Cruiser X-79 June Update #2

 20th June 2021

Since I have more or less run out of other C64 projects to work on, and pretty much up to date with everything. I decided to work a bit more on Cruiser-X 79. It has actually been a whole day's session. Yes, that's right, about 8 hours or so. I needed to get a lot of things done today and I had nothing else to do. Considering the weather has been rubbish today also.

The first part of today's session was working on the music and additional jingles. I loaded up Goat Tracker and I experimented a little with the music to come up with some suitable in game music. I ended up doing 3 different tunes. The initial  plan is for the game to have only 4 different in game tunes. All of the tunes turned out more upbeat, and the well done and game over jingles sound familiar to the level 1 jingle. 

The next part was slightly more painful. The easiest part was to setup the filename properties. The second part actually gave me a real headache to work on. The disk access multi-load system. I tried compressing the test level graphics, character set and map as well as the music for the game. Unfortunately, however the de-crunch routine was crashing all the time. 

I discovered that the music memory is at $1000, and I cannot unpack a music file at $1000 when it loads to that address with Exomizer. I also had issues with memory management. I had no spare memory to place packed data. So I decided to leave out the Exomizer level compression for the time-being and load the test files as unpacked data. The program worked, but loading time takes a bit longer. 

I might need to find some alternative to the mem -l packing in Exomizer. If there is a load and decrunch on the fly method, then I might consider using that method. Otherwise I might have to do the level packing the more slower way, using a Level Squeezer and unpack from the level unpacker code. We will have to wait and see.

Update 21/06/2021 - I scanned through the memory area using the Action Replay Machine Code Monitor, after testing the game and found there was plenty of memory where I could load the packed data and de-crunch the data with the Exodecrunch wrap.s. Since the size of each packed file was less than 4K, and there was just over 4K memory free. I used the memory nearest to the last $100 bytes at the end of the game memory for loading and de-crunching the data. Everything seems to be working fine, although bugs in the title screen and the game still remain - but they should not be a problem to fix.

 

Cruiser-X 79 - June Update: 1

 10th June 2021

Over the past few months. I mainly worked on a few small game / demo / intro projects. There have been times where I have been doing more on my game project. I noticed that it has been a few months since I last did some more Cruiser-X 79. This was because I was literally unsure what to do next after the alien movement patterns. The main game engine is more or less finished (except for the bugs that are still left in the game). The only thing that is missing for the main game code are the level graphics. That is up to Saul :). 

Okay, so if I cannot code any more on the game, what shall I do now. I decided to work on the front end for the project. The title screen graphics are still there. So it wasn't much of a problem to import them into the game project. I also did a mock-hi score table. The front end is not 100% complete yet, but it does look quite nice (and erm - green, ha, ha.). The title screen also uses the same music as I used in the playable preview. Since the music was made for the title screen anyhow.

The title screen appears to look nice, but it does need some kind of action in the scene to make it look less boring. The game is supposed to be a space shoot 'em up so I might add some kind of star field like I did with Zzapped in the Butt DX. There are characters free for this cool effect.

Another thing I need to add, which I decided to do this hot and sticky afternoon is add a disk loader system to load the main game. This is only for testing purpose, as no level packing has been done yet. The game currently loads through the SFX de-crunch routine from Exomizer. Eventually changes will take place in this project because I will need to make alternative plans.

 

I took note of all of the memory which current data from the title screen and the game used. I need to do this in order to  allow the loader system to load the data to a range in memory in the game, where it cannot overwrite important data or code. Then the data can unpack from that area to the target memory at range. The game loader will need to be split into 4 different files. They are as follows:

- In game graphics charset
- In game graphics tile set
- In game graphics map
- In game music

Each of these files (once received) will be fed to the Exomizer using the mem -l  prefix. The Exomizer de-crunch source (which I used on Starfysh Remix) will be used to unpack each file respectively to the correct memory bank of where the original charset, tile set, map and music lies. 

More on this next time I get onto it :)