My NES raycaster - ROM link inside!

A place where you can keep others updated about your NES-related projects through screenshots, videos or information in general.

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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

Super-Hampster wrote:Does it work on real hardware?
Just tested. See link in the first post.
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Memblers
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Post by Memblers »

It looks cool. I'm looking forward to seeing the new textures and the movement.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

Well congratulations what else can I say ? It really looks decent to say it runs on a NES ! Altough I've always preferred 2D games, it's really exciting to see a (pesudo) 3d engine working on the system that wasn't designed for that. It already looks way better than 3D worldrunner, slalom and stuff like that.
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Super-Hampster
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Post by Super-Hampster »

That's awesome. :) I love how your NES has no top too. lol
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

Memblers wrote:I'm looking forward to seeing the new textures and the movement.
Since the resolution is so low, textures will only look good when you can actually move around, so that if you can't see a texture well you can get closer to it or look at it from different angles.

I plan to keep the textures pretty simple. Like I said, their size is 8x16 pixels, but as you can see in the videos, the faces of some blocks end up taking only 2 columns of the screen, so there is no way they'll look awesome there, it's impossible to scale 8 to 2 and keep any detail.

Well, you've probably seen the textures in the Flash demo, it will be exactly like that. The key is to design textures with little horizontal detail, and focus more on vertical detail.
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Anders_A
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Post by Anders_A »

It is awesome!

Ofcourse it'll probably never make a good game since the platform is too limited. but that's not really the point here.

Great work!
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

New video! Check the first post.

Can anyone suggest a good place to host the ROM (somewhere I don't have to register and won't expire anytime soon)? I might wanna do it soon, even though there's still a lot to do.
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thefox
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Re: My NES raycaster

Post by thefox »

tokumaru wrote: UPDATE:

New video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po69zgqyFWM

It looks pretty similar to the Flash prototype now. There just a couple more things I want to do before releasing a ROM.
Very cool. :) Keep up the good work.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

Great but the ground looks horrible in revision 3, in my opinion you should revert it on how it looks in version 2 (if that's technically possible).

Other than that great work can't wait to have the ROM released.
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Celius
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Post by Celius »

Great job, tokumaru! This raycasting is actually bearable to look at (pretty damn impressive, as a matter of fact), and I would probably enjoy myself if I were playing a game with these graphics. This is pretty hard to do with raycasting on the NES :) .

Anyways, I do have to agree with Bregalad to some extend about the ground. The dithered pattern looks a little big, and it makes it seem like the ground does not extend into the distance. If you undithered the ground pattern, this wouldn't be the case. Otherwise, the walls look great, it runs smoothly, and I can't wait to see more! I hope you make a cool game out of this or something :) .

EDIT: I just had a question about the colors. It seems like you have more than 4 colors present for these walls and the ground. I'm assuming the entire image is part of the BG, so I'm wondering if you are working with color attributes in this project? If so, that's very impressive! That must be a nightmare to do. If not, well it's still impressive because it seems to me like there are more than 4 colors visible.
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Post by Celius »

tokumaru wrote: Can anyone suggest a good place to host the ROM (somewhere I don't have to register and won't expire anytime soon)? I might wanna do it soon, even though there's still a lot to do.
Sorry about the double post, but yes, I could have the ROM up on my site. Well, I wouldn't have info about it, but you could download it from www.freewebs.com/the_bott/tokumarusROM.NES or something like that if that's what you were wanting.
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Memblers
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Post by Memblers »

Before this, I wouldn't have expected an raycaster on NES to look that good. Pretty nifty to watch the textures kinda fade in as you walk towards the distant ones.
tokumaru wrote: Can anyone suggest a good place to host the ROM (somewhere I don't have to register and won't expire anytime soon)? I might wanna do it soon, even though there's still a lot to do.
I can give you an FTP account on the membler-industries server. Just PM me the username/password you want.
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

Bregalad wrote:Great but the ground looks horrible in revision 3, in my opinion you should revert it on how it looks in version 2 (if that's technically possible).
The routine that generates the patterns accepts the floor and ceiling patterns as parameters, and the dithering patterns of the walls are in a table, so all of them are easy to change.

But I'll tell you, finding patterns that look good in NTSC is pretty hard! But I'll give it a try. I'm not happy with the floor or the dark pixels of light walls.
Celius wrote:Great job, tokumaru! This raycasting is actually bearable to look at (pretty damn impressive, as a matter of fact), and I would probably enjoy myself if I were playing a game with these graphics.
It's great that you think like that! IMO, it doesn't look so good in fullscreen, but that's when I'm close to the monitor. Since we usually sit quite far from the TV, it should be OK.
Celius wrote:I just had a question about the colors. It seems like you have more than 4 colors present for these walls and the ground. I'm assuming the entire image is part of the BG, so I'm wondering if you are working with color attributes in this project?
You are correct, there are more than 4 colors. There are 5! :D

1 = floor/ceiling;
2 = dithering (black);
3 = wall color 1;
4 = wall color 2;
5 = wall color 3;

It may not sound like a big deal, but I believe that you'll agree that 3 wall colors in one scene is much better than 2. And yes, that adds significant complexity. The colors might have to share an attribute column with another color, and for all possibilities I have to select the correct palette and use the correct patterns while rendering. A table helps me with this.

You'll understand when you use the PPU viewer in FCEUXD. Watching the palettes changing as different walls are found is pretty cool. This happens because even though only 3 walls can share the same scene, these colors are dynamic, so you can have as many as you want in a level, as long as no more than 3 of them meet in the same view.

Thanks for the hosting offers, I guess it make sense to take Memblers' offer, since we were thinking of including a version of the raycaster in his garage cart.
RetroRalph
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Post by RetroRalph »

Hey tokumaru, I think this is excellent! Very nice work. As for game ideas, it could be as simple as a maze, trying to find the exit within a time limit. How much wiggle room do you have for enemy sprites/gameplay ?
HJRodrigo
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Post by HJRodrigo »

3d pacman type game could work, but with mario and collecting coins instead of pellets. Maybe have goombas chasing u. Instead of the big power pellet, have the stars that makes him invincible and allows him to kill them by touch. Maybe put in power ups scattered through out the maze like the flower that allows him 2 shoot fire balls.
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