Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Catching up, and Halcyon moving platforms.

Hmm. I haven't posted here in almost a year. I got thinking about my progress on Halcyon, and decided it was time to actually get back to writing about what I'm doing here.

I realized I didn't say a thing here about Super Homebrew War, my 4-player nes brawl, using characters from other well-known NES homebrew games, which scored 2nd place in this year's NESdev competition. 



Nor did I mention that I got inspired to try my hand at Dreamcast development. Like last year's port of Robo-Ninja Climb to the 2600, I decided to once again take my NES code, and try porting it directly to the Dreamcast. As usual, it took slightly longer than I hoped, but I now have a Dreamcast version of Robo-Ninja Climb finished.
The nice thing about Dreamcast homebrew is that you can test on hardware for the low price of a CD-ROM!

Now I'm back on to working on my metroidvania, Halcyon.  Tonight's challenge is obstacles/platforms that aren't part of the background, and thus can move around.  Like ramps, moving platforms are always slightly trickier than you'd think they should be.

After a few false starts, my current theory of how they'll work is like this:

  • Moving platforms are actually just an enemy instance, with a modified collision routine.  
  • During the enemy platform's update routine, I'll do a collision check: If the player collides with the platform, I'll move the player by the same amount that the platform moved. (which lets the platform push the player around)
  • During the player's movement, it will look for any enemies flagged as platforms, and handle collision results against them just like collisions against background tiles.
  • During the enemy's movement/collision checks, the collision box of the platform will be adjusted to be a tiny bit larger than during the player's collision checks, so that the platform will "grab" the player and move it if the player is riding on top
Believe it or not, but that moving thing above the tank is a platform.

I spent the evening writing the first half of this (the enemy update phase, which can move the player around).  Hopefully tomorrow or soon I'll get to the 2nd half (the player's adjusted collision routine), and we'll see if my theory works out.

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