spacemanbow & scrolling

question:shoot

Does anyone think its possible to make a spacemanbow 2 ?
and if so, who will help me?Yes, it's possible, but no one will help you. Sorry

I would like to know as much as possible about the scrolling
in spacemanbow.
Who has some additional info for me?There's not much to know, you seem to know most of it already.

- spacemanbow uses screen 4
- it scrolls using the horizontal screen offset registers

the farmost left 16 pixels in screen and right 16 pixels seem not te be
affected by the horizontal scroll.
how is this done?They are affected, on both sides of the screen by the way. You're probably playing it on an (emulated) MSX2+ or Turbo-R on which it uses the scroll/mask function these systems have.

are software sprites used, or are all the characters sprites?
if sprites are used how come they are not affected by
the scrolling?Sprites are affected by scrolling. You can solve this by adjusting their coordinates though. It's not too much work, but you do have to do this every interrupt though. The bigger 'sprites' are indeed screen 4 characters, you'll notice they don't move as smoothly.

who can tell me some more, Id really like to make a
spacemanbow 2.So would I, but it's not that easy. And try finding someone that can make proper gfx for screen 4, that's a whole different story still...

there a so many highly intelligent people constantly on this
site. I know we could make a team of programmers for this
game.

hopefully we will !There are indeed, but most of them know it's not that easy to make a game either. Although Space Manbow it not *that* impressive from a technical point of view, it's still more work than most people here are willing to bargain for. I hope you can find someone that's willing to try though... I'm not it though...

cheers,
msx love, Norakomi !
Good luck!

(^_^( "Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii t0000000000000000b~"

From a technical point of view, Space Manbow is impressive as well. Because the game uses so many sprites, it has to switch sprite tables in the middle of the screen. To do this fluently, sprites that overlap the line on switch the split happens should be in both tables. It takes some good organisation to pull this off.

Space Manbow is my favourite testcase for openMSX, because it uses both SCREEN4 and SCREEN5, uses multiple screen splits (mode and sprites), acts differently on MSX2 and MSX2+, and because it's fun to play of course.

I agree with Wolf: making something better than Space Manbow is very very hard. So probably it's better to start with a goal that is more within reach. For example, a vertical scrolling shooter in the style of Aleste is easier to program, but still quite a challenge. If you make such a game, you will have learned a lot of skills that you'll need to make something like Space Manbow later.

Sonic: What's so technically difficult about making an Aleste type game ? I mean beside using a lot of sprites, and scrolling fast vertically it's nothing but clever level design, great gameplay, and cool GFX. Technically it's all R23 based, 100% screen 5. It's looking impressive and moving fast but still it doesn't take much tech tricks to achieve it.

What's most impressive in Space Manbow is the multi-direction-multi-speed-multi-layer scrolling (CPU intensive in screen 4), while still displaying a lot of sprites and animating of tiles and big objects. To me, it technically beats most demos I've seen so far. It's something I'd never even think of trying to program...

how'bout a shooter using Wolf's screen4 streamer (wings?) hehe