback for those who don’t have a 32x), but I can’t guarantee anything

More Megamix

Once the initial 32x tests were bust, and with the matter still pending, I decided to move back onto Megamix directly. There’s not a whole lot to say about it, though, as I mostly continued to perform bugfixes (finding none so entertaining as the one I posted a video of a while back)

I did, however, also jump onto the engine rebuild for a time, and I’ve succeeded in getting more of the game running correctly. Specifically, sprites would occasionally flicker on hardware, ring collisions didn’t work correctly, the platform routines for solid objects like the monitor weren’t complete, and regular object collisions weren’t implemented at all. That is to say, those things are now properly functional, and the rebuild project continues to look promising

Outside Projects

Something else I had stated in the description for my crowdfunding campaigns was that the amount of funding would determine the amount of time I’m able to spend on my personal projects, as low funds would require me to still take outside jobs. That's happened during October with a sort of mini-project I picked up to keep things going

I have a friend creating his own Airsoft park within which he plans to use a few electrical props based on the Arduino. Not being a software developer himself, he’s commissioned me to program a few of them. The most recent is a sort of security lock, using a numerical LCD and a keypad, with which the correct code has to be entered, or it will react via the display and trigger and “detonate” a pneumatic part of the same prop

It was actually fun getting that to work, and I’m considering attempting other projects with the Arduino or similar hardware in the future

Headcannon Game Engine

Development continues on this, as well. Some slight improvements were made in October in response to continuing development of the game I’ve been referring to as “Bone Rattle”, several concerning usage of the Sprite Editor. Some of the editors are still in a transitional state, slowly being reworked with better interfaces and to better suit the new multi-window feature

I’ve also made some progress with newer non-PC platform builds, some of which were broken, as I mentioned in the Fantastic Franklin Concept Demo release post. Two remain to be fixed - Wii and GP2XWiz

Spooky, Scary Skeletons

The game previously referred to as “Bone Rattle” now has a new (tentative) title - “Spinelash”. The game itself underwent a sort of hiatus for a while due to other commitments made by some of the team members, but things seem to be getting back on track. Markey is still making remarkable progress with the whip mechanic, and I recently took the time to tidy some stuff up, import and set up some of our existing enemy graphics, and lay down some base functionality for a couple of enemies. As demonstrated by the video attached to this post, they look pretty nice in action

Closing

That’s pretty much all there is to say about last month. Hopefully it made for an interesting read!