Demptronic NFL Football

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raydempsey
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by raydempsey »

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Atlanta Falcons.png
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raydempsey
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by raydempsey »

These are the last ones. I realized that I need to change one color in one standard background palette so the Redskins sideline numbers reflect that change. Next phase: the tedious task of implementing from Photoshop to my game!
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Washington Redskins.png
Dallas Cowboys.png
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Last edited by raydempsey on Wed Dec 09, 2015 3:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.
hackfresh
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

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nicklausw
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by nicklausw »

Finally a Falcons one, I love it. Although this is a lot of gfx data, compression and recycled tiles could probably get the game smaller than needing an MMC5, doncha think?
lidnariq
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by lidnariq »

There's something to be said for drawing all the assets and then figuring out what's needed...
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by tepples »

lidnariq wrote:There's something to be said for drawing all the assets and then figuring out what's needed...
And that's exactly why I encourage newcomers who post "let's make a game; I need a programmer" to provide mock screenshots.
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raydempsey
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by raydempsey »

nicklausw wrote:Finally a Falcons one, I love it. Although this is a lot of gfx data, compression and recycled tiles could probably get the game smaller than needing an MMC5, doncha think?
All of the graphics data is exactly why I need MMC5. I plan to have a line of scrimmage and a first down line in the game, and that would mean I need to have 56K of tiles just for that. I understand everyone tries to avoid MMC5 because of the cartridge thing, but if I did, then it wouldn't be the best possible NFL game for the NES now would it?
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by 3gengames »

You could easily fit all those graphics in nearly any standard MMCX mapper, MMC5 isn't needed. And because MMC5 doesn't provide the best game, it provides the best way not to run anything on an NES because nobody will hack a game for it, and your code won't even work correctly because MMC5 is sketchy in some areas.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I'm fully with 3gengames on this one. Unless you really need 8x8 pixel attributes, the MMC5 doesn't improve the graphics of anything, (still 2bpp, still 32 palette entries, still 8 sprites per line) it's more like it just improves the amount that you can do, and in this case, there's no need. It's like this: A puzzle game for the PS2 vs. the PS4 isn't going to look any better, (aside for running at a higher resolution) but a first person shooter game will, simply because the PS2 can handle all that you could reasonably have in a puzzle game. It's that same reason I still think Super Monkey Ball looks good, because it isn't overly ambitious. You would have to do a lot more to make something like Twilight Princess look PS4 quality than Super Monkey Ball. Basically, just because something is using the MMC5 doesn't automatically make it look better, only in certain situations, none of which are prevalent in a football game. I still think row scroll would be a great idea though. I might actually create a little mock up for it.
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tokumaru
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by tokumaru »

I think the main reason he went with the MMC5 is that it allows up to 1MB of CHR-ROM, something that no other (official) mapper does. He has a lot of graphics and is concerned that he won't be able to fit it all in ROM sizes supported by more conventional mappers. Also, the ability to address 16384 tiles at once, which could maybe simplify the process of drawing each field.

While I do see that the MMC5 offers some advantages over the more traditional mappers, there are cases when it's absolutely necessary and cases when it just makes things a bit more convenient for the programmer, and I personally feel like this is a case of the latter.

I'm of the opinion that even though there are a lot of graphics in this, much of it is redundant. With CHR-RAM, you wouldn't need two copies of each team's end zone art, since you could simply flip the data when copying to VRAM. Also, since a lot of this art is actually composed of letters, there's a fair bit of localized redundancy and flat areas, which could be exploited with RLE or any other simple compression scheme. If you used extra WRAM (which is a hardware improvement much more reasonable than the MMC5) you could even use more complex compression schemes to achieve better compression ratios and buffer the uncompressed graphics and the flipped versions there, so you could blast them to VRAM as fast as possible during the match as needed.

I assume that the actual code for a football game wouldn't be extremely complex, so you could probably fit it in 128KB or less (probably less!), which would leave you with 384KB of a 512KB ROM where to store compressed graphics. With a good compression scheme and without the redundant graphics, those 384KB of compressed data could easily expand to 768KB worth of tiles, which is more than any common CHR-ROM mapper will allow, and is fairly close to the 1MB of the MMC5.

You seem pretty set on using the MMC5, despite the fact that this might reduce your target audience. What's the point of making the "best possible NFL game for the NES" if most people won't actually be able to play it on the NES, just on emulators? "the best possible game" should also be a game that people can actually play. In the end, this is your decision, so there's not much left for us to say.
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by thefox »

I think if you keep certain constraints in mind, you can start with MMC5 for ease of development, and if if/when the game is completed and it turns out that the game doesn't utilize the mapper fully, you can convert it to another, simpler mapper (e.g. one with CHR-RAM). If it's only the big CHR-ROM that you're after, such conversion should be fairly simple (depends on how many of the other MMC5 features are used, of course).
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by tepples »

Espozo wrote:Unless you really need 8x8 pixel attributes, the MMC5 doesn't improve the graphics of anything, (still 2bpp, still 32 palette entries, still 8 sprites per line)
But not still four sets of 64 tiles per screen. It's not the 8x8 pixel color areas as much as the 8x8 pixel bank switching. The particular use here (end zone at left using one set of tiles, center emblem at right using another) looks like it could be achieved with MMC2 or MMC4, but those are even less common than MMC5, though the MMC2/MMC4 circuit has been cloned in discrete logic and would likely fit into a reasonable CPLD.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tepples wrote:end zone at left using one set of tiles, center emblem at right using another
None of those would be visible at the same time though, which matters most. Just swap out graphics at different parts of the field.
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by hackfresh »

tokumaru wrote:
I assume that the actual code for a football game wouldn't be extremely complex, so you could probably fit it in 128KB or less (probably less!), which would leave you with 384KB of a 512KB ROM where to store compressed graphics. With a good compression scheme and without the redundant graphics, those 384KB of compressed data could easily expand to 768KB worth of tiles, which is more than any common CHR-ROM mapper will allow, and is fairly close to the 1MB of the MMC5.

You seem pretty set on using the MMC5, despite the fact that this might reduce your target audience. What's the point of making the "best possible NFL game for the NES" if most people won't actually be able to play it on the NES, just on emulators? "the best possible game" should also be a game that people can actually play. In the end, this is your decision, so there's not much left for us to say.

Tecmo Super Bowl's PRG size is 256KB and its CHR size is 128KB. But about half of its PRG area is used for data (player abilities, game simulation data, playbook data, player command script data cut-scene and various screen scripting data, music, etc). And all of this data is pretty heavily optimized for space.

So ya the actual code takes up roughly 128K of he 256KB. So not a bad estimate on the code part.
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Re: Demptronic NFL Football

Post by tepples »

Yes. You have 13 yards where no logos are displayed, and you can load an end zone into CHR RAM in that time.

An American football field is 120 yards (360 feet) long, including the end zones that are each 10 yards deep, and 160 feet wide. The graphics are scaled at 8 pixels per yard horizontally. For some reason they're also 168 pixels tall from top sideline to bottom sideline, though 160 would be 1 foot per pixel. I'll assume for a moment that each 8x8 pixel tile represents 1 yard by 8 feet.

Except for the Bengals with their stripes, the end zone graphics appear to occupy a 6 yard by 160 foot area, or 120 tiles each. The center emblems are 10 yards by 40 feet, or 50 tiles. This means no logos from the 0 to 45 yard line, or a 13-yard margin to swap in tiles. That's more than enough for CHR ROM or 32K CHR RAM using an MMC3-class mapper.

But with the standard 8K CHR RAM, you'd need to copy in about 10 tiles per yard. The fastest scrolling would be about 10 yards per second, based on the airspeed of a punt or the ground speed of Deion Sanders' 40 yard dash. This means the engine has 13 yards or 1.3 seconds or 78 NTSC* frames to get 120 tiles into VRAM. If no sprite cels are dynamically updating, that much data can be easily copied within 15 frames.

* They don't play a lot of American football in PAL regions.
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