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Guest promethea

Project 1 Preview Video Has Landed!

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Guest promethea   
Guest promethea

Hi!

 

It took us 4 long and hard weeks of hard work, laughs, cries, desparation, bug hunting etc etc, but we finally did it!

 

Reboot is (somewhat!) proud to present you a preview video of Project One! You can find more info and a video (encoded in divx 6) on our website

 

There's also a Youtube video right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyqPDmHchy0. We're sorry for the low quality for the moment, it looks much better on a real jaguar!! We're working on a hi-res video for you to enjoy :)

 

Any comments (good, bad, etc) are very welcome!

 

 

 

Who are Reboot?

4 good friends and knowledgable Atari enthusiasts got together and decided to join forces with two main goals:

-Have fun

-Produce Atari stuff

So this is where we are: Reboot, brand new group, lots of enthusiasm, we sure aim to rock the Atari scene!

 

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Zerosquare    10

As I already said on AtariAge : it looks very promising, it's impressive how quickly you developed it. and the fact that it will be free with the source is especially nice.

 

I'm awaiting the release eagerly ;)

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GT Turbo    5
As I already said on AtariAge : it looks very promising, it's impressive how quickly you developed it. and the fact that it will be free with the source is especially nice.

 

I'm awaiting the release eagerly ;)

 

Nothing else to add :) except great work !!

 

 

GT :)

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Thanks for the nice comments everyone :)

 

Just thought I'd add a bit more detail about the code. I've tried to make it more "engine-like" than "hard coded" so that it will remain flexible enough for us and/or others to use for other projects.

 

For example, the bullets. To spawn bullets, you pass a "bullet type", x, y and owner to the bullet engine. It then goes and looks up the bullet type from a table containing how many bullets are in that type (pattern), what the bitmap for the bullet is, and the trajectories for each bullet in the pattern, and feeds this into the bullet table. The bullet processing engine just shunts these bullets along, working out if and where they should be in the display window to the map.

 

The enemies are generated much the same way, with a lookup table for each wave, and a lookup table for each enemy type containing things such as its wavepath, animation sequences, firing frame, bullet type, how vulnerable it is, etc etc.

 

The scroll engine simply translates an X/Y (in pixels) into the correct "grid" position and places the tiles at the correct place with the correct bitmap. The screen is made up of 96 32x32 objects for the top layer, and a larger bimap for the underlay.

 

All these modules are running on the GPU. The 68k is acting as a sequencer and reading the jagpad :-)

 

We really hope that the release of source code for this (at the end of the development) will help others either with existing projects, or to start new ones. At the very least, manipulating the data tables, wave patterns and graphics would produce a quite powerful "Shmup Construction Kit" for the Jaguar.

 

Currently, the VideoTest level packs down to 150k. So we're hoping for a 1Mb ROM for all 4 levels.

 

I'd just like to add again that THIS WILL ALL BE FREE. THE FINAL GAME, THE SOURCE CODE AND ALL ASSETS WILL BE RELEASED AND FREELY AVAILABLE FOR ANYONE AND EVERYONE TO EXAMINE AND USE. Please feel free to ask us questions, here, on atariage or on our own forums regarding this or Jaguar Development in general. Sorry for the capitals and the bold, but people are still saying they'd buy this! :-)

 

Right, I'd better get back to coding!

 

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SebRmv    2

Wow :blink:

 

This is really really great!!!

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Fadest    0

Great video !

I'd just like to add again that THIS WILL ALL BE FREE. THE FINAL GAME, THE SOURCE CODE AND ALL ASSETS WILL BE RELEASED AND FREELY AVAILABLE FOR ANYONE AND EVERYONE TO EXAMINE AND USE.

It's nice to see this kind of effort in homebrew world, let's hope it will help other developper to make new games. Thanks you very much !

 

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Guest promethea   
Guest promethea

Ok, since Morden talked about the code, I might as well talk about the tools a bit :)

 

Basically there are two tools for the project, written in GFA BASIC 32: one converts .BMP images into the format that the raw format that the jag needs (4, 8 or 16bit images, any size). It's still being tested, and not helped by the fact that Morden has a 68000 routine and some mumbo jumbo that he uses ;)

 

The main tool though is the wave generator. This is resposible for calculating the waves, writing them to the game's required format, and creating an .s file describes the waves and where they appear on the screen. This file gets included during assembly. The waves are small snippets of code (small equations or other neat stuff), each frame is calculated and displayed on-screen. What's interesting though is that the waves and the appearance values are separated. I.E. once you create your waves and you know they work ok, you can forget about them. There is a distinct place in the source where you can put the appearance parameters (which line, enemy type etc).

 

When you're done with your changes, you just run the program and it:

 

  • creates the coord files
  • creates the .s file
  • puts them in the right directories
  • assembles the source (smac)
  • links the objects (sln)
  • copies the produced binary in the vjag folder
  • runs vjag with the rom

 

So testing cycles are reduced to a few seconds!

 

I agree that it's still a manual process, but after a brief discussion between me, Morden and KZA, we decided that it's too small a project to make a full-fledged wave editor. We have lots of improvements and ideas for project two, a proper tool can offload the code quite a bit! But I digress here, all this will wait till Project One is out the door!

 

P.S. Of course the tools will be included in the source code release for your tinkering :)

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Pocket    0

The game looks really promising. And when you think it took you only 4 weeks to run it ! Can't wait for the final version :)

 

And thank you for releasing it for free.

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viMaster    0
Basically there are two tools for the project, written in GFA BASIC 32: one converts .BMP images into the format that the raw format that the jag needs (4, 8 or 16bit images, any size). It's still being tested, and not helped by the fact that Morden has a 68000 routine and some mumbo jumbo that he uses ;)

I'm interested in finding out more about your image converter. Are there any other features you plan on implementing?

SebRmv has a great converter as well. I'm hoping he gets some time to look into transparency during the conversion process as well.

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sh3-rg    6
Thanks guys :)

 

It's come on a huge amount since the last video, we're hoping to put a progress video up shortly.

 

No more videos, keep it for the release!

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GT Turbo    5

I've played at one of the last beta !! Only one word : PFIOU !!!

 

If you love shooters, you WILL love P1 !!!

 

Kudo to the whole Reboot team, keep up the good works guys !! You've rebooted my Jaguar ;)

 

 

GT Turbo

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Guest promethea   
Guest promethea
I've played at one of the last beta !! Only one word : PFIOU !!!

 

If you love shooters, you WILL love P1 !!!

 

Kudo to the whole Reboot team, keep up the good works guys !! You've rebooted my Jaguar ;)

 

 

GT Turbo

 

So it crashed on your Jaguar? Sorry ;)

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ovalbugmann    0

I can't wait for this one - action shooter! - Niiiice!! :yes:

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SebRmv    2

While surfing on Reboot website, I wanted to download PROJECT1.ROM but unfortunately, the link seems to be broken. Could you repair that?

 

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