CompoundGob::RefreshPage

I guess you can hardly tell what's going on on the picture below, and I can't blame you for that. It's supposed to be a stomped scorpeye shell, but since I've added crawling animation for the scorpeye, we see that glitchy mess of sprite parts instead.

Ah oui, je m'étais fait un joli scorpion qui marche, mais si vous parvenez à l'assommer, tout à coup, il ne ressemble plus qu'à un tas de pixels complètement glitché. Comme j'envisage de passer refaire un coucou au "gaming club" de vendredi, ça ne serait pas mal de corriger un peu ça.

La cause du problème, je la connais: l'animation de la marche est construite avec 5 sprites hardware: un "large" pour la carapace du scorpeye et un carré pour chaque "patte". En revanche, les animations "carapace seule" et "carapace qui tourne parce qu'on l'a lancée" sont toujours inchangées et n'utilisent que 3 sprites hardware. Et le couac, c'est qu'en plus, le sprite large n'est pas sur le même d'une animation à l'autre. Il était donc temps que je me gratte un peu la tête et que je retrouve les fonctions-clé pour gérer ça, en particulier loadAnim() dans CompoundGob et setupOAM() qui peut redéfinir les tailles et aspects des sprites.

What happens is that you have dedicated bits in the hardware sprite entries to indicate whether you want a square, tall or wide sprite and of what size. So far, in my engine, those properties are defined once when you allocate hardware sprites for an object and then preserved as we just update coordinates, VRAM location and optionally palette slot of each sprite as we animate them. But by mixing the new crawl and the old spinning animations, I'm breaking an old habit of sharing the same structure for all animations of a given game object. So I need to extend the game engine with the following function:

  void refreshPages(const GobAnim *ani) {
    unsigned nlimbs = ani->getnlimbs();
    unsigned i;
    pages = ani->getpages();
    for (i = 0; i < nlimbs; i++) {
      if (oam[i]==NO_OAM) continue;
      pages[i]->setupOAM(sprites + oam[i], 0 /*?*/);
    }
    for (; i < nboam; i++) {
      if (oam[i]==NO_OAM) continue;
      sprites[oam[i]].attribute[0] = ATTR0_DISABLED;
    }
    nboam = nlimbs;
  } 

Je dois dire qu'au départ, je m'attendais à plus compliqué, mais la petite fonction ci-dessus et une brave ligne de plus, les animations se sont réparées presque d'elles-même. à utiliser avec prudence tout de même: le système ne se déclenche que si les deux animations ont un nombre différent de sprites.

To be honest, I was expecting it to be harder to code. It was a bit tedious to locate where to act in the code (state transition? animation loading ?) and I spent a significant part of a holiday afternoon in ddd setting conditional breakpoints to figure it out. Then I got puzzled by the update/setup/allocate functions manipulating hardware sprites through the "SpritePage" class: the one that is used at every frame to update what we see on screen keeps aspect ratio and size of the sprite unchanged... but after all, it was just a matter of a small function called when we detect that the current number of OAMs (aka hardware sprites) is different from the number of limbs the animation uses. Pretty and straightforward.

Crawling Scorpeye

Sur bsky, MagicalScope nous poste d'impressionnants designs d'objets magiques qui sont ensuite vendus à des internautes. Parmi eux, je suis tombé sur une potion-qui-marche particulièrement inspirante. J'ai d'abord eu le réflexe de voir comment je pourrais l'intégrer comme nouveau perso dans la pyramide jusqu' ce que je réalise que mon brave scorpeye pourrait simplement profiter du type de déplacement que suggère cette potion tout en restant lui-même. 

Après des mois où on voyait un scorpeye tout immobile dans un coin de la salle pyramidique, voici enfin une petite animation (encore un brin brouillonne) du scorpeye patrouillant autour de son trésor. J'aurai probablement un peu de travail à faire sur le moteur de jeu: l'animation de la carapace lancée supposait 3 sprites hardware alors que la marche en crabe en utilise 5 ... le résultat est assez bizarre à voir quand on assomme et ramasse notre scorpeye.

At last! After months (years ?!) of design blockage on how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-make-scorpeye-walk, I can propose you a prototype animation for the crawling scorpeye ! Maybe not as "crawling" as I had imagined after seeing MagicalScope's mimmic potion, but that shall be a start.

Key idea for the redesign is to embrace the "limbless" nature of Bilou's world and grant the scorpeyes 4 versatile spike sattelites. It can use them to crawl, pinch or sting depending on the situation's need. It will make it clear whether it's currently safe to stomp on its shell to stun it.

"Mais où sont passées ses pinces ?" me demanderez-vous ? Eh bien c'est justement là tout le sel du redesign: les même membre lui serviront soit de pattes, soit de pinces, soit de morceau de queue de scorpion. Je décide que ce sera plus fun et plus lisible qu'un vrai arachnide avec tous ses chéli-chose (J.L.N ? c'est quoi le bon nom, encore ?) 

As a bonus, an intermediate step where I was studying the design of the magic potion and considering "well, why not. It would be an extended version of Inkjet that can move along... quite fits the universe. You lose some part of the crab-like suggestion by not having limbs between the pinching part and the body, but that's how I came up with the idea of keeping scorpeye and having it walk on its pincher, so I'm okay with it.

 

Blador vs. Spike

While I was checking collisions/interactions were still working fine after introducing the G_FIGHT group, I noted something not so right about the dumblador. Something I don't think I've ever blogged although it was available since the anniversary level: throw a dumblador into pencil spikes and it will snap to the spike it lands on, turning itself into an additional safe platform.

But with the current engine, you may end up with the blador "waking up" and start walking within spikes. You may also see it stopping completely misaligned and almost everytime, it would be too low compared to where it used to stop.

I first tried to tune collision areas, but that did not seem to help. I checked some values in the DDD debugger, but it's a bit of a lottery: you can't really tell in advance whether you'll find yourself in an interesting case. Note to future self: there are save states in desmume! (In such a case, I should have saved the emulator state before throwing the blador, save again when the breakpoint triggers, fast-forward to see whether the condition will happen and only then go back in time to either review the step-by-step behaviour or change a little bit the initial conditions and try another throw).

But I had not came back from the future to leave myself a note yet, so instead, I started adding coordinates of colliding entities in the "gobscript expression debugger" so I could have something that is stepping faster than DDD, and present precisely the information I needed (although I could have used it in base 10 :P).

And there I realised that when the blador ended up misaligned, it was colliding with a spike whose position was a mere multiple of 8 rather than a multiple of 16 ...

Back in SchoolRush times, it was mandatory to be a 16x16 pixels block if you wanted to have special behaviour such as hurting the player. But it changed with the tiled engine revision where each individual 8x8 tile can be of any 64 special type (or any of the other 192 "normal" types).

Larger blocks are still possible thanks to "refer too" special tiles that point towards the top-left corner tile of the block. When loading an older map, the conversion is automatic, but when I created the "school teleporter" room for the 3-rooms-demo, I just added 1-tile spikes instead. With a small change to the Level Editor, you can now press A to reveal the redirecting arrows (default behaviour is to mirror the pink tile instead). That should make such errors easier to spot in the future, if I ever make them again.

So the script for the dumblador now looks like

$THROWN :anim3 {
  using gravity(24,1536)
  testpoint off (8,18)
  test 0 (0,0)-(8,12) ${F_BAD|G_FIGHT|F_WEAPON} //# weapon against other monsters.
  test 1 (0,15)-(16,16) ${F_BAD|F_PLATFORM};
  area 0 (0,0)-(16,12) ${F_ISINK} //# deleted-by-ink
  area 1 (0,0)-(16,8) ${G_FIGHT|F_HURT} // # stand-on-spike
}

$THROWN->$STUNSTAND on hit1 (0 :1 0 :0 Lc $vPlatform(2));
$STUNFALL->$STUNSTAND on hit1 (0 :1 0 :0 Lc $vPlatform(2));

and the script for the pencil spike looks like

 block 21 {
   is spike "0101030307070f0f"
   area (7,0)-(8,16) 10010010 # hurts
   on hit [0] (t)
 }

 Together, they allow to get a functional blador-align-on-spike (aligning is performed by the Lc opcode), but there's still one thing to fix if I don't want to see dumblador waking up and start walking on pencils: duplicate the $STUNSTAND state into something like $SPIKED, while removing the "get feet" area. But well, a remaining glitch makes some more fun for ScreenshotSaturday ;-)

 

Le fight club, version cflags

Last summer, I started reworking collisions in my game engine. The idea was to be able to define groups, so that e.g. collision-based communications between a stunned blador and its feet would never interfere with a bouncy branch and things it bounces away. Sure, there was way to do that already, by assigning them separate collision flags, but I've long ran out of these, forcing me to make weird groups and combinations.

Oui, parce que bon, ça fait maintenant un moment que j'ai ouvert la branche "new-cflags" dans laquelle on a la possibilité de définir des groupes de collision, et je m'en suis même servi pour gérer les portes, mais si je veux permettre à un appleman de rebondir contre les autres applemen tout en passant "à travers" les petits vers, je me retrouve devant un imbroglio avec la question épineuse "je le mets où, mon nouveau flag ? et est-ce que ça coince ?"

With recent work on the appleman, I wanted to make a distinction between "weapon-sensitive area, from a light object" and "weapon-sensitive area, from a heavy objects", but I wouldn't know how to encode it anymore. So far, the groups had only been used to implement the doors, but felt like it was time to define a new group, to deal with every collision that deals damage to entities in the game... which I finally decided to call the "fight" group.

Alors c'était l'occasion de se demander "et si en fait on faisait un groupe pour toutes ces actions qui retirent des points de vie à un des objets ?". Petit à petit, hein, en vérifiant qu'on ne casse rien (et donc, forcément avec une vidéo Screenshot Saturday où tout d'un coup, on passe à travers les branches au lieu de rebondir et à travers les pommes sans qu'elles ne se doutent de rien...)

Un nouveau G_FIGHT donc (j'ai un peu chipoté pour trouver le nom du groupe puis le Fight Club s'est rappelé à mon bon souvenir, tel une évidence inévitable). Peu à peu, les différents scripts-personnages sont convertis en nettoyant les vieilleries comme les scripts avec des valeurs numériques plutôt que des combinaisons de symboles. Puis arrive le moment crucial de réactiver la branche-qui-rebondit, et là, je me rends compte que garder dans G_FIGHT l'action principale F_STOMP, celle que Bilou utilise jouer à Super Mario assommant un goomba, ça ne va pas marcher. ça va imposer aux zones de collision destinées à être de simples plate-formes de faire partie du Fight Club alors qu'elles n'ont même pas de "points de vie". D'autant plus problématiques qu'on a aussi des flags du type F_PLATFORM pour, par exemple, empiler des taille-crayons sans qu'ils n'infligent de dommages.

It wasn't that straightforward ... I mostly broke everything first and then repaired things one after another. Last week, for instance, only the woodworm would still interact with Bilou. but now the code is cleaner and I think everything is repaired ... I may to a bit more time travelling to check the blador / tiled pencils interaction ... it looks like it isn't working as good as it did previously.

Then a few things just did not resume working, like jumping higher when you press the JUMP button while bouncing on a branch ... mostly because some hit areas needed to be duplicated and transition depending on them needed to be reassigned to the new area. Current GobScript doesn't make that easy to refactor. 

Ah, and yeah, below is a snippet of what the area collisions look like now.   

Heureusement, j'avais prévu de garder une portion des flags "neutres" (CFLAGS_LONE_FLAGS), valables qu'il y ait accord sur les groupes ou non. On pourra donc mettre la branche dans le groupe G_GROUND (qui n'existe pas encore) dont F_PLATFORM ferait partie et lui ajouter un "ah, oui, on prend F_STOMP aussi, même si ça ne fait pas vraiment partie du groupe". Certaines des zones de collisions ont dû être dédoublée (une avec G_FIGHT, l'autre sans), un petit défaut dans la réécriture quand ça arrive et on se retrouve avec des branches qui ne rebondissent plus aussi bien qu'avant ... un petit schéma, un peu de ddd et ça se remet en place. Le code pour tester deux zones de collisions ressemble donc maintenant à

 cflags GobArea::test(const GobArea *o, GameObject *g, cflags mask, GobCollision* gc) const {
     if (o==this) return 0;
     cflags group = mask & CFLAGS_GROUP_MASK;
-    if (group && (flags & CFLAGS_GROUP_MASK) != group) return 0;
+    if ((flags & CFLAGS_GROUP_MASK) != group) mask &= ~CFLAGS_IN_GROUP_FLAGS;
     if ((mask & flags & CFLAGS_EXPR_MASK)==0) return 0;
 
     // congratulations: you may compare coordinates, now.
     

edit: there was one last thing I had spotted that wouldn't work as expected: sticking dumbladors on pencil spikes. Especially, the dumblador might still wake up. So I dug the good old SchoolRush and checked what happened. Verdict: the dumblador *might* wake up there too, but it looks like it's much more unlikely to happen due to terrain geometry.

Un dernier ver ?

Si vous avez un peu essayé n'importe laquelle de mes démos "green zone" ces 20 dernières années, ça n'a pas pu vous échapper: le petit ver jaune - ce croisement entre un combattant dans Worms Armageddon et un poison slug de Commander Keen - est pénible.

Jusque là, je ne lui avais jamais fait d'animation "éliminé, le petit ver". On l'assomme, il attend, il repart. Il n'avait qu'un rôle minime dans Apple Assault... et le fait qu'on puisse le réassommer à volonté y permettait de reprendre des points. On le supportait.

I've had to apologize about that point to about any beta-tester who tried the Green Zone: the woodworm feel unfair and annoying. You could stomp it, but after a mere second, it would wake up and resume worming. Unlike the Appleman or the the Dumblador, there's no visual clue that the worm is about to wake up, so you're likely to take a hit from something that seemed defeated just a couple of seconds earlier.

Enfin, on le supportait mais de loin, parce que sa manie de repartir à l'attaque sans avertissement, c'est certainement ce qui vous a pompé le plus. Alors le week-end dernier, après avoir déposé les gamins en camp, j'ai allumé la DS et refait 3 petits dessins de ce ver tournoyant dans les airs pour qu'au moins, quand on lui roule dessus avec une pomme, on en soit quitte. ça ajoute de l'interaction et en théorie, ça devrait être rigolo à voir.

The core reason for this are a) the lack of a proper "defeated for real good" animation and b) the fact that worm.cmd was intended to be a tutorial for "the most simple ennemy you could think of". I could justify it for Apple Assault, where the fact it was never really defeated implied you'd always have a way to build up your punch meter. But for Dreamland, it no longer makes sense. Especially when you can throw an apple rolling over them! So I picked up my NDS last week-end and drew a few frames that make it look like it's spinning mad in the air. Yes, exactly as if you had used the bat of Worms Armageddon (or PWorms demo ;).

Il m'a fallu un peu de chipotage pour que le sens de rotation soit cohérent avec celui de la pomme, et j'en ai profité pour lui rajouté un état "détection" qui le remballe directement dans l'état "assommé" s'il sent Bilou à proximité. J'aimerais aussi rajouter une autre fioriture, un état "se fait rouler dessus" qui le maintiendrait au sol jusqu'à ce que la pomme soit passée, et ça, ça va sans doute demander un petit contrôleur supplémentaire...

I'm not quite done with it. Not yet. I feel like the worm starts spinning a bit too early, and I don't really want to fix that with a hard-coded delay but rather by saying "when the apple is done rolling, the worm get caught by the "leftover motion" and *then* starts spinning and falling. Maybe it could be settled with additional hitboxes, and maybe not. If not, I sketched a state machine fix that would help, with a "rolled_over" state, a way to attach the worm to the apple when entering that state and a controller that triggers an event when we're the attached item is far enough... or maybe the regular "track another gob" controller would do the trick if I make the "dead zone" (where it doesn't pull your controlled gob to the left or right) configurable in size (spoiler: it isn'tnow it is). That would give

$STUNNED->$ROLLEDOVER on hit0 [w0 0 >] (128 :0 A);
$STUNNED->$ROLLEDOVER on hit1 [w0 0 <] (128 ~ :0 A);
$ROLLEDOVER->$LKICKED on event0 [v0 0 <] (400 ~:1);
$ROLLEDOVER->$RKICKED on event0 [v0 0 >] (400 ~:1);
$ROLLEDOVER->$RECOVER on done (0 :1)

with

$ROLLEDOVER :anim7 {
    using tracking(@ over 12);
}

And then I'll have something else to fix regarding whether a monster that get hit by a flying-apple-weapon is strong enough to turn back the apple (funky funghi, appleman, caterpillar) or let it fly through (worm, berrybat).  

Un dernier détail qu'il faudra régler: de base, si on touchait le ver avec la pomme avant que la pomme ne se soit mise à rouler, la pomme rebondissait dans la direction opposée. Un reste de quand elle était un taille-crayon, j'imagine. Mais maintenant que j'ai modifié le script de la pomme pour qu'elle passe à travers le ver, elle peut aussi passer à travers les autres pommes ... pas terrible. Il faudrait bien que je me donne une variante de F_WEAPON qui indique "ennemi léger" et une autre "ennemi lourd", ou encoder ça dans encore-une-autre-variable-propre des gobs, ce qui serait sûrement plus facile, mais moins cohérent avec le type de programmation proposée ... un peu comme ajouter un "if" bash dans un Makefile, quoi :P

L'occasion de passer au nouveau système de flags de collisions ?

LEDS ... The forgotten branch

I completely forgot to tell you about that patch from early June that allowed to see clearly the space occupied by larger monsters in LEDS. And I forgot to pull it from "the cube" and to push it on sourceforge, too.

It did not work exactly how I hoped though, so there was still some manual tweaking to get those bouncy branches properly aligned with the tiled tree when I assembled the tree, and I even figured out why. But well, June was fairly crowded IRL.

I even missed to mention that when testing the new tree at my fairy's birthday, my brother almost immediately soft-locked Bilou by just trying to walk from a tiled branch to the sprite branch. It took me some time and a good deal of DDD to realise what was happening: the bouncy-block hidden within the branch would only progress in its state machine if something was falling on it but in this very case, Bilou isn't falling. So Bilou did the transition to the "soft-landing" state while the thing he's landing on ignored him altogether.

So I'm taking a moment this morning to try a patch I think was still required: seeing some random collision box will not help you craft your level. What you need to see is the bounding box of the object, the one that materialize its presence in the world.

...

edit: Ah. Yeah, of course. I'll have to push that new patch, else I'll start hunting for it again when I'll want it running on NDS for more map patching ^^"

The July Demo

Ooops Ooops oops. It's about time I tell you about the releasable nds I uploaded last week ... I wanted something featuring the latest Funky Funghi and applemen improvements that I could share over the not-too-new itch.io page and tried the development log feature to write a blurp about it. But of course, July is always super-crowded to the point I feel like an impostor when just taking time for me. And carbon-induced heatwave didn't help.

I also managed to put it on sourceforge download before my own laptop's battery told me to stop and go to bed...

Swimming got improved, too, and we finally see all the branches of that important tree, although it could use more leaves at the top ... that shall happen later on.
  

Funghi vs. Appleman

Funky Funghi, un des plus anciens personnages de la Green Zone sur DS, vient de se ramasser une pomme. Jusqu'il y a peu, la pomme serait juste passée à travers, mais alors que ce blog va sur ses 20 ans d'existence, j'ai rajouté les quelques lignes de code script qui manquaient pour que l'interaction proposée début 2022 devienne une réalité: on va pouvoir dégager les champignons du chemin à coup de jets de pommes.

Throwing apples around is a bit more fun since they've started rolling when hitting the ground, but one thing has felt odd so far: seeing the appleman crossing the path of a bouncing Funghi without triggering any effect. Since early 2022, I had the idea that we could have Bilou *bouncing* when hitting the hat of Funghi rather than being hurt, and that implied of course that a thrown apple should bounce as well. It was now time to implement that.

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Ah, and yeah, I've played a good deal of the original Rayman, including throwing fist at bouncy plums and yin-yan balls to make them reach the place I wanted them to be. With all this new bounciness, Funghi is no longer just a hazard and you might actually want him to be *somewhere* rather than just wanting him away. Some of the initial ideas -- such as having the hat deflecting apples and only the foot being the target to hit if you want him moving -- quickly proved unpractical, and uselessly tricky to do, especially for a World-1 interaction.  

Bon, j'avoue que comparé aux "prunes rebondissantes" de Rayman, on est sur quelque-chose de nettement plus détendu: Funghi ne risque pas d'aller rebondir contre un mur et de revenir vous écrabouiller. Il ne reçoit que la moitié de la vitesse de la pomme et ralentit de moitié à chaque rebond. Juste ce qu'il faut pour passer d'une souche à "entre les deux souches" en une pomme. Mais ça devrait être marrant quand-même vu qu'il y a moyen de ramasser à nouveau la pomme et de la lancer une fois de plus. D'autant plus que maintenant, il va aussi être possible de rebondir sur le chapeau de Funky Funghi! (c'est peut-être encore un peu fort, d'ailleurs).

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La solution à laquelle je suis arrivé à coup de débuggeur d'expression est un rien intimidante ... entre autres parce qu'elle dérive de la collision destinée à faire rebondir Bilou, et que pour Bilou, je voulais que l'angle change selon qu'on arrivait plutôt sur le bord ou sur le centre de Funghi, comme s'il était vraiment un bumper de flipper. Pour ça, on va préparer deux valeurs et les combiner avec | dans le byte haut et le byte bas d'un entier 16-bit avant d'écrire le tout dans la 10e variable de Funghi avec :a. C'était rigolo avec l'appleman, mais ça devenait compliqué d'y ajouter le transfer d'énergie ... donc au final, pour l'appleman, Funghi agira toujours comme un mur qui absorbe 50% de sa vitesse horizontale et n'a aucun n'effet à la verticale. Et sur l'énergie absorbée, la vitesse acquise par Funghi est moitié moins importante que celle qu'avait l'appleman ce qui nous permet de calculer qu'un Funghi pèse à peu près 2 Applemen ;P

state0->state0 on found$apple [C_THROW we 0 >= w0 0 < & &]
                  (w0 2/ ~ $ff00 & w1 256 / $ff & | :a w0 4/ v0 + :0)
state0->state0 on found$apple [C_THROW we 0 < w0 0 > & &] 
                  (w0 2/ ~ $ff00 & w1 256 / $ff & | :a w0 4/ v0 + :0)

I ended up with something simple for Funghi/Apple interaction: half of the speed of the appleman (w0) is transferred to Funghi, and the other half is bounced back. But since Funghi is bigger, the half it takes only result in 1/4th of the speed. Not pushing him very far, I'm afraid. And well, that's only the part w0 4 / v0 + :0. All the things that happen before are reusing the "protocol" defined for throwing things where the thrower decides of the direction of the thrown object I already used for dumblador. The X speed and the Y speed will be set in the 10th register of funghi with :a and later used by the appleman with

$RTHROWN->$LTHROWN on hit0 [C_THROW wa 0 < &] (wa $ff00 & :0 wa 256 * :1)

Mais dans le code de l'appleman, j'ai quand-même gardé un code générique qui se contente d'appliquer le vecteur-vitesse qu'il trouve dans la 10eme variable de ce qu'il a heurté. ça pourra me permettre par la suite de faire en sorte que les branches rebondissantes puissent elles aussi renvoyer les applemen ^_^. Petite subtilité: la transition hit de l'appleman est testée avant la transition found de Funghi mais c'est found qui fournit le vecteur vitesse que hit va utiliser. c'est pour ça qu'il y a un test qui s'assure que wa < 0, pour que lors de la première frame de collision, l'appleman conserve sa trajectoire pendant que Funghi calcule l'impact. A la 2eme frame, wa est défini et la trajectoire de l'appleman pourra changer.

Et pour la collision Bilou/Funghi, c'est la distance entre le centre des hitbox (we) qui va déterminer l'angle de l'impulsion que Funghi va nous imposer, entre (-3,0), (-2,-1), (-1, -2), (0, -3) 

The idea inintially was to use the same behaviour as the one I coded for Bilou, where the angle you're bounced depends on the position you hit Funghi on. That's decided in Funghi's script with

state0->state0 on found$bilou [C_THROW we 0 >= &] (we 4/ 256* we 4/ 3 - $ff & | :a)

where we is one of the collision-specific parameter (rather than an internal variable of the collided object) containing the center-to-center distance between Bilou and Funghi, ranging from -24 to +24. At the very edge of Funghi, you'll get bounce horizontally by (+-3, 0), and at the center of his hat, you'll be bounced by (0, -3). In between, you could get (+-2, -1) near the edge and (+-1, -2) near the hat. And yup, it's got the overall expr_1 256* expr_2 $ff & | shape again to put both together in a single variable.

I still had to do something for how static Funghi looks when hit by something. My first attempt failed because transanims with characters that are made of a single sprite, and so far, Funghi was still like that. But behold, Funky Funghi 2.0, remade in AnimEDS after I separated hats and feet, so that I can animate it more freely, at in-between frames of some sort, etc.

It doubles the amount of memory it takes, but I think it's worth it. 

Il me restait un truc à régler: Funghi donne l'impression d'être en béton et que rien ne peut lui arriver même quand on rebondit dessus ou qu'on lui lance une pomme. J'aurais bien essayé de réutiliser l'animation "rebondit au sol" dans un sens ou dans l'autre, mais Funghi est toujours un "SimpleGob" premère génération, et je ne leur ai manifestement jamais ajouté le support des transanims.

Je profite donc de la p'tite canicule du week-end pour redécouper un peu Funghi dans le Sprite Editor, refaire ses animations dans AnimEDS et rajouter un "fait rebondir un truc qui arrive du haut" ainsi qu'un "fait rebondir un truc qui arrive sur le côté". Ce n'est pas spectaculaire, mais ça donne plutôt bien quand-même.

Foreground for the underground ?

Something is annoying me with the underground section of the green zone levels: it's too repetitive. It shows in every screenshot I try to make. I have variation tiles that could make it less uniform, but they don't really work if we repeat them. I have plans for a background, parallax layer underground, but it only really works in open environments, not in tunnels, and underground areas are mostly made of tunnels. in the Green Zone.

But those funny pillars might work as foreground  layer as well! Maybe even better because they're bigger than the pebbles repeating tile of ground I have. They would focus the gameplay in a smaller part of the level just like a circle-of-light would, but with something pleasant to look at. The question is, how can I make it indeed focusrather than obscure. I don't want to make Infogramish game where you don't see where you're heading to because of the foreground.

Let's ask Bouli to make a bit of math, here: if my foreground layer advances by e.g 3 pixels everytime my regular layer advances by e.g. 2 pixels, then I just have to make a map that is 3:2 bigger than the playfield if I want to follow things properly.  

I mean, my "foreground" map would be drawn over a 150% zoom up of the main map, and that should be it. At least, that's the intuition. How to confirm it quickly ? Well, how about cutting some paper to make a live overlay and make it move around. Of course, you have to consider that only a part of the result will be shown to the player, too.

Does that mean I need a special mode or a variant of the Level Editor ? ... maybe not. At least, not more than "use the "physical" layer of gac.map (move by 2:3) and let me edit gacfg.map on top of that.

The fun trivia here, is that the initial motivation was to find a way to have VRAM for textures now that I know it does not require palette slots. But while comparing the options, I came to the conclusion that I had no real use of 3D in the green zone anyway, except maybe to render more trees in the background... but checking Case Portman's Lost in Fuzz video, I realised that proper amiga-style parallax would work better than any 3D and would be easier to make here. And yes, I'm only using 2 tilesets out of the 256K allocated to the background tiles in Dreamland, so I could fit a 3rd one and another "infinimap" in the unused space ...

Does it means textured 3D becomes out of reach ? No, but that Bilou's Dreamland will sometimes use 3D, sometimes not (plain 3D does not require more VRAM, but it consumes one layer).

Does it means Yoshi-Island-Style dual screen action should be forgotten ? No, but it would only work in levels where we have no 3D objects and no fancy lush background/foreground maps.

Does it mean having Bouli or another character "telling the story" on one screen while Bilou is "living the action" on the other impossible ? No, but Bouli may have to survive within 16K of sprite VRAM, using DKC-like live-update techniques for his animations.

edit: sidequest finding: shifting extended palettes from 64K to 16K VRAM isn't that trivial to do. (but not required unless we want to texture 3D stuff)
 

Better THROWN->ROLL transitions

 Since the introduction of the appleman ROLL mechanics, there was something I couldn't completely fix: if you managed to throw the appleman straight into a "jump thru" platform, it would stop as if it was a wall, while you'd expect it to roll over the platform or fall through it instead.

I envisioned a number of solution to this problem until I realised there was one quite obvious one: just bounce the appleman upwards a little bit when that happens. It will then be able to advance sufficiently into the platform so that it is then in the normal "thrownroll" transition. If instead it was thrown into a solid wall, the bounce will be visible, but have no lasting effect

Au début, ça ressemblait à un petit détail: au moment de se mettre à rouler, un appleman pouvait se retrouver bloqué bêtement par un sol qui trainerait en l'air. Mais si, vous savez: ces plates-formes qu'on ne peut franchir que de bas en haut, mais qui vous retiennent quand vous allez de haut en bas.

Eh bien pour vous retenir, il faut qu'elle soient solides au moins pendant que vous tombez. Et à ce moment-là, elles ne font pas dans la dentelle: pas question de venir avec un "oui, mais non, mais regarde: en vrai je ne peut pas atterir, là: c'est juste le côté de mon haut qui passe de quelques pixels dans le bord de ton bas ... j'fais qu'passer, quoi!". Nada. Je me retrouve avec une pomme qui était lancée à vive allure et qui s'arrête nette sur un plan d'herbe à travers lequel elle passait sans problème quand vous la portiez sur la tê♪te, la pomme ♫ i' faut pas'l'nier.

And let's be honest: it would have been a nightmare to debug without the recently introduced GobExpression debugger. You can quite easily end up in a situation where you expect some speeds to have been non-null in some condition and realise that, well, no they're null here.

The alternatives I had envisioned were globally more complicated, like holding the speed for some time and then restoring it. More complicated in the sense that they required introducing new states in the behaviour or even new controllers. Here, it's just one extra transition that says "stay in THROWN state if {conditions}, but update velocities as follows"
 

C'était devenu un sujet de cogitation dans mon carnet, et un assez bon exemple de ce qu'on pourrait vouloir faire avec un contrôleur "around" pour contourner les obstacles. Au final, ça se passe de ce genre de complication: il suffit de redonner une petite impulsion verticale, juste assez pour que la pomme monte d'un demi-bloc et puisse atterir sur la plate-forme plutôt que de passer à travers.

Tout ça grâce au nouveau débuggueur d'expressions que vous voyez dans le bas de l'animation, qui représente chaque opcode par un caractère qu'on fait avancer petit-à-petit avec la touche L et qui complémente agréablement ce bon vieil Inspector Widget :P 

A few fixes

It should have been a calendar, and somehow I'm using it that way on the "recto" side. But it's a week-by-week calendar, which means it's also a near-A3 rigid laptop with good quality paper that I can use nearly anywhere to write notes about nearly anything. 

But I wouldn't be studying Turing processors this week-end, nor how the 1st Pokemon game stored its maps. Instead I was trying to tackle two old bugs in my editors that affect loading new files in AnimEditorDS and leaving "monsters edition mode" in LEDS. It's not very impressive, but it's releaseversary day, so here it is anyway.

And, well, it seems like it's been nearly one year since I made a release of the Dreamland demo itself. Now that the "WIP" level in the greenzone -- the one I intend to keep and that has been historically the first Bilou level ever -- has an exit door, I can make some release for that as well. Enjoy

• water slides
• revised appleman mechanics, including the funny rolling throw
• connected doors
• smashing big punches

I'm sure there are plenty of bugs and glitches here and there. This is not a polished demo, more a presumably playable snapshot of the ongoing work.

 

 

 

 

Fixing unimportant things

You know you're on a hobby project when you start fixing things that are on the bottom of your priority list first because you feel ashame of their current state and there's no one pushing you to do top-priority fixes instead.

Improving the graphics of the water slide was certainly no high priority except for my eyes. Having a special "patch sprite" to allow the desired shape that needed 3 layers despite I only have 2 map layers was inevitable after that, as much as patching the color cycler to avoid half-water half-rainbow effects.

Les graphismes des pentes-à-eau présentés fin 2025 (eh oui ... déjà) avaient un truc qui ne me plaisait vraiment pas : une jonction très "carrée" entre la cascade et la pente. Un problème qui est la conséquence d'un choix dans la construction de cette cascade:

elle est constituée de deux couches de graphisme superposés. ça offre des avantages, mais ça veut dire aussi qu'à part des sprites, je ne peux rien mettre en même temps. Un problème que j'avais déjà rencontré dans le dernier niveau de SchoolRush. Problème que j'ai retourné dans tous les sens pendant les mois de janvier et février (provoqué par le même genre de problème "quelle couche ?" autour du poing écrabouilleur) avant que l'évidence ne me frappe comme un boomerang revenant de l'ère 8-bit:

rajoute un sprite.

Well, adding a sprite overlay on top of the tiles layer is hardly any innovative. In fact, it was super-common in 8-bit and 16-bit games as soon as you aimed at something visually more sophisticated than Super Mario. But no. It took me almost two months to realise that was the solution I needed here.

And took me almost as long to realise that very dark greyish stone wouldn't work in the bright-and-colorful environment of Bilou undergrounds, and that since I'd like the peaks zone to feature purple rocks, I could start introducing purple rocks as soon as the first level.

Then in a single evening, I reconstructed a draft mockup of what I wanted to see: background dirt tiles and a waterfall, then the big rock and the wavy effect (that is still to be integrated), and in a couple of hours, I repainted the rocks in a quite satisfying way.

And when I saved things, I realised I was close to 90% of tile space consumption, while there are still a good deal of things I'd like to add to the green zone. So I wrote down a note to hunt for duplicatas later and a few other higher-priority things like drawing a background screen for the underground parts... and of course, the day after, I was marking duplicate tiles and then patching them in the level maps and noting where I had alternate dirt / rock tiles that I could use to break the grid, etc. Priorities will have to wait :P

J'ai donc profité d'une soirée où ma fée était au club-créatif du coin pour aller de fil en aiguille, dessiner quelque-chose qui ne me déplaît plus, faire le montage, ajuster les scripts et rajouter le code qu'il faut pour avoir une pente qui présente bien, avant de me rendre compte que oups, je commence à avoir trop rempli ma mémoire de graphismes pour la greenzone, marquer les duplicatas, les nettoyer, etc. au point que j'ai dû retransférer presque l'intégralité du contenu graphique de la green zone (y compris les maps des niveaux) de la DS au PC alors que je vais aussi devoir faire le transfert inverse pour les scripts de comportement ^^". 

Corrigeons l'appleman ...

Bien, j'ai pu un peu montrer l'appleman qui roule à mon frangin lors de l'anniversaire de J.L.N l'autre jour, et il avait plutôt apprécié. Surtout les interactions supplémentaires que j'envisage avec les autres ennemis du jeu.

We have rolling appleman now, and both my son and my brother do like it. But before I start adding all the fun interactions I envision (and they're awaiting) using that new mechanics, I have some clean up to do.

Mais avant de m'attaquer à ce genre de jeu, il me fallait d'abord corriger quelques étranges bugs apparus près de ces plateformes rajoutées dans le niveau de l'arbre creux en construction.

Le premier est un curieux alignement: au moment où la pomme commence à rouler sur une plate-forme à sens unique, elle se retrouve curieusement alignée fort bas. Comme si le bas des tiles était le sol, plutôt que le haut comme prévu. Ou comme si la géométrie de la pomme était beaucoup plus plate que ce qu'il faut.

Two bugs were requiring some attention. The first affected the ground height of the rolling appleman on jump-thru platforms. A quite perplexing thing which I expected to require tracking of coordinates and tile properties as the debugger would let me dig within some of the more complex functions of the engine such as "do_slopes". So I went on posting debugger screenshots as bread crumbles for a non-existent time machine. 

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C'est le genre de situation où je sais que je vais devoir regarder en détail ce qu'il se passe dans les fonctions do_slopes ou cando, parce que c'est là que se prendront les décisions. Et je sais d'expérience qu'il va me falloir une idée précise des coordonnées impliquées, où noter les résultat intermédiaire etc. 

Je suis donc reparti à me faire des petites annotations dans mon carnet et une série de captures d'écran du débuggeur qui me servent de machine à voyager dans le temps. Et on retrouve bien les deux problèmes: la bounding box definissant la taille de l'appleman grandit entre l'état "lancé" et l'état "roule", ce qui veut dire qu'il se retrouve automatiquement avec les pieds dans le sol. Mais en plus de ça, la hauteur du sol n'est effectivement pas correcte. Un résidu du passage au nouveau système de propriétés du décor qui n'avait pas encore été corrigé.

After numerous breakpoints and conditions and instructions stepping, after using a second emulator in parallel to figure out coordinates, check bounding box size and the like, I eventually noted that the height for a "direct" tile like those used for jump-through  is 0. That's intended for "look at what's beyond" when walking on some ground. That's fine for water or air or maybe even vines to be climbed. Not for any sort of ground. Easy to fix.

Now, the second one the appleman didn't pretend to enter the "jump-thru" platforms while being carried. That led to weird situation where it would push on Bilou, preventing him from even approaching the platform. Here the issue was in the properties we told the gravity controller to test for. It doesn't need to be AIR for the appleman to move through. In fact, anything the carrier could move through would be equally fine for the carried object. In the capture below, I only fixed the state when the appleman is facing right, so that gives you a nice fixme/fixed comparison.  

Autre effet bizarre: l'appleman ne voulait pas entrer dans ces régions "jump-thru" pendant qu'il était transporté. Un choix malheureux des propriétés recherchées qui insistait sur le fait que "ça doit être de l'air". En fait, non: partout où le joueur peut passer, ce qu'il transporte doit pouvoir passer aussi.

(la petite capture animée montre un état intermédiaire où j'ai utilisé ddd pour modifier les propriétés recherchées quand on est tourné vers la droite, mais pas encore quand on est tourné vers la gauche, pour vous faire un "avant/après" plus parlant)

Vous noterez peut-être dans ces petites captures un moment où Bilou se retrouve avec 4 mains. C'est le problème que j'avais cherché à (et cru) résoudre en Mai dernier ... manifestement, ce n'est pas encore complètement au point.