Flagon Bird

Use this forum to submit new files for the download section of the archive. I will check each submission and upload it to the archive on a regular basis.
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sorchard
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Location: Norwich UK

Re: Flagon Bird

Post by sorchard »

Wow. A lot of work has gone into this and it really shows. It still has that silky smooth fast scroll, the graphics are outstanding, I'm loving the sound effects and there's a slick loading screen too. (Which loads in suspiciously quickly by the way. Is there some sort of compression thing going on here?)

I neglected to mention before that I was tickled to see one of the rankings is 'Chorlton'. When I was a kid, 'Chorlton and the Wheelies' was one of my favourite programs. It had a scary, scary witch in it but Chorlton liked her... mmm nostalgia

Awesome job Bosco! :D

ps. My best score is 20.
Stew
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Bosco
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Location: Nottingham, UK

Re: Flagon Bird

Post by Bosco »

Thanks sorchard.

I edited the load time in the video to keep things moving along so your spidey senses were correct. LOL!

Yeah, Chorlton was great so he had to go in. :)

BTW. I meant to share this and forgot. I implemented a kind of sprite compactor for the large graphics that weren't speed critical. The orange tinted tiles are duplicates which is quite a saving although I still needed to store tables of tile IDs to reconstruct the sprites. All in all I made a 50% saving and together with a few other optimisations managed to shave 1.5k off Flagon Bird 1.0. Much of the performance savings, which enabled me to mask the lower pipes and still run in a frame at 60hz were down to using self modding code, which I owe to you for sharing the magic. That and your Dragon sound primer. :D

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sorchard
Posts: 530
Joined: Sat Jun 07, 2014 9:43 pm
Location: Norwich UK

Re: Flagon Bird

Post by sorchard »

He he... I didn't actually look at the video... I downloaded the cas and was surprised at how quickly the loading screen came up. Of course, now you've explained it, I realise it is constructed from a small number of tiles rather than the whole 3K screen :oops:

Now I have looked at the vid I'm disturbed at how good you are at playing it ;)

It's generous of you to credit me but all I did was share a simple example. You've figured out all the clever stuff yourself. Do you know what you might be working on next? I feel suitably inspired to have a go at a new game too...
Stew
sixxie
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by sixxie »

Actually the loading screen is compressed - with dzip. 3K is packed down to 450 bytes (lots of repeated data in that mode just to get square pixels...). Only a 20% saving on the main game code though, which I now see is because Bosco's already been clever there!

Bosco, your enhancements since the earlier release are lovely - nice touches of polish to an already cool game!
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Bosco
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by Bosco »

Thanks for the positive feedback guys, you're very kind. For a coding debut I feel I've done the game justice now, (there may be a few more bells and whistles in the future?).
sorchard wrote:Do you know what you might be working on next?
It'll be something which expands a bit more on what I've learned from FB, (which is a lot :) ), but probably not a scrolling game. I've got a few ideas that interest me but haven't committed to anything yet. Watch this space! LOL
sorchard wrote:I feel suitably inspired to have a go at a new game too..
Do it! :D Let's put the Dragon back on the homebrew map.
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Bosco
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by Bosco »

40% faster loading WAV made with bin2cas 3.0
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FlagonBird_1.1.rar
(48.37 KiB) Downloaded 514 times
zephyr
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by zephyr »

Here is v1.1 converted for use from auto-starting cartridge.
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Flagon Bird v1.1 Cartridge Version.zip
(7.67 KiB) Downloaded 501 times
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Bosco
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by Bosco »

Thanks zephyr. :)
sixxie
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by sixxie »

It's getting some attention on the CoCoList...
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Bosco
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Re: Flagon Bird

Post by Bosco »

Cool! :D

There seems to have been a surge of interest recently from CoCo owners, (since v1.1).

I'm glad now I avoided rom routines and made sure the game ran at 60Hz.
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