Scoring

Monday, 26th September 2005

scr_1.png scr_2.png scr_3.png

  • Fixed drunk pilots. New algorithm is about 20 lines shorter, 10 times faster, 5 times simpler. Reason for drunk pilots: drunk coder.
  • Implemented scoring, including:
    • Variable points for shooting enemies.
    • Variable points for shooting objects on the ground.
    • Display of score at top of screen.

  • Updated pause screen, all sprites now remain on-screen, background is less wavy.
  • Trimming of enemy attack times so they follow on from eachother nice and quickly.
  • Numerous minor bugfixes and tweaks.

The score might look nice there, but it really needs to be stuck on a background - any sprites trying to come in are cut off and look really odd popping into existance 8 pixels down from the top of the screen (8 sprite limit, and I have 8 digits in my score). For example, see this:

cropped.png
Look at the top - you can see the nose of a ship appearing, and it looks horribly wrong.

Drawing a black bar might be achieved by swapping name table addresses when I hit a certain scanline, but that's mucky and so far the best result has been 3 or 4 VRAM timing errors per frame and a jumping area of the screen that shows junk. Wonderful!

vgm_player.gif
Download the new build and source.

I also did some more work on my VGM player. It now emulates the PSG correctly! There is one problem still - playback of VGM files that have a specific delay specified. The default timings (1/50th second, 1/60th second) both work beautifully... *sighs* The others play waaaay too fast.
Thankfully, this affects very few VGM files I've tried it with. I also ripped out the tacky visualisations (it's now just a boring console app), improved the seeking code to be time rather than file position based (more accurate) and added support for VGZ files (GZipped-up VGMs) using ZLIB.
If you're in the mood for excellent chiptunes, download the above and the VGM pack to a classic Sega game from SMS Power! - I'm particularly fond of the music from "The Flash". (Ristar's music is also excellent). smile.gif

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