** EHB - Sega Genesis Bullet Hell ** Another day , another 20%+ speedup , now maintaining 60 FPS - 99% of the time. During transitions from fixed ( red ) to random ( blue ) trajectories a few frames below 60 FPS but now after the transitions holding 60 fps with some buffer to spare , about 82 % CPU with near 320 sprites onscreen , 360 capable. Sprite pattern updates on the multiplexor at this density are a bit intensive, so couple of minor frames drop as new patterns are cached. I do need to spend some cpu on other things besides bullets so this is a good step and proves I'll will be able to push the sprite counts very high without slowdown. #SGDK #SegaMegaDrive #SegaGenesis

** EBH Sega Genesis Bullet Hell Update ** Well strap yourselfs in - tonnes added since last update. Its had about 30 hrs spent on it - burning the candle at both ends haha. Updates since last : Player Death animation - we now have a very nice scaled hop after player death. Changed to XGM1 sound driver ( was XGM2 ) , the heavy PCM in this game was just too much for XGM2 to handle and slowdowns in music persisted , so changing to XGM1 we trade a bit of 68k performance ( about 2.7% ) but solve the slow down issue and also gain another PCM channel - it does cost some rom space though !! Explosion SFX added to ships and Cruisers, Cruiser s now take damage with Explosion Animations also. We have about 5 different SFX for explosions so far and using XGM1 driver we have 2 PCM channels dedicated for enemies . Made some more custom XGM1 asm routines for channel hopping with channel groups to lower cpu usage. Basically we take the first free channel we can without adding much cpu cost. Target tracking Lazers !! Dual beams track targets across the screen with latching - this part alone took me about 10 hrs to do !! They started out been way too expensive .. thankfully just with my cpu budget for them now after optimising. All the rotations too time , thankfully some scripting did a lot of the heavy lifting as theres a lot of rotations ! Sword attack added !! Able to pickup purple bullets which can be later used in a mega weapon ( to be added ) - see mid level . Again scripting helped with a lot of the rotations. Cruiser artwork re done, new small ships and 2 more Cruiser types added. A couple I touched up from an purchased artpack , one is completely my idea so hopefully they look ok. @GabrielPyron fixed bullet artwork - bullets looked a bit weak before , @Carsten1349 provided more ships for the game - and the final boss which has loads of parts and animations i need to get in yet , without their help it just wouldn't be the same @Luke86McQueen provided new SFX including Lazer and also new Explosion SFX , its really got some punch now thanks to him. The stage will keep getting bigger yet and its all WIP . Hope you like it !!! #SGDK #SegaGenesis #SegeMegadrive

** SEGA GENESIS - MEGA VALKYRIE ** Formerly the 3D engine- now becoming a game ! Since last showing : Back face culling of objects added - increase performance by 15% !! Basically we don't draw what gets overdrawn which saves performance - Some scripting helped to sort models into cullable ones and ones that weren't and also analysed co-planer triangles and reworked those to quads for the engine ( a quad is faster vs 2 triangles ) . Optimised quad drawing ~ 2% gain, saved some resetting of the DDA points amongst shared sections. Optimised joypad reading ~ 0.8% speedup every cycle counts haha. Added dither patterns to the renderer so dithered surfaces can be used - only a slight hit to draw speed. Modified the vblank dma timing to allow XGM2 driver to run at full speed without lagging , so now we can switch from XGM1 to XGM2 and gained 5% cpu performance. Added a basic Enemy - much more complex ones to come , hes using the same movement logic as the player attract mode before. No destruction or collision checking yet . Added player attacks - nothing final but a good start. Reworked the camera to keep a constant background load on here so its indicative of a real stage. Maintaining a solid 20 FPS in this demo. @TonimanGalvez is doing great work on map layout and huds, hes made some very nice internal renders of how the game will look once fully populated. Music is a placeholder for now, kindly provided by @laurent_crouzet so we can model music load in the game. #SGDK #SegaMegadriver #SegaGenesis

** Sega Genesis Mega Parodius Update ** Slow but steady progress - the gift that keeps giving in coding workload is nearly done, in a few days Catboss will be done then onto the Penguin Boss ( much easier ) , which means stage 1 is near complete. @GabrielPyron in GFX/SFX @VTRCHIPMUSIC in Music are patiently waiting for me to catch up with the level art / music but things are accelerating now . Much of the assets are done for stages 2 & 3. Since last showing many changes under the hood, whats shown here is added Chest Bees, Penguin factory ( penguins coming up from the middle of the catboss ship ) , added Meow SFX, added Catboss Explosions and damage states. The penguin factory was harder to get right than i thought , the ship acts as moving platform. Its not 100% arcade accurate as i don't have the source code, I actually think small variances will make it fun to play anyway - the goal is still to be very close. Fixed a tonne of priority issues via a level based depth system for objects, e.g. penguins sprites come up behind the ship onto the ships deck, but paw sprites need to be infront of ship still, but the entire catboss ship must eventually come offscreen behind foreground, but then the foreground is actually the background layer ( layer B ) at that time and thats normally behind layer A ( the ships hull ) , as layer B takes over all foreground and background tasks when the Catboss comes on, as much of the Catboss is layer A to avoid the sprites per line limit issues ... yeah its priority hell haha. Part of the issue is getting things accurate to the arcade, would have been easier to take liberties here and there , eg just let the Catboss drop down in front of the forground etc. Also arcade size explosions that don't cause sprite wipeout rather than using small explosions etc , used custom sprite cutting with no Y overlap to make sure sprite overload is kept at bay. The explosion sprites overlap the paw sprites and the right part of the cats face which is also sprites so minimal overlap was needed. I'll also be attending the Japan Game Festival in Lyon 21/22nd , Parodius / Lufthoheit ( full team there ) / 3D Engine and other demos will be on display - hope to see some of you there : xitter.cf/RetroPoloTV/status/210… #SGDK #SegaGenesis #SegaMegadrive #Parodius