SquallStrife wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

TBH: I really don't like the YouTube system, but I know lots of people prefer it, plus because of Blip policies it's more suitable for me to upload my future archived livestreams to YouTube instead of to Blip, but those should be the only videos that end up exclusively on YouTube.

Sounds odd... what are blip's rules on that?

Basically, you're not supposed to upload raw, unedited, video game footage. The policies simply say not to upload video game footage in general, but this was something I asked about way back before I even started Season 1 since tons of people had video game footage in their videos, and that's when they explained that aspect of their policies to me. I actually still have a copy of their return eMail which was very short:

Blip Producer Support back in 2010 wrote:

As long as there is context/commentary for the footage being used we do not have an issue. This rule is there basically to prevent some from uploading hour long raw gameplay footage rather than actual shows.

Livestreams are thus kinda teetering on the edge of if they'd be allowed or not so I'd rather not risk it... though I suppose I could just ASK them... *logs into Blip and does so*

I think most people record their voice commentary while streaming, which would probably meet the policy.

*shrugs* Well, I'm still gonna wait to see what Blip says all the same. ;)

In any case, Ancient DOS Games Episode 143 - Full Throttle is online! :)

Really not much to say about this game beyond what I've said in the video proper. :B

7 more episodes until 150 and the final regular episode of Season 3... it's still crazy to think I've made so many of these now... Then again, one of my favourite webshow artists, Linkara of Atop the Fourth Wall recently hit his 300th episode, and he goes a lot more all-out with overarching stories and props and special effects and everything. :o

Cool, I still like Full Throttle, and the review gave me good nostalgic vibes. This and grim fandango were my favorite click adventures at the time.

Your comment about the combat on emulated/real hardware might be accurate. Rebel Assault, which I believe shares part of the same engine, is much more difficult on my 386. Running it on a more powerful machine like a 486DX4/100 makes it much easier. Presumably the emulator is fast enough to run the game at maximum speed and makes it easier.

I knew it was going to be Full Throttle, but I didn't bother sending in a guess because I knew a million other people would get it right too. Looking forward to watching this one.

HunterZ wrote:

I knew it was going to be Full Throttle, but I didn't bother sending in a guess because I knew a million other people would get it right too. Looking forward to watching this one.

The finally tally was either 19 or 20 guesses, all correct. :B

I haven't checked through the guesses sent in so far for the next game yet. I always tend to take it easy on Saturdays and do next to nothing productive... that's not entirely true, I worked on synth music earlier. ;)

4 hours... Well, think of it this way: it's still about twice as long as Loom. 😜

RadioPoultry wrote:

4 hours... Well, think of it this way: it's still about twice as long as Loom. 😜

Actually, with voice acting, the CD version of LOOM is probably about as long as FT.

Found the problem with my next batch of video conversions for YouTube. Traced it down to the video, not the audio, being out of sync, then traced it back to the multi-threading capabilities of the codec decoders I'm using, since multi-threading is fine for general playback, but what ends up happening with the combination of codecs, decoders and software I'm using for reconverting the old master files to render properly on YouTube is that VirtualDub runs the decoder the same way a playback system would for grabbing the video data, but with 8 threads going on my 8-core system, that means 8 frames need to be pulled into the buffer before it'll start actually rendering any... yet it's rendering in the audio data the whole while! :o

This must be something that was changed/adjusted/whatever from when I initially installed my codecs and such as I had updated them at one point a number of months ago, but that was AFTER my initial batch of YouTube conversions, which is why despite having identical settings, the old conversions worked properly but the new ones didn't. :P

I figured this all out when I noticed frames from prior attempted renders showing up in new attempted renders. Turning off multi-threading in my decoder settings has solved the issue. Fortunately for me I had the foresight to save my VirtualDub jobs list after setting up all 77 video files in it, and since the problem was with a decoder setting, not a codec setting, I should be able to just process the entire jobs list a second time with no changes and end up with properly synced files. :B

So YouTube uploads should resume tomorrowish, depending on how busy I end up with everything else. ;)

Ancient DOS Games Episode 144 - Hocus Pocus is online!

This is a HUGELY nostalgic game for me, so it's kinda surprising that it took me this long to get around to it. Then again, there's so many great DOS games out there I guess it's not THAT surprising. :P

Curiously too, this made for an average length episode. The game's so incredibly simple that I honestly wasn't expecting my script to reach anywhere close to 5 1/2 pages... I blame the fact that this game has lots of little quirks which I was able to elaborate on. :B

Are there any DOS platformers with smoother scrolling? Most of them are so jerky, scrolling multiple pixels at a time despite using hardware framerates of 60fps or more. It's ironic that consoles got the smooth scrolling thing down in the NES era using tile-based graphics, although in fairness the hardware was much better optimized for it.

Well there's smooth scrolling ega platformers like keen and monster bash and vga jazz jackrabbit. They figured out how to redraw the screen with minimal effort through smart hardware scrolling instead of redrawing the entire screen each frame.

Harekiet wrote:

Well there's smooth scrolling ega platformers like keen and monster bash and vga jazz jackrabbit. They figured out how to redraw the screen with minimal effort through smart hardware scrolling instead of redrawing the entire screen each frame.

Which ironically is exactly how those old consoles did it, just that the consoles were designed with tilemap scrolling in mind. Computers weren't. :P

Harekiet wrote:

Well there's smooth scrolling ega platformers like keen and monster bash and vga jazz jackrabbit. They figured out how to redraw the screen with minimal effort through smart hardware scrolling instead of redrawing the entire screen each frame.

Kinda funny you say that. None of the Keen games scroll anywhere near as smoothly as Jazz or Monster Bash. Keen may have been impressive for an EGA game when first released, but in the grand scheme of things, it was pretty damn pathetic compared to smooth scrolling platformers available for other systems at that time.

I'm pretty sure the Commodore 64 and Amiga could have done the same thing just as well, if not better than what EGA graphics could do at that time. And I'm pretty sure those computers weren't designed with tilemaps in mind, either.

No, but C64 had hardware raster interrupts and a scrolling register, and the Amiga had its copper/blitter, so the hardware was actually helping instead of hindering you like on the PC. EGA/VGA weren't even designed with games or animation in mind.

I'm pretty sure VGA was able to do real scrolling, but maybe the earlier hardware didn't have enough VRAM or CPU to do it effectively?

Edit: It definitely didn't have layers, though, which probably made scrolling a bit useless for most games.

switchblade wrote:

Harekiet wrote:

Well there's smooth scrolling ega platformers like keen and monster bash and vga jazz jackrabbit. They figured out how to redraw the screen with minimal effort through smart hardware scrolling instead of redrawing the entire screen each frame.

Kinda funny you say that. None of the Keen games scroll anywhere near as smoothly as Jazz or Monster Bash. Keen may have been impressive for an EGA game when first released, but in the grand scheme of things, it was pretty damn pathetic compared to smooth scrolling platformers available for other systems at that time.

Monster Bash and Jazz Jackrabbit scrolling methods are unusual, even for shareware games. Both use a true 60fps in their scrolling, whereas most other games use 30-35fps. Commander Keen deserves credit for implementing smooth per-pixel scrolling, but Bash and Jazz synchronize their scrolling to the display refresh rate.

Actually, another funny thing is that even now, scrolling methods are still useful with modern 2D gaming. The game I'm working on right now uses tilemaps but with very small tile sizes, thus even with hardware acceleration, drawing 10,000+ tiles per frame of gameplay isn't very efficient and can burn through tons of GPU power, especially when I've also got pixel shaders going to produce a high-quality glow effect across the entire screen, and especially since I'm producing a sort of depth effect as well which would theoretically quadruple the number of tiles I'd have to draw per frame.

So what I'm doing is using an oversized tilemap backbuffer and ONLY updating newly drawn or altered tiles on it, and making sure it repeats across its edges, this way I'm, at most, only drawing about 500 tiles per frame and when the player's not moving, no tiles need to be drawn at all! Also, the depth effect is produced with a SINGLE draw call from the tilemap done by simply repeating the same backbuffer triangles multiple times with different texture coordinates. :)

With hardware acceleration nowadays, it's much better to draw tons of stuff in a single draw call than to draw tiny amounts of stuff in multiple draw calls, since it's typically the calls themselves which slow everything down. (Switching the active texture you're drawing from is another potentially huge slowdown too if you do it too often.)

Can't stick all tiles in 1 large texture and have the shader do the tile rendering 1 pass with a screen filling quad?