[WIP] Operation Fox [100% playable Demo released]

[jonnection]

A torrential jungle downpour hits our hero, as he seeks to release the hostages in a nearby village

[Sorunome]

I love that rain effect!

[jonnection]

New title screen, the last one was a bit flimsy

[erico]

Great title!
back on rain fx, it looks great as a in game fx, but I have to wonder,
would create a bunch of hundred points instead do any better?

I say that because a while ago I did a bit of research on 8-bit kind of rains.
I was going to go for a similar type of fx, but discussing with the crowd, and here we are talking
making rain fx on the likes of caanoo using GLBasic, the conclusion was that animating a very small sprite
did better, and also visually.

I ended up making a snipet of it that you can check here:
http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php? ... 2#msg78342

I understand the likes of basic and caanoo and desktops are quite different from the Gamebuino.
If I´m babbling BS, then at least this link may inspire. ...(beware, popups)
http://www.gamesradar.com/the-evolution-of-rain/

Cheers! When can we give a try?

[jonnection]

I say that because a while ago I did a bit of research on 8-bit kind of rains.

You should be screenwriting for the "Big Bang Theory" That is like, the best pickup line for chicks ever *grin* !

Oh yeah, the rain. its a 8x8 bitmap with mask, flipped every 2nd update and shifted every 2nd column.

Why ? Because speed and because lack of memory.

If I wanted a "random" rain with 30% screen coverage, that would be an array of 160x2=320 bytes. I would need the array because the rain is updated at 1:4 speed to the rest of the world, meaning that I have to "remember" the rain for 4 screens before it changes. 320 bytes of ram for the rain effect ? No can do.

Then, I'll let you in on a dirty little secret: random() on the Gamebuino is very slow. 320 x random() would slow the game down seriously.
This is not because of rodot. The underlying random code comes from avr-libc and its both slow and actually not a very good random generator either.

Operation Fox doesn't use random() at all.

[erico]

You should be screenwriting for the "Big Bang Theory" That is like, the best pickup line for chicks ever *grin* !

I will give this a try today over the local pubs see If it works out!

I now understand the limitations, but it was just something to add up, I like the way it is.
Specially the ´invert´, it really makes it shine, a result almost blurry as hard rain should be.

So how did you do it? 2 tiles?

[rodot]

Hey,
I'm really impressed by the visual effects you manage to do
About the slowness of the random() function, I struggled with it while developing the sound library (as I needed a lot of randoms/second to generate noise).
A very quick way to genera pseudo-randoms is to use a Linear congruential generator. In general, you would need to make it using longs for you pseudo-random number cycle to be as long as possible (that's probably what's inside random() ). For you rain for example you don't really care if after a few hundred raindrops it starts the same pseudo-random numbers sequence again. So you can do it using bytes instead of longs, and it's pretty fast. You can try something like :

Code: Select all

rand = 67 * rand + 71

each time you need a random number. It takes only 9 cycles (over 2190 using random() ). And no need for a modulus as rand will overflow at 255.

[jonnection]

I use a modified verion of Marsaglia Xorshift. 16-bit for sound and more randomness, 8-bit for speed.

[jonnection]

Playable demo has been released, check out the Games page.

Thread on Games section in forum

http://gamebuino.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3152