I'm making a 2-player fighting game. Similarly to the author also doing quite a lot in a frame: pixel-perfect collisions, input buffer parsing, character rotations, complex state transitions ( damn fighting games character have dozens of these! ) and planning soon to ad an AI.
I tried going down to stable 30fps, but it kinda sucks for a fast-paced game.
This thread was very helpful. I realized I can cheat a bit, i.e. only compute collisions for player one in even frames and for player 2 in odd frames and so on. Thanks!
Does 30 fps look too uncanny for a retro style game?
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Re: Does 30 fps look too uncanny for a retro style game?
Mesen has a code counter, so you can see which code is executed more than the rest. That might be helpful for seeing which functions are executed too often, and could be tightened up.
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Re: Does 30 fps look too uncanny for a retro style game?
I've been keeping tight cycle counting, leading to a premature optimization nightmares, and obsessively commenting cycle counts for blocks of code, which I will tolerate for a hobby project.
So far, the cycle count for 4 way scrolling, metatile decompression, actor depth sorting (for distance priority,) actor drawing relative to the camera position (maxing out at 32 visible actors or 64 sprites, whichever comes first,) moving all 32 actors per frame, and reserved cycles for music playback is estimated to be around 20,000. I'd like to add pseudorandom sprite flickering, which is difficult to do with depth sorted priority ordering.
I've got some things I can do still to reduce a one or two thousand cycles; I'm sure that people smarter than I have already solved these problems.
Re: Does 30 fps look too uncanny for a retro style game?
I seem to remember Metal Slug ran at 30 fps, as did Sonic Spinball most of the time. Micronics games for NES ran even slower.
In the modern era of NES, Garbage Pail Kids and Full Quiet run at 60 fps most of the time and frameskip at 30 fps (by skipping every second frame's draw phase, doing move-draw-move instead of move-draw-move-draw) if they start to encounter mild lag.
In the modern era of NES, Garbage Pail Kids and Full Quiet run at 60 fps most of the time and frameskip at 30 fps (by skipping every second frame's draw phase, doing move-draw-move instead of move-draw-move-draw) if they start to encounter mild lag.
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Re: Does 30 fps look too uncanny for a retro style game?
Sonic Spinball was written in C so it makes sense that it would run slower.