Racing A.I. Squeezed In how much is left?

So, I’ve established some form of racing A.I. which will at least, keep them on the track a lot better and they still perform some homing in on the player, making them particularly tough to pass easily on the test track at least.

Lap counters, speedometers and damage counters are in place and ALL THE BASICS ARE THERE! Which is really nice, but. I’m pretty much maxing out the CPU on the Classic Gameboy, which means there’s not much more I can fit in before things get janky and framerate-y.

Essentially, I’m now really limited to what else I can add to the game without breaking the Gameboy version (the Gameboy colour version is a-okay though, faster CPU (~8MHz) so more time per frame)

Hopefully some power-ups are possible. I’m thinking either boost pads or boost fuel drops in odd places on the track would be pretty cool to force the player off-line.

I **could** drop the game down to 30fps instead of 60 but I don’t really wanna do that. That smells of just giving up on performance, there’s got to be another way around it.

I need to add some toughness to handling the cars also, make the controls a biut more analogue in the steering. That should make things a bit more interesting regarding mastery of the game.

Animated A.I. Cars (click for big)The Lap count is currently going up from 0 and taking up to much window space so It’s going to be changed over to a countdown instead with “L:XX”. With XX being the number of laps remaining.

There’s only a few days left until the end of the month now and #1gam is looming, I’m still hoping to add a few game modes in there though, including a championship mode, time attack, not to mention intro screens, car selector and results summary. Oh and a password system.

I think I’m going to need to cut-back a bit!

More Gameboy screens in Photoshop

Refresh Games Gameboy Title Screen Game Intro Screen with mode selectNot the most productive day for coding today but, thanks to my sleep pattern being slightly messed up this weekend, I managed to fit a couple of screens of pixel art in tonight / this morning.

The Refresh Games logo needed some Gameboy love and should fit easily into RAM, but, the main title, I’m not so sure about.

Some clever tile mapping will be needed no doubt, I guess that’ll be tomorrows gubbins!

Still, it looks pretty cool there, I used a 3d model of super deformed F1 car I’d made a couple of years ago which just seemed to fit in really nicely when posterized in Photoshop.

We’ll see tomorrow I guess then.

[P.S. most of my tutorial code for part 2 of my GBDK tutorial series is nearly ready also, it just takes a while to write all about it.]

Background collisions, SFX and TURBO!

Well, today went really well, I fixed up my collision routines with the scrolling background, yup, it was using a simple offset, with a case for looping every 32 row increments, seems to work well. Possibly un-optimised but good enough so far.

There’s some rudimentary noises from both cars on screen based on their speed and distance from each other, also collision noises are in there now.

The fuel-o-meter has turned into a working turbo bar to help catch-up or overtake other racers. It’s getting there, but I’m down to 4kb of ROM remaining now and the racer A.I. needs improving on the sly. I’d like to get some BGM in there also somehow.

CPU Usage is getting pretty high now though, so I may need to inestigate into other ways to load my level up. Setting colours for each tile through a switch is probably slower than referencing another variable directly I imagine but, well, a balance needs to be struck.

Tomorrow I’ll most likely be sorting out the code into banks to save space and going from there with more advanced A.I. (Not simple homing, falling of the track A.I.) those cars need to fall foul to going off track also and that’s going to be inetresting to set-up correctly!

Screenshot tonight is from the gameboy classic mode where, yes. Identical cars. I’m not too fussed about that. I am fussed about adding some steering animation though!

Getting There