I set myself the target to get more level features into Bee Happy tonight and after some prototyping in photoshop this morning I ended up with this lil image to work towards.
This meant changing how level data was constructed and read from, keeping within my limits of not just lazily turning the rendering off for a few frames. Initally everything went well, adding the hedges seemed to cause no problems until I added the code for the Hive placement which proved to be a little too much for the PPU to handle inside 1 frame.
The problem was that I knew I was close but there were a few cycles I could spare and, with a few minutes of tinkering about with my level loading code I was able to optimize it down to run, what seems to be, safely within the NMI CPU time.
Figured I’d best post a lil video to go with it, the only real difference is that the hive outline isn’t black but that’s something I can live with.
Next up I think I need to handle background collisions in a smart fashion, ideally pre-calculating which tile each player is over before deciding what to do with that information in the NMI window.
Wish me luck, as I think I’m going to need it!