Vectrex games that *should* come out...

[hcmffm]

Mar 31, 2016 19:43:15 GMT -5 50tbrd said:

I always thought it'd have been interesting if Martin had taken the animations from Debris and Astro Dodge and made an Asteroids clone.

Uhh, I think bitmap games on the Vectrex are a failure since you cannot see the beauty of the vector lines, i.e. the glowing line starts and ends. And: There's only one retro console that can draw vectors well but many retro consoles who can do bitmap graphics - even in colour.

[gliptitude]

Apr 1, 2016 16:48:05 GMT -5 hcmffm said:

Uhh, I think bitmap games on the Vectrex are a failure since you cannot see the beauty of the vector lines, i.e. the glowing line starts and ends. And: There's only one retro console that can draw vectors well but many retro consoles who can do bitmap graphics - even in colour.

In general i completely and passionately agree with this, but i do have a few contrary ideas on the subject ..

I've been toying with Art Master and Animaction again recently, working on more game and graphics ideas that i have and want to see. .. One problem I am having is that object graphics are visibly overlapping. For example if I am trying to depict a 3 dimensional scene with a person standing in front of another person, the person standing in the background can be seen THROUGH the person standing in the foreground. It would be much nicer if the overlapping portions of the person in the foreground could MASK those of the one in the background.

Maybe this is only a problem with Art Master/Animaction, but I couldn't come up with an example of a Vectrex game in which an object can move "behind" another object without being entirely visible while doing so. I revisted I, Cyborg for this reason because I thought there must be an instance where the main character overlaps the background graphics, and i wanted to see what that looked like. .. Well i found that in general this does not happen in that game.

.. It seems like bitmap graphics could potentially adress this issue, and the bigger idea with bitmap graphics is COMBINING BITMAP WITH VECTOR GRAPHICS.

With my example, perhaps the figure in the foreground could be a bitmap image, therefor appearing OPAQUE and the one in the background could be vector still, (therefor appearing beautiful).

.. Or perhaps the opposite is really true, if the vector object is much brighter then maybe it would be the one to appear nearer. At any rate I don't know that we've ever seen a really fundamental combination of vector and bitmap graphics, and I think there are numerous justifications for it. .. But perhaps there is a good reason and it's actually impossible to do?

.. My other thought about bitmap graphics on Vectrex is that I would really like to see SCALING SPRITES. Vectrex is capable of apparently perfect and smooth scale shifts and I would like to see how this looks with raster images. .. All of the bitmap Vectrex games that I am aware of are completely 2D games and I know of no instance of scale shifts of bitmap sprites on Vectrex.

.. So those are two manifestations of bitmap graphics that I very much would like to see on Vectrex.

[garryg]

Hi gliptitude, I this would be very difficult if not impossible, not to mention very time/processor/cycle consuming for the Vectrex.
You would have to stop the background image being drawn at a given point (where it goes behind the foreground object), then move to the point where (or if) the background object reappears from behind the foreground object and keep drawing until this happens again!

The only way I can think to do this is to draw the background character one vector point (dot) at a time as some sort of array, calculating the position of each dot as you go, and just moving the plot point instead of plotting when the object is hidden, remembering that each point needs to be refreshed every time you cycle.

I think this would be horrible to code to write, would probably cause a lot of drift, and would run very slow!

[gliptitude]

Apr 2, 2016 16:59:20 GMT -5 garryg said:

Hi gliptitude, I this would be very difficult if not impossible, not to mention very time/processor/cycle consuming for the Vectrex.
You would have to stop the background image being drawn at a given point (where it goes behind the foreground object), then move to the point where (or if) the background object reappears from behind the foreground object and keep drawing until this happens again!

The only way I can think to do this is to draw the background character one vector point (dot) at a time as some sort of array, calculating the position of each dot as you go, and just moving the plot point instead of plotting when the object is hidden, remembering that each point needs to be refreshed every time you cycle.

I think this would be horrible to code to write, would probably cause a lot of drift, and would run very slow!

Hi garryg. Can you please clarify? .. When you say it is near impossible do you refer mainly to the notion of vector objects overlapping? .. Or do you refer to the more general ideas I had about BITMAP graphics?

.. With the idea of combing bitmap graphics with vector graphics I was suggesting that it would not be necessary to "mask" one object with another, but that you would get a similar effect just because the bitmap object would be completely filled in and appear solid, so a vector object could move "behind" it without being completely seen.

.. Or do you just mean that combining bitmaps with vectors would be impossible?

.. And how about scale shifting bitmap sprites in an all bitmap Vectrex game? (This is completely unrelated to the problem of overlapping objects).

[garryg]

Yes I was referring to the a vector object 'overlapping' or appearing behind any other object.
I believe you would have the same problem whether you were trying to draw a vector behind another vector or behind a bitmap.
E.G. draw a line on screen then put some text over the top of it, you will still see the line intersecting the text, not disappearing behind it.

You can combine bitmaps with graphics,that is basically what you are doing when printing text.
You can also scale and shift bitmaps fairly easily.
But (especially large) bitmaps will generally take much more cycles to draw that vectors.

[50tbrd]

I think a great usage of the 3D Imager would be a wireframe boxing game like Punch-out. Actually, it'd be part Punch-out, part Teleroboxer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBLqaovAKc

[VECTREXER]

Slither.IO on the Vectrex. With at least two computer opponents.

[japjac]

Although playing Galaxian is irrelevant in 2016 and would make for a boring Vectrex game, Galaxian2, as seen on the Sharp 68K is a superb title (despite it's annoying slowdown) that I feel would suit the Vectrex perfectly.

[VectorX]

I've seen that! A bit of an odd take on the formula, but yeah, I think that would be fun (never played it).

[50tbrd]

Looks awesome. The music is great. A lot of stuff going on though, especially with the in-game music for the Vectrex. I wonder if the Vectrex32 Smartcart would make it easier to do graphics and music.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_VSo1luPM0

[binarystar]

Wouldnt have thought there'd be much gain, music doesnt really take much time to process. The VEctrex32 isn't going to allow more lines on screen either as far as I understand. It will make it easier to do larger games though, stuff that requires lots of ROM or RAM space or lots of maths (3D). Hopefully someone will port Elite to it one day

[VectorX]

I just downloaded this for my Chromebook today and immediately thought "Vectrex"...



What you see is pretty much what you get here in just the first few seconds of watching (as this might not seem real exciting, as it's just pretty much some nice techno music to listen to): it's just Space Wars without the sun, asteroid or variants, Revector without power-ups appearing, and Repulse off Vecmania without having to fire up the center of the fortress thing. You just shoot ships and more and more of them appear; you get hit once and it's game over.

It's fairly fun but needs an asteroid thrown in, or some saucers or something (even if they don't shoot). After you build up enough kills you can start buying power-ups. You start off with a fast-moving booster thrust and I currently have a shield. So basically you're just grinding away until you can buy things, but you can only use one power-up at a time. Might be more fun playing with friends online though.

Nothing real original, but just a thought.

[gliptitude]

I do think there's more room for different particular takes on the 2D steer and thrust shooter. There are so many of them, and some are very similar to eachother, but most of them are good and i think there are still new ways it could be done, different twists and novelties. .. From a designer's standpoint it is kind of an interesting design challenge: how do you make a really new game of this type? .. Most of these games don't have a power-up system. Just adding that would almost qualify as a new take by itself. Should be minimalist i think.

[VectorX]

Yeah, it's very simple.

This was a teen that made the game too, by the way.

[japjac]

Konami's Circus Charlie using Vectrex suitable levels from the PCB or the FC version starring Spike would be good. The swinging trapeze and the circus balancing balls might be tricky to do on the Vectrex though.