Attribute / Tile

[tokumaru]

Well, I am using 4x4 metatiles. But doing free all-directional scrolling - it's not obvious to me why I need to read the attribute tables for that, am I missing something?
(I'm using 4 name tables, if that makes a difference)

Even if you do have the off-screen space for updates in all directions (which you do because you're using 4 name tables), you still have to deal with the fact each name table is 30 tiles tall, and that number is not divisible by 4, so in every other vertical name table the attributes of your 4x4 metatiles will be misaligned with the attribute table, meaning you'll have to shift and mix attributes from different metatiles (or a buffer in RAM) to form the final attribute bytes.

That is, unless you take the easy way out, which's truncating the bottommost row of metatiles in every screen, using only the top half, so that attributes never misalign. That's as easy as 8-way scrolling gets, but I think it's weird to pretend that sections of your level maps don't exist.

[gauauu]

That is, unless you take the easy way out, which's truncating the bottommost row of metatiles in every screen, using only the top half, so that attributes never misalign. That's as easy as 8-way scrolling gets, but I think it's weird to pretend that sections of your level maps don't exist.

Heh, after a lot of thought and internal debate, that's exactly what I'm doing. I started writing the routines to do the mis-aligned metatiles, and said "forget this" -- so yeah, sections of my level maps won't actually exist :-/

[tokumaru]

Yeah, that simplifies the rendering code a lot, but slightly complicates the logic side, since now you'll also need to skip those rows when testing for collisions, meaning you'll probably need a few Y >= 240? checks here and there.

[gauauu]

Yup. Most of the checks are pretty simple so far. The only annoying ones I've hit at this point are checking for characters that span the 240-px boundary. Might be worth tracking y2 for each character just to avoid having to recompute that at each collision check.

[Myask]

Use the hidden data to label your maps, mayhap~

Or use it to spell out another message.

I asked this question, or close to it.