nesdev.org

I want to add more background elements - many more background elements - but I'm having a hard time learning to draw them all. Hopefully the bushes won't be so out-of-place when I have trees, mountains and buildings all over the place. Well when you have them, try the non-black outlines again. See ...

Hmm; I guess the non-black outlines would be hard to pull off on the NES. I've seen some SNES and GBA games do a great job with them, though. I think the problem is that all you have that isn't something the player can touch are those two bushes. If you had more background elements it could work a l...

Looking at the scene mock-up, I like the first one you posted better, except for the hills (the presumably one-way platforms) which I think look better in your second incarnation. For such a simple and cartoony design, I would admonish you to avoid using black inside the tiles; only keep it as an ou...

This is why I love this forum.
I asked a question that could have had a simple yes-or-no answer, but I got some more detailed responses that addressed various extra circumstances.

I suspect I already know the answer to this, but I just want to make sure. Does the system need to load an actual blank tile into the PPU in order to have a blank tile in the scene? Or can a game actually just not display something in a given square? To be clear, I mean among the artwork loaded into...

I suspect that this one is not going to have many specific answers, as it probably just comes down to the individual game and how it was programmed. But even so, I'm wondering what limitations influenced the sizes of maps that games used. Okay, I know some were influenced by the name table and thing...

I was thinking about it on my to work tonight, and effectively what Castlevania is doing is letting you walk the distance between you and the wall. I could set up the collision in my game to use raycasting to find the distance between the player and the wall, and then move the player no more than th...

You know, I just realized that tracking from the center isn't going to have the offset problems I was thinking of. If, that is, that I make sure all objects use even numbers in their dimensions. (Or all odd, but it makes more sense to use even, since the tiles are all 8x8.) Yes, the object's center ...

you can still get stopped by blocks that are at face-level but don't go all the way to the ground. Are you saying it's impossible to go down those stairs in the screenshot you posted? Oh right, the stairs. No, the stairs work, but they are triggered by pressing down. They are really a separate elem...

If I had to guess, I'd say that Castlevania's collision routine only checks for Simon's feet. If he is under a block there isn't any collision because the feet only intersect with the bottom 8 pixels. It still works when colliding with tall walls because the feet would hit the side of the wall and ...

I'm rebuilding my game's collision system manually so that I can make it follow the NES more accurately. (Friendly reminder, I'm not actually building this for the NES, I'm just trying to emulate the NES.) So far, it is going good. I have successfully made a falling object properly get blocked from ...

Now I'm really not sure how I want to proceed... I'm in the process of rebuilding a lot of the basics for my game. For one, I'm forcing it to move objects in whole-pixel increments. For this to work properly, I'm also building my own collision system, which honestly is going better than I had though...

Okay, but if the object is tracked from the center, how does a NES game handle the logical offset of using values in whole numbers?
If a character is 16 units (pixels) wide, then the character's exact center is in-between the eighth and ninth pixel.

As I'm building my game to emulate the NES's capabilities, it occurs to me that it may be more reasonable to track my objects from their corner, rather than their center. I suspect this is how NES games did it anyway. It's simple logic, really. Positions and things need to be whole integers, and if ...

I was not aware that fixed-point was a thing. So the games can store things in fractions of 1/256 very easily. Good to know. And logically, because of how the screen is drawn, the character will not move until they have reached a full 1 pixel to move. I suppose this applies to collision as well as r...