Posted By
cobbpg
on 2023-08-15
10:46:04
|  Re: Stunt Car Racer
Finally back from work so I can react to this deluge of messages! :P
> It looks way more smoother, almost as if the frame rate has doubled and loving the new colors.
I saw several comments along these lines, which I found amusing, since the frame rate is pretty much the same as on the C64. This version actually does implement a few optimisations, but the best they can do is offset the effect of the extra work needed to handle twice as much colour data as in the original. In any case, if I could squeeze in the screen clear optimisation, that should have a noticeable effect. I tested the idea with a modified C64 build that I adapted to cartridge, so I'd have ample space to unroll code, and it really did breathe a new life into the game.
> It might be a cool feature to allow user define colors for the track and sky with so many to choose from, just for added fun.
At the moment these are mostly hardcoded and baked into assets. The only thing you can change via a single byte is the chroma component of the ground, the rest would be tricky to handle during runtime.
> You could built in a setting which switches off the overlayed car or part of the animations in favour of speeding up the 3d rendering.
That wouldn't help with the speed too much, since the overlay is basically free; it's added as part of the screen clear step, before any lines are rendered. The fire is also free (I just choose the picture used during clearing depending on whether it needs to show or not). You could save a bit of time on the wheels, but they are not very significant in the grand scheme of things. The only thing that could help with frame rate besides the above mentioned optimisations would be to shrink the viewport, and that would really take away from the fun factor.
> I wonder if this would have beaten the Lemmings at the Árok Party?
To me, Lemmings is an infinitely more impressive port. The code for SCR could be reused almost in its entirety, with only minor, mostly cosmetic changes, while Lemmings needed a complete rewrite.
> TL;DR, engine sound could probably still be improved, i.e. made more similar to that of the original one, by code taking the TED's frequency curve into account.
Yes, I gave this some thought while adapting the sounds, but I came to the conclusion that it's not worth the additional memory needed for a LUT, since it's going to sound different anyway. While playing the game in its current form it feels to me that the frequency feedback is adequate: it does the job at least. I'd rather focus on more valuable features. Of course when there's a public build and people have low-effort/low-cost suggestions to improve it, I'm going to be open to that.
All in all, based on the overall feedback I'll be working to recover the key rebinding and load/save functionalities, since they seem quite feasible at the moment. I'm just going to leave out unneeded functions, like the encryption logic or the ability to list the disk directory (yes, you can do that in the original by typing DIR for the filename). If all goes well, hopefully I can get the release build ready later this week.
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