8-bit guy released a new c64 game Planet x2, real-time strategy game. Any of you planning on buying or bought it? Has a digital download copy option, but the box art looks well designed. All 3 available versions are out of stock, planning on placing an order earlier today, hopefully it's back in stock soon. I don't own an actual c64, but the digital download works on emulators.
Video of 8bit Guy going through the making of the game youtu.be/NB_VBl7ut9Y My only gripe is he didn't develop the game with all features included blaming memory constraints. Programmers back in the day for the c64 were known to pull off almost the impossible, pushing the machine to its limit and beyond. I was somehow hoping he would have found a creative and clever way to do this and add everything he mentions he wanted to in the video. Game developers on the c64 were known to do the impossible, wish he had somehow pulled it off by collaborating or asking some of the c64 demo scene peeps, I'm pretty sure they would have figured a way to compress down the maps and save a bit of memory to add all intended features.
That's pretty cool, I mean a nearly 40 years old platform still getting games.
Nicholas Morgan
/agdg/ here. While I don't work with older hardware and languages like this, it's still bloody fascinating to see, and a lot of my own optimization techniques are borrowed from older games like this.
He also mentioned working for on a DOS port, if anyone's curious.
Kevin Morgan
He should use 4x4 tile clusters to store the map rather than a raw 1x1 tilemap as he did.
A lot of memory and storage space wasted.
Angel Ward
Think I know how 4x4 tile clusters work in my head, can you explain briefly how it would save memory? Would be nice if he upgrades the game and improves the ai and adds all the features he wanted. I feel like compiling a list of improvements he could implement.
Mason Lopez
Lost my interest there. With this interface and keyboard controls its going to be shit.
Asher Scott
The trick is that you create those sets of 4x4 tiles, and the map indexes point to those sets instead of the individual tiles. You lose a bit of the freedom of edition etc, but well, the map itself gets 16 times smaller.
On the video, he uses 24KB of memory for the raw 1x1 tile map, but if he used this compression, and used for example 256 clusters, the cluster list itself would use 4KB (16x256), but the map would be shrunk down to 6KB, thus getting the map down from 24 to 10KB
Many oldschool games like mega man use this very trick.
Christian Bennett
why not 8x8?
Henry Anderson
You're probably not getting too much repeated patterns at this point to take advantage of.
Chase Morris
Now this is autism I can admire, looks fucking cool.
Mason Cruz
4cucks get out
Carter Morales
I think he said that there may be plans for another game, and any advice on memory optimization would likely be appreciated. David seems like a pretty affable fellow, and he's done quite a bit of C64 and Vic20 programming. Alas, I have no nostalgia for the Commodore, as I was too poor to have one in the eighties. I have several right now, but with the power supplies being the most shitty design imaginable (everything encased in a solid brick of epoxy resin), I don't dare use them for very long, lest one of the power supplies fuck off and fry the system or disk drives.
Gabriel Bailey
8bit guy is pretty alright. We need more fat balding old men who look like they diddle kids in gaming.
Connor Wilson
He was talking about msdos or Amiga, maybe a few other systems. I was hoping he'd try to improve the c64 version, free up some memory and add more to it, push it to the limit. That would in my eyes be a real accomplishment.
Colton Rogers
I don't think he's that interested in code optimization and pushing the system to its limits. He just seems to enjoy making games for old systems.
Jaxon Smith
But how can someone not push it to the limit after listening to this song?
Xavier Perez
ayyy, lmao
Andrew Cruz
Yea, but he had a lot more ideas to put into the game, and game developers on the c64 were known to do some amazing things to make games work. I think it's a damn shame he didn't contact or reach out more successfully to the c64 demo scene, considering there still is one.
Check part at 11:56, whole demo will blow your mind.
Jose Martinez
You can mod a c128 power supply to work with a c64. IIRC that's what I did when my c64 power supply melted, back in the days. They are nice and big and serviceable.
Overcoming limitations was a big part of what made developing for those systems fun.
Ayden Bailey
...
Liam Wood
Why do you keep restating this so insistently? Some devs probably did some great work near the limits of the hardware but I'd imagine the majority did not, similar to every other system. Why do you seem to think it's such an important criticism of this game? Maybe he didn't get all his ideas for features in but no game dev ever does.
Julian Bailey
He IS right, almost all C64 game devs used various tricks to get shit done. Have a game that has blast processing scrolling speed without blast processing hardware of SEGA as an example. I recommend you watching "Ultimate C64 Talk" and "Behind the scenes of C64 Demo", both of them explain plenty of hacks and tricks used extensively both by games and by demos.
Jonathan Allen
as interesting as mayhem in monsterland is, keep in mind it came out in 1993. The C64 was 10 years old by then and a lot of odd tricks were found at the time. It's not really reasonable to compare what the game achieved to what the Genesis was capable of.
Not to undermine the achievement of Mayhem in Monsterland, but it's important to understand the environment in which its achievements were made and to see them more as what can be achieved with mastery of the odd tricks the hardware is capable of under highly specialized circumstances.
Noah Foster
That's an interesting misconstruction of my point
Easton Martinez
This game do feature some interesting effects, but this one in particular is just regular HDMA fuckery, not unlike your standard top gear/outrun clone.
Matthew Johnson
As cool as this is, and I'm sure the guy had fun making it, I have to say he picked probably the worst genre for the platform considering the performance and interface limitations he ends up having to accomodate.
Benjamin Ramirez
Because it's 2017 and he made a game for a system that's 35yrs old, there is a community still tinkering away trying to squeeze more out of this machine, he could have done the same. I'm not bashing 8-bit guy, I just wish he went all in. I found the part in making of the game video very interesting, how he had to juggle around with free memory.
Zachary White
Did you just pull a currentyear + 2?
Charles Moore
Take that back, please. Nah, it's more like we know a lot more now, and the info is on the net, put it to use, that's all.
Jason Rivera
I always wanted to make an NES game, this fills me with determination.
Jeremiah Powell
This might be interesting for you, then. also
Joseph Lewis
this sort of shit is beyond hard to do
You have to not only fundamentally understand a decades old programming language people have long abandoned. But you also need to do it on a decades old platform and handle shit that modern game devs hate doing like optimization.
Back in those days you'd often have at least 1-2 guys you could call and ask questions. I remember Ken Silverman asked John Carmack a few questions when he was developing the build engine. Which was what lead to making it sector based. But with c64 dev it's like "tough shit" you have to be like an archaeologist trying to get this shit to work. It's like trying to learn to play "Don't Stop Believing" on a lyre or something.
Elijah Ortiz
Many classic gaming forums are full of people who are willing to provide some useful tips, especially if you're showing off your project that has gotten beyond the idea stage.
