Deva preview

Indeed the platforms and jumps and backgrounds remind me of Fantasm Soldier II, while the monsters and weapons remind me of Psycho World. The animations in the background remind me of Ys 3; I think Fantasm Soldier only had static backgrounds. And I like the music. Looks very promising!

Wow, there is a great feel to this game, judging by this preview. And idd, it breaths Fantasm Soldier II all over. Then again, it also looks like Core Dump sources have been found after all ^________^

WOOOOT! that looks freakin' good !
The sprite animation is fantastic, as are the general GFX. Very well coded...

Dunno 'bout SFX, but I'm more than willing to provide some PSG based SFX
(using SEE3)

Extremely good start

Great preview! It could be a true classic.
I would insist by adding more frames for sprite animations.
As you use screen 4 you can spend all the spare VRAM to store sprite animations.

Great job! Hope this game will be released

Absolutely superb stuff! I do hope a graphician will step up!

The current graphician (is this a word????) will become more active again in the near future (I was/am very busy with eh... doing stuff with my daughter and girlfriend), but some help would be nice. A lot of work (demographics in screen 5 and levelgraphics in screen 4) has to be done before we can release Deva.

But thanks for all the great compliments!

Love it. This has a little "Turrican" feel as well !

Why 9958? 9938 can do the trick vertically as well, and horizontally if you don't mind wobbly edges.
(Might also be a good time to try my trick of colour masking instead of classic border masking for Screen 4 edges. No idea if that's possible CPU-wise...)

Which is one of the points I made in the relevant forum thread, but I was corrected by one of the developers here.
And at least vertically I don't see a problem at all, judging by the video that could be a bit smoother.

well, in that case fine scrolling and multilayer should be possible

I've proposed that already bu I am the only one that is interested in the GFX9000. And Norakomi can't program for it.

We need more SCREEN4 games. Pattern modes rule!!
It looks great. Good use of the 8? patternbanks used for animation.

1. What are the limitations on the sprite npc's? How many can you have max on a row? I'm guessing that the MC (player) uses 4 sprites on a row and npcs 2 (or more)? Is that limit handled by (fast) sprite rotation?

2. I noticed differences is the gfx. Are you guys going for flat 2d or for pseudo 3d platforms? Or are most of the current gfx only place holders for later gfx?

Anyway the game looks already good now. About the level graphic, I like the pseudo 3d, but I know that this makes level design harder.

Aside this, I think you should insist on the sprite animations: when you have large animated characters like the monsters I've seen or the mail character, you should have many frames of animations or the general atmosphere of the game will suffer.
You have also to carefully calibrate the length of the steps in the animation or the character will tend to slide.

@huey
1. What are the limitations on the sprite npc's? How many can you have max on a row? I'm guessing that the MC (player) uses 4 sprites on a row and npcs 2 (or more)? Is that limit handled by (fast) sprite rotation?

8 sprites per line.
the player uses 4 sprites on a row.
so on that same row you can have only 1 enemy (hardwaresprites) of 4 sprites per row or 2 enemies (hardwaresprites) of each 2 sprites per row.
but a lot of softwaresprites will be added, and there are also objects/enemies that use hardware and softwaresprites combined.
So with smart planning we can easily fill a screen with exciting material for the player to interact with.

@ artrag
Actually the 8 tilesets could be used for fine parallax. In this way you could move the far layer very slowly while the front layer moves 8 pixels at time.

i understand what you are talking about, but this wont work for deva.
it would completely change the screenbuilduproutine and unfortunately it will take slow down the engine, forcing the game into a lower framerate which i don't want.
In my eyes lots of games on msx fail because they are too slow.
Also this will require a huge change in the graphics of the far layer, which will not be for the better.

@norakomi: you can do a fast (and simple) sprite rotation multiplexer by simply changing the sprite ptr attribute to two or more vram tables, holding the already rotated sprite planes each 8 by 8.

frame 1: use the SAT1
frame 2: use the SAT2 (sprites rotated by 8 planes)
frame 3: use the SAT2 (sprites rotated by 16 planes)
frame 4: use the SAT2 (sprites rotated by 24 planes)

in this way you could achieve rotation without rotating (moving) 512 of sprites data. just a matter of writing colors and attributes at different addresses each frame.

why? What is the main difference?

Shame that this one hasnt got any further.

I almost cried when the devs said this project was on (definitive?) hold...

I believe Norakomi has moved on to other things non msx.

I saw norakomi at the last Nijmegen fair and I’m pretty sure he has some involvement in a certain project, so… let’s not make those kind of speculations unless we’re sure .

We both should try to inspire norakomi then, syn.

help him out with maps and sprites.

canceled

https://youtu.be/TRjNs6p_ceI

nice music

The overall feel has become more dark, I'd say. At least the music. I do like the current music, but the music in this early version is very very good

Eh, please don't sell yourself short... your music for Deva is fantastic.