Technical Aspects into Famidash
Added 2024-05-17 13:26:31 +0000 UTCHappy Friday!
A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes in Famidash. I wanted to spend some time today to explain how we got more room for sprites.
This is the tile viewer. At the top half you will see all of the background tiles used.
When changing the viewing type to OAM, you can then plainly see the sprites on the bottom half:
As you can see, we have very limited space to work with. How are we going to get in all of the player sprites AND portals/orbs/pads/coins/etc?
Well, we accomplish this with bankswitching!
As you can see here, we have declared each of the sprite sections as 2KB sections. We have bankicon00.chr (which is cube, ship, mini cube, ufo (followed by portals)
then we have gamemodesA followed by portals:
and finally, gamemodesB followed by portals:
SO essentially, the portals are ALWAYS loaded into sprite bank 01, while the player's current model is swapped into sprite bank 00:
We also swap out bank 03 every few frames to create a pulsing effect between these 2 CHRs:
Here it is in action:
And with that, we saved a bunch of sprite space by only needing one sprite bank (out of 4) utilized for the player!
A big music update just hit too, so there is music in levels that weren't there before.
Also, more settings!
Enjoy the latest build :)
