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Topics - Eggbertx

16
Projects / Sphere 6502 emulator
I'm working on porting an emulator of the ancient (relatively speaking) 6502 processor from 6502asm.com to run in Sphere. Getting it to draw as it would on the site (without having to worry about flipping buffers) has been a bit of a chore, but I got it mostly working, but I've noticed that it's significantly slower than the website, both compiling and drawing. Because of the upscale and the way it draws to the screen (coloring individual pixels for each draw), I've had to create <scale_width> by <scale_height> surfaces for each pixel and then fill it with a rectangle (surface_obj.rectangle(0,0,fullwidth,fullheight,color). The issue of slow compilation shouldn't (hopefully) be too much of an issue to look into, but do you have any advice for improving drawing? How does Duktape's spead compare with browsers, or could it just be an issue of having to optimize the site's code to work well with minisphere?



EDIT: wow, I just checked, and both the 1.5 and 1.6 engines perform far better than minisphere. Could this be an issue with minisphere's javascript engine, or would you like me to upload the game folder (please don't look at the source, it's incredibly hacky and I'm not proud of it) and have someone here try it in Windows?
17
Sphere Support / Resizing a map via scripting?
Would it be possible to resize the width/height current map in-game, short of manually modifying the file and reloading?
I have an idea for a game that requires the map to be able to grow, and it wouldn't work (as well) if I just went with a very large map instead.
18
I used to dislike the fact that there were multiple forks of the original engine, but now I don't think it's such a bad idea. Originally, there was just one Sphere, the main engine, from its origin to its stagnation at v1.5. Now there's TurboSphere, miniSphere, Sphere 2.0, the beta of Sphere 1.6 (which from what I understand has ceased development?), Sphere SFML, and at one point, JavaSphere and web-sphere.

So it seems now that rather than Sphere being one engine, it has turned into a standard. Like HTML, with multiple browsers and their goal at being compatible via different methods.
What do you guys think?
19
Off-Topic Discussions / Windows 10
Anyone else here upgrading to Windows 10? What are your thoughts?
cmd.exe finally dropped the max width! And they fixed the issues with some old games (Like RPG Maker 2k/3 ones) having choppy full screen animation.
I'm still waiting for a tabbed Explorer, though.
20
Engine Development / JavaSphere Redux
So for those of you who remember the original JavaSphere engine attempt, the main reason it failed was because Oracle (for the most part) seems to have driven the concept of Java applets into the ground. Way to go, jerks. That being said, I've been thinking about bringing it back, since Java is very cross platform and runs on almost every OS under the sun, without too many hoops of fire.
I don't know if I still have what little code I had written for it still, but even if I do, I'll probably end up trashing it anyway, since I was a horrible coder, and have at least slightly improved. This  time, I'll focus on having it run directly on the user's computer, making things much easier (think Minecraft)
Another goal for it will be for it to be as compatible as possible with the different versions, from Sphere 1.x to all of the forks and offshoots
Eventually when I figure out how and most of it is stable, I'd like to add Android support as well, since as far as I know, you can write straight Java code for apps.


So what do you guys think? I saw the HTML5 project, but that looks like it's going nowhere fast.
21
Engine Development / Actual "cross platform" engines
I've seen engines around here claiming to be cross platform, but they require MSVC++ library, something that is obviously only on Windows. Is there any engine (newer than 1.5) that actually does run on Linux without WINE and is semi feature complete? WINE is ok, but I'd prefer to run it native, if possible.
22
Projects / Sphere-based beat 'em up engine
So I've been thinking of starting a beat 'em up engine in Sphere, with the functionality to write multiple different games with different functionality in it. I'm going to use The Simpsons Arcade, since it has a lot of common features of other arcade beat 'em ups, and some that they don't have, allowing for more options.

A nice thing about it I think it would likely be able to use a lot of Sphere's tools, like the map engine (with some stuff for jumping and jumping collision), collision boxes, and character sprites and different sprite animations, like jumping, attacking, etc

What do you guys think? Do you think this would be a good idea, or feasible given the Sphere map engine (with some extra coded functionality? I'd start by replicating the Simpson's Arcade Game as much as I can, and then working on other games, making sure it's possible for it to be portable and flexible, without it being a SAG clone.


For those of you who haven't played TSAG, it's a fantastic arcade game, one of the best, and is a great standard for what beat 'em ups should be, which is the reason I'm using it for a base.
23
Site Comments / Forum theming
This forum has all of...two themes, both being drab, generic default ones. Does a forum theme competition sound like a good idea, possibly to get some more community involvement?
24
Hi all, it's been a while. I haven't been working with Sphere much, but I've still been doing plenty of programming, and I have a question that I've been thinking about for a while. Would you say it's better to use XML or JSON for transferring configuration info, for example, via AJAX. JSON seems a bit more straightforward and easy to use, but XML seems to be more widely used.

also, this might be worth checking out, if you need a very compressed serialization format.
25
Script Support / (more) 2D platformer issues
Hello everyone. I'm still trying to make a 2D platformer, and while I've made a fair bit of progress on it, I'm still running into issues with gravity and ground detection. When you jump, the character goes up, and falls back down, but when it reaches the ground, instead of stopping, it goes down into the ground for about half a second before the "burying" prevention kicks in and pushes it out of the ground. Height seems to have nothing to do with it, since if you walk off a ledge without jumping, it hits the ground as expected. The problem exists somewhere in scripts/SideScrollingEngine/base.js, in Character.update(), Character.gravityCheck(), Character.moveCheck(), or Character.onGround(), but I've been unable to find the exact cause. Any ideas?
You can download the game here