Jumpman

[kevin]

aN old Amiga scene friend (zaphod) sent me this today..

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cleathley/jumpman/

[The_Masked_Coder]

Thats Donkey Kong,

And a fine rendition of it, it looks too.

Geez i havn't played that in what must be decades now.

Did you know Donkey kong was originaly called Monkey Kong, or was it Monkey king, But an error in the language translation from Jap to English caused the name change.

Yes of course you did, everyone knows that.

:)

By the way, i can't get any topic listings by clicking the games link on your forums titles page, had to click the direct game link to get in here to make a post.

When i enter the games section its just blacnk, even after numerous refreshes and i am logged in ?

Masked

[kevin]

Thats Donkey Kong,
And a fine rendition of it, it looks too.

erm, you've never seen JumpMan ?  amazing, JumpMan was a classic C64 series.. A bit like DK, without the barrel rolling :), a bit more like load runner on high wires..

By the way, i can't get any topic listings by clicking the games link on your forums titles page, had to click the direct game link to get in here to make a post.

Ahh, newbies..  :rolleyes:

 This forum software shows posts by DATE. You can control how far it goes back yourself (30 days is the default).  I had a look see if theres another mode, but there's doesn't seem to be one.. At least i couldn't find anything relating to a default setting for it.

When i enter the games section its just blacnk, even after numerous refreshes and i am logged in ?

If you weren't you couldn't post.. :)

[The_Masked_Coder]

Ahh ok Kev.

That makes sense.

Nope, never played Jumpman, looks a spitting image of donkey kong to me, lol. which is no bad thing.  Donkey Kong of course, was the first game to feature Mario, but lets not go there. lol

Yeh, after i made the previous post, the topic became visible. lol.

Felt a bit stupid after that, lol


I've just got my mits on Blitz+, gonna have a go at porting my shoter across to it.  Hopefully a dedicated 2d system should help speed things up.  Have you benchmarked Playbasic against Blitz+, just out of curiosity.
And can PlayBasic rotate sprites on the fly. ?

Just curious.

Masked

:rolleyes:  :rolleyes:

[kevin]

Nope, never played Jumpman, looks a spitting image of donkey kong to me, lol. which is no bad thing. Donkey Kong of course, was the first game to feature Mario, but lets not go there. lol

  Used to be pretty popular around these parts at least. JM  was around about the time of Boulder Dash or a bit before.  Although I was more a Boulder dash fan then JM.

Yeh, after i made the previous post, the topic became visible. lol.
Felt a bit stupid after that, lol

 Dude, your not the first, and won't be the last :)..   had another look see for a way to set the forums to showing threads purely by last post rather than dates.  But nothing, so this approach seems to be a core feature of the board.  Although, it wouldn't be issue if more people posted :)

I've just got my mits on Blitz+, gonna have a go at porting my shoter across to it. Hopefully a dedicated 2d system should help speed things up. Have you benchmarked Playbasic against Blitz+, just out of curiosity.
And can PlayBasic rotate sprites on the fly. ?

Nope, Play can't currently rotate/alpha sprites in real time.  It's on the to do list though. Since this has to be done in software (to keep the wider compatibility base), performance comes down to the host machine, and frame buffer setup.   I'm pretty confident we can get it to a fairly useful state though.  But i wouldn't expect miracles..  

Overall speed wise native B+ should beat PB across the board.  Not surprising really, as Play is written in a mix of B+ and Delphi.  The focus is more on both simplifying the normally mundane tasks through either more powerful commands, or flexibilities in the core language that neither DB,Dbpro, BB, etc support.  As I build in more command sets this is slowly becoming more obvious how the little things really add up.  

While at present PB is interpreted, and will be for some time yet,  the future goal is to compile standalone exes, via cross compiler.  We'll see how it goes first though.

[The_Masked_Coder]

OK :)

Have you thought about writing dedicated 2d blit routines in assember, linked in through dll's.  I don't know how feasible that would be.  But i'm sure the speed gain would be more than worth it.  There are probably quite a few free assembly graphics libraries out there in cyberspace too, although i havn't looked, and that would help a great deal as regards development time goes.  Just a thought.  Looking at the very impressive speeds of blitz+.

My main concern with PB is speed.  Speed at the cost of funtionality.  But these days, thats less of an issue with such a wide userbase of differnet base machines.

Still, if your happy with the way development is going, who am i to argue.  lol.

Any chance of release date for PB too. ?

Masked  :)

[kevin]

Have you thought about writing dedicated 2d blit routines in assember, linked in through dll's. I don't know how feasible that would be. But i'm sure the speed gain would be more than worth it. There are probably quite a few free assembly graphics libraries out there in cyberspace too, although i havn't looked, and that would help a great deal as regards development time goes. Just a thought. Looking at the very impressive speeds of blitz+.

Yeah that'd be a good thing..  Currently we've, well empty has been exploring using Pascal/Delphi with MMX opted routines for certain rendering functions.  The results have been faster than native B+, and BB can manage.  For example, the tests of the new CopyImage was to up 4 or 5 times faster that native B+.  

My main concern with PB is speed. Speed at the cost of funtionality. But these days, thats less of an issue with such a wide userbase of differnet base machines.

 Speed, well your not the only one. We're all worried about it.  The aim is for the core interpreter to match DB classic, while it's not quiet that fast in the Alphas, it's not too far behind it either.  In some cases faster.  I'm pretty confident however that with some re-working on the interpreter opcodes we can beat DB classic across the board.  In regards to rendering, it already blows DB and DBpro out of the water.  However, those with much newer 3D harwdare would get better sprite performance from Dbpro..

 Were aiming at the lowest base spec possible.


Note: OF course PB special operations, are way faster than DB could ever hope for.  So using the build in features, like intersections for example is the way to go..

Still, if your happy with the way development is going, who am i to argue. lol.

 Well, the concern is very valid, and the #1 priority on my mind also.  It should be noted though that unlike DB/BB etc Play attempts to give the user a greater layer of 2D support.  Encapsulating things like 2D Mapping, Collisions, automatic Scene depth, entities etc etc.  While a lot of how this will work is still being resolved, in concept your program won't really drive the display from a hands on perspective, it'll attempt to manage the scene/world as the player interacts.. So actions can be completely driven through entities..  

 Every effort is being made to make the users life easier, and their apps run a nice solid rate.

 For Example the Missile Attack tech demo runs at a pretty solid 80->40 fps with 4 layers of 800*600 parallax in the background. That demo is old school basic really, while it uses some of the compilers features, with passing arrays/jump tables/and the array commands, it doesn't use the new entity system at all.

Any chance of release date for PB too. ?

  Yep were looking to roll out the first demos in mid October.  While some aspects of the language will indeed be fairly young, or not available at that time, we should have the base entity/mapping and sound commands sets in by then.

[The_Masked_Coder]

Cool :)

All sounds very impressive stuff.

Not too far away from initial release then.  Better start that hype wagon a rolling, lol.

The entity system sounds very user friendly and i like the way your able see the errors and drawbacks of other languages, and then side step them in PB.

It's like you said, the user friendlyness of the system will be it's selling point.

Speed sounds pretty good too, hope your able to maintain that whilst adding more features.

I did see another basic, for sale on Indigicon called "I basic" , seems to be direct x based.  Theres certainly plenty of choice out there for the buying the public.

Anyways, best of luck with it, although as you know, luck is something we often have to work very hard at.  ;)

Masked

[kevin]

Thanks :)

 Most of how it works is a fairly big conceptual shift, from old school 2D thinking, towards something a bit more modern.  I dunno how well we've avoiding the pitfalls of others though, there's bound to be just as many short comings within entities/ and other commands sets.  In particular as it gives users a lot more bang from the get go.

 I think what will set PB apart will be the entity system.  While only young at the moment, it'd be perfect for users to build RAD tool editors for.  As It should be possible to create a point and click game creator through mainly entities..The thinking at the moment is make the entity action scripts external and compile at run time.  But well see..

 Speed wise, it shouldn't get any slower than the current alpha, only faster as obsolete code/overheads are removed from the run time . Currently the compiler doesn't even begin to opt the tokens it exports. This is most noticeable in expressions.  So simply by weeding down the number of opcodes exported we can speed up the interpreter.

[Bustaballs]

I'm reviving this 3 year old thread because what I have to say is relevent to the topic and it's only a few topics down from the top.


While I was in New Mexico I was going through an old storage shed and came across a Apple Mac, a ton of C64s and a full C128 set with monitor and keyboard and all.  Apparently the C128 had cartriges that you could plug into it and one of the few games that was laying there was Jumpman Junior (or was it Junior Jumpman?).. anyways I thought it was cool.  I get to keep all of that stuff =)