David Walters
@hiddenasbestos
Working solo on too many projects! (he/him) #NoAI
Got the countdown timer coded up now and posting HUD messages to ramp up the tension.
Deluxe Poly - made a very early start on other colour modes. It'll be locked to indexed for a while yet, but I do plan for these other two modes in future. #pixelart
Reduced the file size dramatically by using zlib to compress the bitmap tiles before encoding to base64.
Deluxe Poly - using base64 encoding to store bitmap data and now my files are screaming 😅
Thunder Helix #wip - Started work on the next scenario mission. I'm about to go into summer-holiday Dad mode so I'm not sure how long this one will take, but here we go! #flightsim #lowpoly #gamedev #solodev 🚁 🐪 😅
Fun fact - even using hexagons, 65% of the quads in this model are spent on the tires. No wonder games like Geoff Crammond GP used sprites.
quick 3D doodle, a very- #lowpoly open wheel racing car - 2 x 36 polygons (35 quads, 1 tri)
Deluxe Poly - bitmap layers were lacking an alpha channel - the tiles a bitmap is built from get initialised to index 0 but were opaque. Only unused tiles were invisible. Was pretty simple to add a second channel and now bitmap layers can layer layeringly on top of things 🥳
All of the vector drawing tools now have bitmap equivalents. A good bit of progress today !
I guess you'll have to trust me this is a bitmap not just the vector pencil 😄
Deluxe Poly - started working on bitmap layers today for a traditional #pixelart workflow. I'm essentially starting over with a new toolset. First goal is to store bitmap layers efficiently, and get a basic 1-px dot pencil tool with working undo/redo and load&save to disk. Then grow from there!
Ancient 4D - more UI ! -- I've added a 'button' that can talk to the panel it lives on (when clicked I'm just logging its 'id' to the console). Since the "button" is currently just a cyan rectangle, next up will be to give it access to graphics/fonts and make it look nice and have word(s) on it.
Bring back this form factor cowards ! We only need 128 KB of RAM to computerize satisfyingly.
Solved the mixing issue by just adding a level value for the active synth. It's not a fancy mixing desk of sliders, but nor am I still working on it 😄
Tinkering with my "fmComposer" a bit more. Added support for songs with both FM and PCM in them, and as a test swapped out the fm drums of this Desert Strike theme remake for samples. The UI is still pretty clunky, it needs a FM/PCM mixer, but I'm excited about some hissy Genesis-style beats 😎
I'm deeply apologetic for the latest Thunder Helix update being so bloated in size. I will work harder to get the size down in future to match what other games are doing, and to avoid excessive bandwidth consumption and the number of floppy disks required to store it 🙏 #gamedev #flightsim
... and a summary. Got to use my 3x5 #pixelart 'Q' which is always a good day.
Thunder Helix - each game scenario has a bit of randomisation to keep things interesting. Naturally part of that is custom mission briefing text. Had fun writing these - and keeping them short. #gamedev
Apparently I'm on a bit of a roll so this 'gold' in-engine faster than I expected. 🥳 (I have no idea what chemical element the CGA ones are made of btw) #gamedev
Thunder Helix - last item on my list is a ridiculous pallet of gold bars. #lowpoly
Thunder Helix gets another MacGuffin item to liberate from the enemy - this time the top of a tank. If they didn't want it to get stolen, they shouldn't have left it in the middle of that heavily guarded base 🤷♂️ #lowpoly #gamedev #flightsim 🚁
Ancient 4D - phew 😅 - finally got an event driven vertical scroll bar working - due to the event based architecture I'm using, it was proper "first you have to invent the universe" stuff for the longest time time, an endless supply of pre-requisites. But now it's done !
