Engine Refactory

The Big Refactory has started (I could pretend it is a new-year resolution). And it even went pretty far, like abstracting away the animated objects list so that only the code for animated objects need to know details of the animation scheduler.I was about to try changing the VRAM allocation system so that only classes …

Tout vient d’la cache

Quand Eric parlait de faire des mises à jour à la volée de la mémoire au fil de l'animation des sprites, je pensais spontanément à un système semblable à celui de Donkey Kong Country: chaque personnage se voit attribué un emplacement en VRAM et les mises à jours pour ce personnage-là viennent systématiquement à l'emplacement …

Si j’étais graphiste …

Si j'étais graphiste, mes sprites auraient plutôt cette trogne-là. Je saurais qu'une bonne animation, c'est une animation où on a pas peur de casser les cadres et j'arriverais à l'appliquer. Du coup, le meilleur environnement pour faire du bon travail, ce serait quelque-chose qui soit le plus souple possible. avoir suffisamment d'images disponibles simultanément pour …

What’s wrong with my spritesheet ?

Ok, this time, let's try to get that .spr file fixed. That's the right timing to get some framework that read and write .spr files on my host platform with the engine's C++ code.You may remember this spritesheet captured some times ago, where 'striped'  tiles were suspected to be declared free although containing pixels ... …

School Rush "Fish16"

 Here we go: the long awaited update on Bilou: School Rush game. Still only 4 levels, polished gameplay, improved menus for easier difficulty selection, and last but not least, improved software stability. I also fixed a couple of issues with level maps, esp. in level 2 that still featured a few excessively difficult things. More …

selective WiFi transfers.

My .spr files are becoming large. That's especially annoying when you remember that issue with DS-to-PC bandwidth issue, which I still haven't investigated more. Look at all that grey and all that purple: these are not used by the game engine. I started an evolution of RunMe where you could selectively transfer "tiles" or "sprites" …

Economiser des pixels

Imaginons un instant que je tente de faire l'animation du crayon-soldat qui court derrière Bilou juste en pixel art ... Il me faudrait avant tout gagner assez de place sur mes planches de sprites. Heureusement, les "1002/1024 tiles used" sont un peu surfaits. Si je visualise le contenu de la VRAM, les sprites colorés en …

School level delivered!

Enfin nous y voilà. 3 ans après 'Apple Assault', un nouveau jeu Bilou est sorti. Enfin, "jeu" est excessif: c'est une démo jouable comme vous auriez pu en trouver avec votre magazine PC-Fun préféré dans le milieu des années nonantes. Avec un seul niveau, il n'y a par exemple aucun moyen de reprendre de la …

ghost busting with spr2png.pl

No matter how much I improved SEDS, I still can't "optimize" my spriteset below 1024 tiles without messing up something. So I had to admit a disturbing possibility: maybe my tileset is *really* corrupted, and has been so unnoticed for some times ... maybe I'm suffering the equivalent of infamous cross clusters.Let's recap: in .spr …

sponge-hands-and-ink-and-mockup

Here I stand, guilty of doing low-level debugging where the situation wasn't calling it. Now that I have a "test level" for the school zone, it's very tempting to start writing more monster code. I thought I could easily hack a Sponge Bop test while *deline was asleep this afternoon, but for some reason, only …