Forums

High everyone.

I'm doing a bit of research to mimic the master system as close as possible, for the game i am currently working on. I understand the palette restriction and the sprites per line, but i need a rough estimate for the max level size to sprites and tiles i want to have in one maximum sized level.

I read the doc about 512 patterns of 8x8, but i'm not sure of what i can do level size with the amount of assets i want shown. It's a side scrolling action game.

Here is the assists broken down, for what i thinking in one level.

Player: 24 sprites of 16x32. Plus 1 8x8 projectile.
Foes: 15 sprites (combination of two foes in total) of 16x16
Level Tileset: 93 8x8 tiles.

Thanks for reading!

There's no maximum level size since that's not a concept tied to the hardware. The difficulty in writing SMS/GG code is to juggle the little CPU resources the machine has. You need to update VDP data (tilemap, sprite map, tiles, palette, scrolling data among other things, potentially synchronized with display) along with music and the game logic.

There's so many ways this can done and this is closely tied to your game design. What constitute a level is open to much interpretation.

Left-to-right scrolling games are typically "streaming" data in and carry little state or don't need to update/store things that are past the player screen. Therefore those games often don't really have limitation other than underlying indexing limitations (a lot of code may depend on 8-bit or 16-bit offset) or storing positions. But then you can even "rewrap" your positions and have an infinite scrolling.

Many games where you can go in multiple direction are splitting their levels in smaller chunks in-between which the game fade-out and load the next sub-level. For example Wonder Boy III stores X positions as a triplet of 8-bit with 8-bit of decimal precision, so pixel positions goes from 0 to 65535 storing a maximum of 256 screens worth of X position. However the game's "levels" are only actually 6 screen worth, because a copy of the map is stored in RAM and it stores data for the various objects.

Other game manages to have bidirectional levels with no cut. Looking at the Maps section http://www.smspower.org/Maps/ may get you an idea.

Ah i see, this is very informative. I'll take a look at the link and thanks for helping me out! @Bock 8)

Author	Message
Orlan Rod Joined: 28 May 2015 Posts: 118	Maximum level size question. Posted: Thu May 28, 2015 8:23 pm
Orlan Rod Joined: 28 May 2015 Posts: 118	High everyone. I'm doing a bit of research to mimic the master system as close as possible, for the game i am currently working on. I understand the palette restriction and the sprites per line, but i need a rough estimate for the max level size to sprites and tiles i want to have in one maximum sized level. I read the doc about 512 patterns of 8x8, but i'm not sure of what i can do level size with the amount of assets i want shown. It's a side scrolling action game. Here is the assists broken down, for what i thinking in one level. Player: 24 sprites of 16x32. Plus 1 8x8 projectile. Foes: 15 sprites (combination of two foes in total) of 16x16 Level Tileset: 93 8x8 tiles. Thanks for reading!

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8653 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Thu May 28, 2015 8:41 pm Last edited by Bock on Thu May 28, 2015 9:49 pm; edited 1 time in total
	There's no maximum level size since that's not a concept tied to the hardware. The difficulty in writing SMS/GG code is to juggle the little CPU resources the machine has. You need to update VDP data (tilemap, sprite map, tiles, palette, scrolling data among other things, potentially synchronized with display) along with music and the game logic. There's so many ways this can done and this is closely tied to your game design. What constitute a level is open to much interpretation. Left-to-right scrolling games are typically "streaming" data in and carry little state or don't need to update/store things that are past the player screen. Therefore those games often don't really have limitation other than underlying indexing limitations (a lot of code may depend on 8-bit or 16-bit offset) or storing positions. But then you can even "rewrap" your positions and have an infinite scrolling. Many games where you can go in multiple direction are splitting their levels in smaller chunks in-between which the game fade-out and load the next sub-level. For example Wonder Boy III stores X positions as a triplet of 8-bit with 8-bit of decimal precision, so pixel positions goes from 0 to 65535 storing a maximum of 256 screens worth of X position. However the game's "levels" are only actually 6 screen worth, because a copy of the map is stored in RAM and it stores data for the various objects. Other game manages to have bidirectional levels with no cut. Looking at the Maps section http://www.smspower.org/Maps/ may get you an idea.

Orlan Rod Joined: 28 May 2015 Posts: 118	Posted: Thu May 28, 2015 9:22 pm
Orlan Rod Joined: 28 May 2015 Posts: 118	Ah i see, this is very informative. I'll take a look at the link and thanks for helping me out! @Bock 8)

Forums

View topic - Maximum level size question.