Post by Hexaae in Castlevania AGA comments

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Hexaae7 days ago (2 edits)

Great work!

Just a few things that can be improved IMHO:

when ply gets hit, he instantly moves back not in the direction of the hit but to the back he's facing. This can be improved: based on attack direction, less instant movement: a bit shorter and shaking with flashing sprite maybe
staircases UP direction range size could be a bit more forgiving, even if player is not well aligned a bit beyond it
in the 1st sewers if you jump in the UP-RIGHT direction, you often get stuck in the staircase, see pic:
is it normal the water falling has those violet/blue colors in the upper part (copperlist sky backgrond passthrough)?

Dante Retro Dev6 days ago

Thanks for the suggestions.

Staircases: they're on a fixed grid (see screenshot at bottom) - it's fixed as 16x16 pixels that the Amiga blitter works. I may ask Earok for suggestions there as he does the engine but meanwhile I suggest you simply press up before at same time you're moving towards the stair: when Simon reaches the spot he'll automatically snap to the ladder (that works on all Castlevania games, all them have fiddly spots, possibly because it's grid based too and even worst, some are 8x8 grid, so we're good here at 16x16).
I know of that sewer issue, I might get to redesign this specific stair position or (an idea) is to eliminate its tiles (collision with player) after Simon leaves it, so the stair didn't get in the way anymore (and there is no backtracking in Castlevania anyway).
Violet/blue colors in the upper part of the waterfall: that's the background parallax from the mansion window displayed behind, even after I issued the command to get rid of it as soon as player enters this area (it didn't obey). On a different version of the engine it works. It's hit or miss, sometimes it works on this version of the engine too. Bear in mind that Scorpion is an experimental engine and ongoing project and these minor issues are to be expected, realistically, even at the final version of the game. Because this game will be finished but the engine development will continue.
Hits: on a modern game you do raycast to get a direction but that is not the case on a 30+ years old hardware such as the Amiga, so, the most efficient solution was to simply check the side that Simon was facing.

Hexaae6 days ago (1 edit)

For the hit effect: yes, of course, but without too refined and complicated solutions, I wondered if you could simply add a check at what side (-x or +x sort of thing based on a fixed center 0 value...) of Simon got hit to correct the bounce effect direction...

Dante Retro Dev5 days ago(+1)

I just did a review of hit code and I did it different in some parts. Older parts of code are like I described previously, while newer are actually bouncing you away based on projectile trajectory (which in most cases are just left or right too, no need to complex calculations). That's the problem with big/ambitious projects that take too long to finish: we face a bit of inevitable code rotten (a form of technical debt that accumulates over time). But thanks for your reported points, suggestions and the icons, they're welcome. All that makes me very glad that people are interested enough to do such detailed and high-level technical posts such as yours.

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