Hi. Anders here. Just a quick FYI on the MT-32 question that is popping up in the comments here and on the Kickstarter page. There is no viable option for David to implement MT-32 into these versions of the game. The old XTs can't handle MIDI-data like you'd expect from similar games (Dune2, MI1/2, Warcraft etc). So the only sound systems available are PC speaker, Tandy 3-voice and AdLib (and this one is stripped to only three channels to keep the workload to a minimum with both composing and coding for it). However, we do compose for the MT-32 and full AdLib in mind, so the downloadable sound track and cassettes will have proper music featured. You just have to play those on the side while playing, sorry for that - but those are the limitations of the hardware and this project. Best regards Anders
what's the tracker that you are using ? and from where can I download it ? Just curious because I'm using VGM to play music on the Tandy, but the exported data is too big for my needs, and I'm looking for an alternative. thanks.
Atari ST: "Hey Apple! XT machines can't handle MIDI!" Apple IIe: "HA! Weak....I can and I'm only 1 Mhz!". 5160: "Shut up! I'm good at other things!" LOL
I can't believe that you have already made so much progress on this game, especially writing it in actual assembly, with a featureless text editor, and no version control, and even no bug tracking. It's blowing my mind how hardcore true retro this is.
He has ALREADY a version control of some kind, bug tracking is made as a list in notepad, and i agree that he did all this with a nearly featureless primitive text editor.
Hey hey hey hey hey hey heeeeyyy... Anchovies are the little fishy gods of the sea. Died and cooked on our pizzas for their heavenly godliness. Nothing says "Hmmmm that's a good slice!" than a garlic, jalapepino, pepperoni, super super salty anchovie, cheesy mouthful of delight. Unless there is pineapple as well, then it is orgasmic !!!!!!
I'm sure it helps to be your own boss. Think of how many games and movies have been stripped of all virtue by overly conservative producers and marketing-execs who only dream of huge mass market sales. One reason these new retro games are so awesome is that making money isn't the primary goal. If it was, they'd be making games for new systems. Mass market, copy/paste, fit-the-mold, do what works. And a hefty serving of DLC. (Yes, I am aware David is getting money for this, but it's clear his main motivation is a deep enthusiasm for the platform, and he doesn't have a stodgy, uninspired overlord telling him to hurry up, cut features, etc.)
Depending on how much memory or compute you have available, we used to solve those path finding issues with either waypoints (baked into the map), or A* (or automatically generated waypoints using A*, e.g. they're compiled into the maps ahead of time, automatically).
Yes please do so. I, unfortunately, don't have space for a boxed copy (and no old machine with a disk drive). But I would love to try it and support your work.
"Hi, so i ordered my copy of Planet X2....and it had what looked like Pizza sauce and a smudge of grease on the sleeve, can i get a new copy shipped out!?" ------hehehehe!
I know many younger devs may not understand the point of Assembler, but back in the day of these machines, many games were written in ASM because you needed to have tight access to the hardware for optimization and polish-- there just wasn't a better way. Even with a C (not C++) compiler, devs wanted to manage every byte, where it went when assembled, and bare-metal CPU efficiency. I'm glad to see you made this choice. This will certainly keep the game "period authentic" not just in how it was made, but how it will feel because of how it was written. I appreciate your efforts. I've always wanted to write a game in ASM but never managed to find the time. This is quite an inspiration.
As a 90s kid, while I never wrote entire (professional) programs in assembly, I have written parts of programs in assembly, when speed was paramount. And boy, was that tough. Fun, and full-filling seeing a machine run at its max potential, but tough. Just thinking about writing full complex programs in assembly only gives me a headache. I know it used to be done like that; I know I can do it; but I never wanna do it that way unless I don't have an option.
Also worth pointing out is that prior to Intel's P6 microarchitecture (first used in the Pentium Pro before being used in the Pentium II), x86 CPUs were in-order (no speculative execution) so you had complete control over timing. This lead to "crazy" stuff like manually interleaving instructions that took numerous cycles (like division) with other instructions that happened faster so that the results would be ready just at the time you needed them. This is the sort of stuff that compilers and speculative execution now basically handle for you, especially on AMD64 where there's a lot more registers to keep track of. That old-school approach is why you used to get games and demos that had different executables or command line options for different generations/manufacturers of x86 CPUs as they had differing numbers of execution units and different instruction timings.
Assembler remains needed. The compilers which convert higher level languages (c, c++) to CPU instructions would otherwise be near impossible to even create.
Damn man. I used to write games in Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS in mode 13h and that was hard enough with no APIs aside from what you could create yourself. Doing this in ASM is crazy. Props.
Agreed. I know David is really comfortable with ASM so that's one reason he went that route. I know he thinks he could not get performance out of C, but the Borland Turbo C (and Turbo Pascal) compilers produce awesomely tiny and fast machine code. In the end, it's a trade off between efficiency to create vs. efficiency to execute. Since he is one guy doing all of the coding, I guess ASM is fine, if a bit short sighted. In 3 years, it's unlikely he will be able to actually reopen and maintain what he built.
Kris M saving time depends. On most projects I’m as fast in C as in ASM. Figuring out what needs to be done and how costs more time then typing in the right lines of assembly or C and on these older machines the hll overhead actually makes a dent in not time sensitive operations too
Good grief. You really are coding like it’s 1986. Notepad? Snapshot folders? If you drink Mountain Dew, there is a good chance we would have been great friends in high school LOL
David, you've worked really hard for this stuff. I just want to congratulate you on even getting this far--a lot of indie game devs don't get the chance to see their game kickstarted, let alone released on a "dead" platform. You've earned every bit of praise.
Dallas Quest on the Tandy CoCo had a color check screen that showed the colors used in the game and said to press the reset button repeatedly until the colors matched the description. Maybe you could add an option like "16 Color Composite with colorbar screen" and before the game starts it will let them shift the colors until it matches correctly so you know they are on the right set of colors. Or maybe ask the question a few times at start up and if the user says the colors are correct several times in a row, stop asking but leave the palette shift option in the menu just in case.
Yeah, the CoCo 1 and CoCo 2 had to deal with the same situation... then the CoCo 3 made a stable choice at bootup, so it always picked the same colors, either the right ones or the wrong ones for your program! If the pattern your program happened to pick made the wrong colors, you could hold down some key and press the reset button and it would switch to the other colors. (Or, on the CoCo 3 you could poke at the palette to change it to any of a whole lot more colors anyhow. But no older programs could have been coded for that. :) )
Wow. That music sounds so great on the Tandy. Any way I can get source for the tracker? Also, are you using compiled sprites on the vga mode? It makes transparency super fast.
That demo tune sounded great on PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice, and AdLib sounds! A little strange for me to hear FM synth doing arpeggios, but still not bad 👌🏽
You can do them in S3M files. Arpeggios are a supported effect and S3M supports FM instruments. Unfortunately only a few player programs do and hardly any of them support the use of both FM and samples at the same time.
Bless you for keeping the Old Ways alive. Watching your channel is like taking a tour of my childhood and gives me appreciation for those who did this stuff for a living back in the 80s.
19:23 Yay! Every so often, I binge-watch a bunch of your videos, kind of at random, based on what is suggested on the side. So only today did I learn about your Planet X2 game (which looked pretty cool), and then immediately after learned you were working on Planet X3 (which looked even cooler), aaaand then also that I missed it's Kickstarter... :P
WOW! Earlier today I was thinking about asking you about what kind of tools you were using (or used) to build these games. So this is an amazing coincidence!!. Thanks for the video i enjoyed it a lot. As for the tools I just wanted to make a suggestion, I don't want to mess with your workflow but I'd like to advice you to use git, even if you don't push your code to GitHub or something like that (albeit you probably should), you can just have a local repository. The reason is that is a lot easier to follow changes in git, because you add a commit message to each commit, and each commit shows what was added, removed or changed. You can checkout files from any commit at any time, you can checkout any revision at any time without risking loosing work. If you mess up, git reset and git stash are there to make your life easier. Also since you have the CGA and VGA versions sharing code you can actually use branches to easily handle this. Even if you aren't planning on sharing the source code or working with anyone else, using a version control system is a good practice, and may actually save you a lot of aggravation.
A* is always able to find the correct path to the target (provided you define the heuristic correctly) so he's probably not using it. I'm guessing due to it being too costly.
Yeah, but bad pathfinding of StarCraft 1 is part of the design. Imagine if you could just send a squad of Dragoons over a bridge with just one click, then anyone could play the game, not just people who can click a million times a second.
It's pretty tricky to code really rigorous pathfinding algorithms with the speed and memory limitations of the IBM PC, so I suspect he's using very simple heuristics.
In Planet X2 you can build a wall around your factory so that the enemy cant reach you but your sentries do. Same issue here. Maybe you can code enemies that way that they actually shoot things that are blocking the path. To realise that, you could make walls stronger than bushes for example. Also i like to mention that lefties like me could have some problems with the key bindings. (in Planet X2 e.g. the unit selection starts at 0 on the keyboard, annoying af). A cutomizable option is on my wishlist. And additional, i would like to see a confirm button when you blow up your tank. Because i blew my factory so many times by hitting the wrong button. All in all, i love to see your effort to make this game something great. Keep up the good work!
How i did my path finding. 1. Detect unit is stuck (e.g. stays in same place) 2. Walk to random location on map 3. If stuck again or arrives at random loc, try again to go to original target loc. Very simple but surprisingly effective. Hope it helps
Wow! This project is looking great! Well done so far. Although I didn't get in on the Kickstarter, I'll be keeping an eye out for purchase after release.
Some tips from an old timer: 1. The PC speaker is better at tones than effects (unless you dedicate the CPU to doing 1 bit WAV output), while the Texas chip in the Tandy is really good at effects. So maybe use PCS for the third music voice and a Tandy channel for effects. 2. Hercules can be run in a mode that closely resembles CGA Mono, it just requires a 9MHz 8088 and a background routine to copy half the 16K CGA buffer to the second half of the 32K buffer at BC000h. So it can be shoehorned into the CGA version for those with a turbo button. 3. Maybe you can get LGR to test VGA on his 8MHz original AT.
When I was in high school, the computers in our lab were all Hercules machines, but we had a TSR called SIMCGA which let us run CGA games on them. You could use that to run Planet X3 on a Hercules machine (if it's anywhere to be found on the Internet today)
I REALLY like your attitude and the way you’re taking further your projects. I always thought that the machines from the 80s/90s had more to say, for they really teach us to be efficient in order to achieve whatever objective has been set. Also...it’s strange, but you make me want to really learn to code! I hope you and your team succeed in the best way possible, you’ve got a new fan. :)
You should consider trying out palette cycling effects in VGA-mode. For the high level of detail-and it does look great-some places like the rivers look too static. On a technical note, most assemblers support conditional assembly for dealing with different feature or hardware configurations. You'll have to check your assembler's manual, but there's no way you need to maintain two separate code-bases that are almost entirely the same.
Really that Version Control is really hard, Maybe its fancy but it really helps speed up using Git / TFS. Also you could try to improve on that bug list to make your life easier, maybe its less fancy but a shared excel at least? Also Keep it up the good work, great progress you have made so far
Exactly, and with git you can make it automatically create the snapshot folders if you want to, just use hooks. Also a common misconception is you need something like GitHub to use git, you don't, you can use it totally on your local machine and is very easy to setup.
Awesome! Thanks for adding the box, I missed out on X2 (and X1). Wanting to get a copy made the deluxe set the obvious choice for me, and I guess a lot of other people too.
Very nice! I used to love assembly programming on my C64. Never really done much of it in DOS, though I used to have some C functions with some DOS assembly embedded for graphic routines (VGA) at the time. Kind of late now, but that is one option and was quite common back in the day, using C with assembly code in some of the functions that needed the speed. It was pretty simple to do really. Path finding was an interesting topic I explored (as well as maze generation). There's many ways to do this. I can't recall what I ended up settling on. Your three voice sound seems a lot like many C64 games which used a similar number of channels, often 3 with a 4th channel used to modify one of the others. I loved the retro sound style you chose, very nice! One of the things I always enjoyed was coding my level editors. I never did make my own graphic editor, but now I want to! ;) Oh, one last thing I found handy is I always keep a programming journal. I have entries for every day I work on my game with the date and time and then comments I add on what I did and what went wrong, how I fixed it etc. It's been interesting to look back on one I have since the early part of the 2000s and it goes right up to present day!
Do a Megadrive/Genesis later! Imagine having gaming hardware with sprites and smooth scrolling, it'd probably look and feel like all those Electronic Arts Amiga ports to the old Sega machine.
That'd be sick! Throw us console gamers a bone, will ya 😂 for some reason, I do think the Mega Drive/Genesis would be the best fit. I dunno why exactly but I can just see it. With some cranking FM synth tunes and smooth-ass scrolling and that console's 320x240 mode, yeah, that'd be a fine thing!
What would be cool for a Genesis version would be an option to pick between the Tandy 3-voice and Adlib versions, since3 the Genesis had a Tandy 3-voice in it.
It hasn't been developed with only a mailing list for 20 years or more. It used a commercial source code manager for a little while, (I think it was called Perforce,) and then, under pressure to use only open-source tooling, Linus Torvalds wrote Git. (Github came many years later.) Even when they did use a mailing list, the powerful Unix diff and patch commands made a difference. Unless, given your username... you were trolling? :)
Path finding is very important and I am glad you talked about it. I know a major update which made Minecraft more interesting was the pathfinding update back in a much earlier version. I remember doom having very simple pathfinding and the demons did get stuck a lot. But one thing they seem to have added was a random movement process to try to get them "unstuck". Bacteria do a "run" and "tumble" process. Here they run in a straight line for a direction, then randomly select a new direction (with a slight bias to where they want to go) and do another run. Eventually, although slow as backtracking is part of the possibilities, they can make it past any obstacle if it is possible to even pass.
Notepad, 8088 assembly ... "I have two separate codebases for CGA and VGA". You just found out why people try to code in the highest level language they can get away with :)
Don't think it'd be very hard to write a tool to compile the two executables from the rendering dependant and independent assembly code though. Save that ugly copy pasting.
Pretty sure most assemblers would support an include directive to automate the copy-pasting, so it shouldn't be a huge problem as long as he's not putting everything in a single file for each program.
@@badgerlordpatrick6493 As they say, "premature optimization is the death of any codebase". I know several people who write code for embedded platforms (like, microcontrollers that fit into a watch) and they all write in C. When everything runs they then look at their bottlenecks and selectively write assembly for just those parts.
Thank you for these videos. You motivated me to fix my 486 motherboard that was getting a keyboard error. Battery acid had corroded traces. Ran a new wired trace under the board between two points and am back in business.
Are there any plans for releasing a digital copy? I would love to play these games and want to support your work, but I don't currently have a C64 or an old computer. Thanks, keep up the awesome work!
Your software development process is as true to the 8-bit era as your theme music is. In both cases: awesome. By far my favorite retro computing channel.
You mentioned that you are planning for transparency around units, but do you also plan for additional sprites for up and down movement, so that the vehicles don't "slide sideways" up an down?
I like how most of the comments about a game update is more about the fact that he uses notepad and folder snapshots. Idk how he does it either though, I would at least need line numbers. If I was in David’s shoes I would probably use VSC, as it’s basically suped up notepad with plugins.
Or you could probably introduce an "I'm stuck" sub-routine where if the unit is stuck path finding, it goes back where it came from and tries to pick a different random path.
If he has memory to spare he could also do one of those ant-inspired algorithms where you leave invisible markers on the tiles when you visited them. Those are the ones you avoid then
Pathfinding can be surprisingly difficult if you are trying to do it with as little CPU time and memory as possible. The best improvement to pathfinding would probably be some background routine that uses spare CPU time to look at the current paths and add intermediate waypoints on them so that units are guided around any areas that funnel them into a corner. Quite tricky to implement with assembler. Perhaps an easier way is to implement some form of "road segments" that are placed in the map editor. Units would try to follow them to a node closest to the destination tile before switching back to the old tile based pathfinding.
This is absolutely amazing. I've always wanted to develop my own pixel/voxel game but have always felt discouraged at how difficult it would possibly be but this is pretty inspiring and I'll definitely give it another shot. Can't wait for the full release :D
Great work so far, the VGA version looks amazing! (to be fair, even the CGA version looks good too, even on the IBM 5155 and it's amber CRT) In fact, the amber CRT looks kinda retro-amazing, maybe we could have a amber filter on the game? (just kidding) My bet is, if you release documentation about your graphics routines, someone will make patches for the other graphics cards/modes(like EGA and Hercules) after the release.
My first PC monitor was a yellow phosphor monochrome Lucky Goldstar (which became LG). I much preferred the yellow colour to the more common amber screens of the day, and the green ones were just ugly.
@Martin Green: Were Goldstar's yellow-ish screens less reddish-brown than common amber monitors? Did they use something other than the common P3 phosphor type? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_types
I don't know what the phosphor was, but it was truly yellow, no reddish tint at all. I don't think I ever saw another monitor back then even close. Wish I had a photo to share but I trashed that (still working) monitor many years ago.
This video was so perfect...! First things first, is very nice to see Dave attention to many video modes, so no one was left out of the party...! The VGA graphics are looking very good, love pixel art...! The music, it's catchy, extremely interesting. And the copy production party, sensational, I would like to see an extended video of that day, listen to you guys talking, making jokes, etc... I'm thinking about to buy the game and play on the DOSBOX within my Windows 10 machine.
Also, I'm kind of bummed you didn't use Git since that would have been a really nice way of traveling back in time through the source, as well as see reasons/rationale in the comments on when and why certain decisions were made. It would also make it much simpler to open source later and allow for collaborators that want to fork or fix things.
From the folders he has he can still create a git repository if needed/wanted. You can even date back commits so the date reflects the actual date of the changes. With these daily snapshots it's just much harder to track single features.
Yeah, I realize this but I was hoping for individual commit messages and more granular commits. A lot can happen in a day and the diffs become pretty unreadable once more than a few changesets are involved.
ProgAndy This won't be possible. The TODO file was separate from the version folders and is being mutated. Once Dave is done with his TODO list the entire file will be empty and all the messages will be lost.
+Martin Green Old stock floppies 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 that have never been used is not that difficult to find and most work fine even when they was made 30 years ago.
-bknesheim - *especially* if they were made 30 years ago! The quality of the manufacturing tended to go down as the format got older and more out of date.
grk70s Maybe some VGA clones don't scale mode X correctly. Simple superVGAs like Tseng labs and Realtek on actual analogue monitors will probably do fine, as the scan doubling is done via generic registers and the video signal is identical to 640x480. But LCD/Plasma laptops, cards with DVI out and modern GPUs might fail in unexpected ways.
+Steve Fernandez Kickstarter? This has to be a financial and emotional commitment! This has all the hallmarks of a great production of high dramatic content. It deserves major financial backing and considerable treatment in production and artistic investment. It could be a film that is talked about for a long time and launches a franchise that lasts for decades. I am serious. If it is treated right, it could be huge.
+Jigo James Rolfe makes campy comedy. His brand is nostalgia based around children's products. It would be different than how I imagined it, but i mean, whatever.
I wasn't going to watch this but I couldn't stop. It was so interesting, I was surprised people still play games like this. I started playing games when they were like this, simple and full of adventure. Good job man! I always wanted to design my own game as well, perhaps I will.
![Sean Rii, Karyon, Sharzkii - Taungule [My Love] (Official Music Video)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eJoMuypbSzQ/mqdefault.jpg)
That footage of the disk-writing party is the best thing. Like an 80s independent software publisher came right back to life.
LGR yeah!!! Pure awesomeness!!!
I just read this in your voice.
LGR, do you code? Any chance we can get a game from you too?
Reminds me of a local demoparty in the 90s
Please be a tester for this game
So happy to see how well things are progressing for you with this project.
first reply, but great video 8-Bit-Guy!
Nice to see you here, love your vids as well.
#LongLiveNixieTube
I hope you or the 8 bit guy do more cassette videos :)
OMG Techmoan commented!
How to write a RUclips comment in 10 steps. First off start with... LOL.
Hi. Anders here. Just a quick FYI on the MT-32 question that is popping up in the comments here and on the Kickstarter page. There is no viable option for David to implement MT-32 into these versions of the game. The old XTs can't handle MIDI-data like you'd expect from similar games (Dune2, MI1/2, Warcraft etc). So the only sound systems available are PC speaker, Tandy 3-voice and AdLib (and this one is stripped to only three channels to keep the workload to a minimum with both composing and coding for it).
However, we do compose for the MT-32 and full AdLib in mind, so the downloadable sound track and cassettes will have proper music featured. You just have to play those on the side while playing, sorry for that - but those are the limitations of the hardware and this project.
Best regards
Anders
Since the VGA is a completely different executable, why cant the MT-32 be implemented in the VGA only version?
Cleverwink David must answer that question. I don’t know too much about the source code so there are perhaps facets that I haven’t described here. :)
what's the tracker that you are using ? and from where can I download it ? Just curious because I'm using VGM to play music on the Tandy, but the exported data is too big for my needs, and I'm looking for an alternative. thanks.
That is up to David and Alex to decide. I don't know if Alex, who programmed it, can and/or will allow it to be free/included in the game package. :)
Atari ST: "Hey Apple! XT machines can't handle MIDI!" Apple IIe: "HA! Weak....I can and I'm only 1 Mhz!". 5160: "Shut up! I'm good at other things!" LOL
I can't believe that you have already made so much progress on this game, especially writing it in actual assembly, with a featureless text editor, and no version control, and even no bug tracking. It's blowing my mind how hardcore true retro this is.
He has ALREADY a version control of some kind, bug tracking is made as a list in notepad, and i agree that he did all this with a nearly featureless primitive text editor.
@@mariannmariann2052 he isn't even using notepad ++ xD
A kickstarter that actual follows through, doesnt over promise, and keeps steady information filled updates coming? What parallel world is this?
Ryan Amberger Yeah, I was expecting another Yogventures situation. Good on him for being better than them. 👍
Yeah. Homestuck this ain't.
its planet X3 :0
Come on guys, it's not *that* uncommon
I'm crying like an anime f- *gets punched*
Planet X2, now with authentic pizza smell packaging
Also that 'disk copy party' is so nostalgic! Apply a VHS filter and it may as well be 1985!
DONT COPY THAT FLOPPY xD
@@LiEnby This is completely legit back-up copy of my original, bought software for my own and only personal use.
"Of course the [todo list] keeps getting..." I legitimately thought you were going to say "longer". That's what happens to me lol.
Why does my Planet X2 smell like pepperoni? lol.
Hey hey hey, just coz most of us are old, no need for dad jokes. oO
I strongly disagree Mr wrecche.
*puts ear horn down*
WHAAAT??
It could be worse, it could be anchovies :-\
Hey hey hey hey hey hey heeeeyyy...
Anchovies are the little fishy gods of the sea. Died and cooked on our pizzas for their heavenly godliness. Nothing says "Hmmmm that's a good slice!" than a garlic, jalapepino, pepperoni, super super salty anchovie, cheesy mouthful of delight.
Unless there is pineapple as well, then it is orgasmic !!!!!!
Congratulations on the awesome kickstarter! That is an incredible amount of work done.
Pizza and disk - copying! Now THAT'S THE 8 BIT SPIRIT.
Free authentic greasy finger print (and if your lucky pepperoni) with every copy. LOL
Limitations breed creativity.
CD audio all but killed game music
I'm sure it helps to be your own boss. Think of how many games and movies have been stripped of all virtue by overly conservative producers and marketing-execs who only dream of huge mass market sales. One reason these new retro games are so awesome is that making money isn't the primary goal. If it was, they'd be making games for new systems. Mass market, copy/paste, fit-the-mold, do what works. And a hefty serving of DLC. (Yes, I am aware David is getting money for this, but it's clear his main motivation is a deep enthusiasm for the platform, and he doesn't have a stodgy, uninspired overlord telling him to hurry up, cut features, etc.)
@@toxy3580 Many games produced after audio CDs became common have a really nice soundtracks, like Skyrim or Gran Turismo.
@@gteixeira nah
@@toxy3580 your opinion is trash
I'm really impressed with the scrolling routine you're using. Smooth scrolling on an IBM PC (5150) is very impressive.
Did they REALLY call it the 5150?
No, it was just the "IBM PC" back then. The model number was 5150. People use the model number now to distinguish the PC, PC XT, and PC AT.
Dude, I wish you uploaded more often.
@Ninja Master: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC#cite_ref-mcmullen19840221_20-1
To me it looks like shifting by a whole tile so its not smooth scrolling.
Awesome stuff bro!
You might just be the only person able to say "Bro!" on this channel and actually make sense :D
I say brah !
Hello 8 bit guy's brother
Dave, you rock. The classic example of a garage project. Inspired!!!
Depending on how much memory or compute you have available, we used to solve those path finding issues with either waypoints (baked into the map), or A* (or automatically generated waypoints using A*, e.g. they're compiled into the maps ahead of time, automatically).
You could also sell the game on Steam, executing it via DOSBox, just like Wolfenstein and Doom are played
GOG.com too!
Please please do this. I wasn't planning on buying but this might change my mind. Steam is way more accessible to me than a physical game.
Yes please do so. I, unfortunately, don't have space for a boxed copy (and no old machine with a disk drive). But I would love to try it and support your work.
Planet X2 could also land on Steam, wrapped in Vice, just like Galencia does it.
I pre-order my steam copy too
"Hi, so i ordered my copy of Planet X2....and it had what looked like Pizza sauce and a smudge of grease on the sleeve, can i get a new copy shipped out!?" ------hehehehe!
I was thinking similarly.
That PC speaker demo track gave me goosebumps. Bzzzt!
It sounds like you have hired the pefect guy for the job. Pun intended!
The work you are doing is astonishing. Truly amazing, David! I get so excited when I see a new video from you!
Somehow that disk-copying party seemed like the happiest thing ever.
Holy crap that pc speaker music!! It's incredible
Amazing! I really enjoy these update videos with such a detailed walk through the process. Just amazing. Great work!
I know many younger devs may not understand the point of Assembler, but back in the day of these machines, many games were written in ASM because you needed to have tight access to the hardware for optimization and polish-- there just wasn't a better way. Even with a C (not C++) compiler, devs wanted to manage every byte, where it went when assembled, and bare-metal CPU efficiency. I'm glad to see you made this choice. This will certainly keep the game "period authentic" not just in how it was made, but how it will feel because of how it was written. I appreciate your efforts. I've always wanted to write a game in ASM but never managed to find the time. This is quite an inspiration.
nah fam gotta use js and html to write games now
As a 90s kid, while I never wrote entire (professional) programs in assembly, I have written parts of programs in assembly, when speed was paramount. And boy, was that tough. Fun, and full-filling seeing a machine run at its max potential, but tough.
Just thinking about writing full complex programs in assembly only gives me a headache. I know it used to be done like that; I know I can do it; but I never wanna do it that way unless I don't have an option.
Also worth pointing out is that prior to Intel's P6 microarchitecture (first used in the Pentium Pro before being used in the Pentium II), x86 CPUs were in-order (no speculative execution) so you had complete control over timing.
This lead to "crazy" stuff like manually interleaving instructions that took numerous cycles (like division) with other instructions that happened faster so that the results would be ready just at the time you needed them. This is the sort of stuff that compilers and speculative execution now basically handle for you, especially on AMD64 where there's a lot more registers to keep track of.
That old-school approach is why you used to get games and demos that had different executables or command line options for different generations/manufacturers of x86 CPUs as they had differing numbers of execution units and different instruction timings.
Assembler remains needed. The compilers which convert higher level languages (c, c++) to CPU instructions would otherwise be near impossible to even create.
Damn man. I used to write games in Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS in mode 13h and that was hard enough with no APIs aside from what you could create yourself. Doing this in ASM is crazy. Props.
Agreed. I know David is really comfortable with ASM so that's one reason he went that route. I know he thinks he could not get performance out of C, but the Borland Turbo C (and Turbo Pascal) compilers produce awesomely tiny and fast machine code. In the end, it's a trade off between efficiency to create vs. efficiency to execute. Since he is one guy doing all of the coding, I guess ASM is fine, if a bit short sighted. In 3 years, it's unlikely he will be able to actually reopen and maintain what he built.
Lassi Kinnunen yes, but most c programs used inefficiënt 4 byte pointers, which will dearly cost you.
assembler IS crazy, but really improves speed. I was astonished that this could run that smoothly in VGA on a 10Mhz 286 :)
C and assembler are very easily mixed.
Code time sensitive in asm, the rest in C. Save major amounts of time.
Kris M saving time depends. On most projects I’m as fast in C as in ASM. Figuring out what needs to be done and how costs more time then typing in the right lines of assembly or C and on these older machines the hll overhead actually makes a dent in not time sensitive operations too
Techmoan AND 8-bit Guy in the same day
Tru
And LGR thrifts yesterday. It's a good weekend
Yeah, real shame youtube hasn't shaken then animu avatar aids yet though.
This is really looking awesome David.I really appreciate all the hard, detail-oriented work you guys are putting into this. :D
The music and VGA mode look/sound awesome!:D Keep up the good work, love what I'm seeing so far.
Good grief. You really are coding like it’s 1986. Notepad? Snapshot folders? If you drink Mountain Dew, there is a good chance we would have been great friends in high school LOL
i code the same way. XD
I'm feeling the pain of using MM-DD-YYYY dates! On files I always use YYYYMMDD-SomeName sorts much better.
YYYYMMDD is what I do. I don't know why my lab mate would use MMDDYYYY.
YMD or bust.
Notepad Plus is the only way to go.
So impressed man. It looks wonderful. Can't wait to play it! Assembly is hardcore!
Actually assembler is pretty simple and basic. And tedious of course but not hardcore.
Gonna be amazing. Congrats on the successful kickstarter
Animal Facts How much did he get?
Pumpkin $113,640 out of $30,000 expected. It's around 0:40 in the video
This is amazing.
Thanks for taking us “behind the scenes” with all this detail into how the game is made!
David, you've worked really hard for this stuff. I just want to congratulate you on even getting this far--a lot of indie game devs don't get the chance to see their game kickstarted, let alone released on a "dead" platform. You've earned every bit of praise.
Dallas Quest on the Tandy CoCo had a color check screen that showed the colors used in the game and said to press the reset button repeatedly until the colors matched the description. Maybe you could add an option like "16 Color Composite with colorbar screen" and before the game starts it will let them shift the colors until it matches correctly so you know they are on the right set of colors. Or maybe ask the question a few times at start up and if the user says the colors are correct several times in a row, stop asking but leave the palette shift option in the menu just in case.
Yeah, the CoCo 1 and CoCo 2 had to deal with the same situation... then the CoCo 3 made a stable choice at bootup, so it always picked the same colors, either the right ones or the wrong ones for your program! If the pattern your program happened to pick made the wrong colors, you could hold down some key and press the reset button and it would switch to the other colors. (Or, on the CoCo 3 you could poke at the palette to change it to any of a whole lot more colors anyhow. But no older programs could have been coded for that. :) )
You are one of the smartest if not smartest person I've found on RUclips. Keep doing what you doing You are the best! Greetings from Norway
Amazing work you put in here. Really cool to hear about all the difficulties and how you attack them.
Wow. That music sounds so great on the Tandy. Any way I can get source for the tracker? Also, are you using compiled sprites on the vga mode? It makes transparency super fast.
Ryan Yoder How 14 Hours Ago?
The video was available for Patreon supporters before it was made accessible for the public
And for Kickstarter backers like me! :)
But how it works?
That demo tune sounded great on PC Speaker, Tandy 3-voice, and AdLib sounds! A little strange for me to hear FM synth doing arpeggios, but still not bad 👌🏽
You can do them in S3M files. Arpeggios are a supported effect and S3M supports FM instruments. Unfortunately only a few player programs do and hardly any of them support the use of both FM and samples at the same time.
Bless you for keeping the Old Ways alive. Watching your channel is like taking a tour of my childhood and gives me appreciation for those who did this stuff for a living back in the 80s.
19:23 Yay!
Every so often, I binge-watch a bunch of your videos, kind of at random, based on what is suggested on the side.
So only today did I learn about your Planet X2 game (which looked pretty cool), and then immediately after learned you were working on Planet X3 (which looked even cooler), aaaand then also that I missed it's Kickstarter... :P
WOW! Earlier today I was thinking about asking you about what kind of tools you were using (or used) to build these games. So this is an amazing coincidence!!. Thanks for the video i enjoyed it a lot.
As for the tools I just wanted to make a suggestion, I don't want to mess with your workflow but I'd like to advice you to use git, even if you don't push your code to GitHub or something like that (albeit you probably should), you can just have a local repository. The reason is that is a lot easier to follow changes in git, because you add a commit message to each commit, and each commit shows what was added, removed or changed. You can checkout files from any commit at any time, you can checkout any revision at any time without risking loosing work. If you mess up, git reset and git stash are there to make your life easier.
Also since you have the CGA and VGA versions sharing code you can actually use branches to easily handle this. Even if you aren't planning on sharing the source code or working with anyone else, using a version control system is a good practice, and may actually save you a lot of aggravation.
Even 90's RTS games struggled with pathfinding, it's a bit tricky to get it right. Do you use A* search for pathfinding or something similar?
A* is always able to find the correct path to the target (provided you define the heuristic correctly) so he's probably not using it. I'm guessing due to it being too costly.
I guess, it's not a coincidence that Dune 2 was a huge desert you could drive straight across.
Yeah, but bad pathfinding of StarCraft 1 is part of the design. Imagine if you could just send a squad of Dragoons over a bridge with just one click, then anyone could play the game, not just people who can click a million times a second.
It's pretty tricky to code really rigorous pathfinding algorithms with the speed and memory limitations of the IBM PC, so I suspect he's using very simple heuristics.
I'm really impressed by the progress you've made on this. It makes me want to work harder on my own game projects!
I love these videos! - The higher resolution graphics for the VGA version looks incredible. I really am looking forward to playing this :)
WOW!!! The VGA one looks fabulous...VERY easy on the eyes - literally.
This game looks glorious the VGA mode looks awesome but so does CGA also. Man brings a tear to the eyes of this RTS fan.
Congratulations! The game looks fantastic... I really enjoyed the music section.
There's so much passion going into this project, I love watching it all come together.
In Planet X2 you can build a wall around your factory so that the enemy cant reach you but your sentries do. Same issue here. Maybe you can code enemies that way that they actually shoot things that are blocking the path. To realise that, you could make walls stronger than bushes for example. Also i like to mention that lefties like me could have some problems with the key bindings. (in Planet X2 e.g. the unit selection starts at 0 on the keyboard, annoying af). A cutomizable option is on my wishlist. And additional, i would like to see a confirm button when you blow up your tank. Because i blew my factory so many times by hitting the wrong button.
All in all, i love to see your effort to make this game something great. Keep up the good work!
How i did my path finding. 1. Detect unit is stuck (e.g. stays in same place) 2. Walk to random location on map 3. If stuck again or arrives at random loc, try again to go to original target loc. Very simple but surprisingly effective. Hope it helps
Wow! This project is looking great! Well done so far. Although I didn't get in on the Kickstarter, I'll be keeping an eye out for purchase after release.
Great as always David! Keep up the good work, love that music demo btw!
Wow wow wow.. these Music snips were promising indeed!!
Some tips from an old timer:
1. The PC speaker is better at tones than effects (unless you dedicate the CPU to doing 1 bit WAV output), while the Texas chip in the Tandy is really good at effects. So maybe use PCS for the third music voice and a Tandy channel for effects.
2. Hercules can be run in a mode that closely resembles CGA Mono, it just requires a 9MHz 8088 and a background routine to copy half the 16K CGA buffer to the second half of the 32K buffer at BC000h. So it can be shoehorned into the CGA version for those with a turbo button.
3. Maybe you can get LGR to test VGA on his 8MHz original AT.
When I was in high school, the computers in our lab were all Hercules machines, but we had a TSR called SIMCGA which let us run CGA games on them. You could use that to run Planet X3 on a Hercules machine (if it's anywhere to be found on the Internet today)
Fantastic work Dave. The challenge of writing a game for the breadth of configurations is amazing. Much respect.
I REALLY like your attitude and the way you’re taking further your projects. I always thought that the machines from the 80s/90s had more to say, for they really teach us to be efficient in order to achieve whatever objective has been set. Also...it’s strange, but you make me want to really learn to code! I hope you and your team succeed in the best way possible, you’ve got a new fan. :)
You should consider trying out palette cycling effects in VGA-mode. For the high level of detail-and it does look great-some places like the rivers look too static.
On a technical note, most assemblers support conditional assembly for dealing with different feature or hardware configurations. You'll have to check your assembler's manual, but there's no way you need to maintain two separate code-bases that are almost entirely the same.
Really that Version Control is really hard, Maybe its fancy but it really helps speed up using Git / TFS. Also you could try to improve on that bug list to make your life easier, maybe its less fancy but a shared excel at least?
Also Keep it up the good work, great progress you have made so far
Exactly, and with git you can make it automatically create the snapshot folders if you want to, just use hooks. Also a common misconception is you need something like GitHub to use git, you don't, you can use it totally on your local machine and is very easy to setup.
he could even write a changelog and paste the solved bugs in it, so he knows from which to which version he solved a bug
Excellent stuff. I really appreciate for all efforts done.
Incredible music from your videos man. Keep it up!
@David, thanks for update! If only all Kickstarter projects have done such elaborate updates (sigh)...
Awesome! Thanks for adding the box, I missed out on X2 (and X1). Wanting to get a copy made the deluxe set the obvious choice for me, and I guess a lot of other people too.
Plus Planet X1 is free on the 8-bit Guy's website.
Very nice! I used to love assembly programming on my C64. Never really done much of it in DOS, though I used to have some C functions with some DOS assembly embedded for graphic routines (VGA) at the time. Kind of late now, but that is one option and was quite common back in the day, using C with assembly code in some of the functions that needed the speed. It was pretty simple to do really.
Path finding was an interesting topic I explored (as well as maze generation). There's many ways to do this. I can't recall what I ended up settling on.
Your three voice sound seems a lot like many C64 games which used a similar number of channels, often 3 with a 4th channel used to modify one of the others. I loved the retro sound style you chose, very nice! One of the things I always enjoyed was coding my level editors. I never did make my own graphic editor, but now I want to! ;)
Oh, one last thing I found handy is I always keep a programming journal. I have entries for every day I work on my game with the date and time and then comments I add on what I did and what went wrong, how I fixed it etc. It's been interesting to look back on one I have since the early part of the 2000s and it goes right up to present day!
I am so impressed with this project... I loved my C64 and enjoy watching the love you give that amazing machine.
Do a Megadrive/Genesis later! Imagine having gaming hardware with sprites and smooth scrolling, it'd probably look and feel like all those Electronic Arts Amiga ports to the old Sega machine.
That'd be sick! Throw us console gamers a bone, will ya 😂
for some reason, I do think the Mega Drive/Genesis would be the best fit. I dunno why exactly but I can just see it. With some cranking FM synth tunes and smooth-ass scrolling and that console's 320x240 mode, yeah, that'd be a fine thing!
What would be cool for a Genesis version would be an option to pick between the Tandy 3-voice and Adlib versions, since3 the Genesis had a Tandy 3-voice in it.
2:28 You can develop anything with a ftp server if you consider the whole linux kernel is made with a mailing list
It hasn't been developed with only a mailing list for 20 years or more. It used a commercial source code manager for a little while, (I think it was called Perforce,) and then, under pressure to use only open-source tooling, Linus Torvalds wrote Git. (Github came many years later.) Even when they did use a mailing list, the powerful Unix diff and patch commands made a difference.
Unless, given your username... you were trolling? :)
Path finding is very important and I am glad you talked about it. I know a major update which made Minecraft more interesting was the pathfinding update back in a much earlier version. I remember doom having very simple pathfinding and the demons did get stuck a lot. But one thing they seem to have added was a random movement process to try to get them "unstuck". Bacteria do a "run" and "tumble" process. Here they run in a straight line for a direction, then randomly select a new direction (with a slight bias to where they want to go) and do another run. Eventually, although slow as backtracking is part of the possibilities, they can make it past any obstacle if it is possible to even pass.
Your videos make me feel so good, I don't know why. Great work. :)
Notepad, 8088 assembly ... "I have two separate codebases for CGA and VGA". You just found out why people try to code in the highest level language they can get away with :)
Clearly he knows, but he wants something really efficient.
Don't think it'd be very hard to write a tool to compile the two executables from the rendering dependant and independent assembly code though. Save that ugly copy pasting.
Pretty sure most assemblers would support an include directive to automate the copy-pasting, so it shouldn't be a huge problem as long as he's not putting everything in a single file for each program.
@@badgerlordpatrick6493 As they say, "premature optimization is the death of any codebase". I know several people who write code for embedded platforms (like, microcontrollers that fit into a watch) and they all write in C. When everything runs they then look at their bottlenecks and selectively write assembly for just those parts.
Yep in C the CGA or VGA mode would simply be a compile time option to swap in the extra code when needed.
9:39 I can't believe the things you make your game run on XD
Dam Dave, you having lots of hard work but the results are just impressive. All the best
Thank you for these videos. You motivated me to fix my 486 motherboard that was getting a keyboard error. Battery acid had corroded traces. Ran a new wired trace under the board between two points and am back in business.
the PC speaker rendition reminds me of Zak MCkraken and the Alien Mind-benders, which sounded somewhat like that on the PC speaker.
Are there any plans for releasing a digital copy? I would love to play these games and want to support your work, but I don't currently have a C64 or an old computer. Thanks, keep up the awesome work!
He is selling a digital copy for $10, which you can just play on DOS BOX. It said so on his Kickstarter.
As always excellent work, keep up the quality content!
Your software development process is as true to the 8-bit era as your theme music is. In both cases: awesome. By far my favorite retro computing channel.
That looks amazing on the Tandy!
You mentioned that you are planning for transparency around units, but do you also plan for additional sprites for up and down movement, so that the vehicles don't "slide sideways" up an down?
So stoked for this to come out! Great work so far, David!
I must say, those update videos are really entertaining to watch. Can't wait for part 4! :D
I like how most of the comments about a game update is more about the fact that he uses notepad and folder snapshots. Idk how he does it either though, I would at least need line numbers. If I was in David’s shoes I would probably use VSC, as it’s basically suped up notepad with plugins.
Or you could probably introduce an "I'm stuck" sub-routine where if the unit is stuck path finding, it goes back where it came from and tries to pick a different random path.
If he has memory to spare he could also do one of those ant-inspired algorithms where you leave invisible markers on the tiles when you visited them. Those are the ones you avoid then
Pathfinding can be surprisingly difficult if you are trying to do it with as little CPU time and memory as possible.
The best improvement to pathfinding would probably be some background routine that uses spare CPU time to look at the current paths and add intermediate waypoints on them so that units are guided around any areas that funnel them into a corner. Quite tricky to implement with assembler. Perhaps an easier way is to implement some form of "road segments" that are placed in the map editor. Units would try to follow them to a node closest to the destination tile before switching back to the old tile based pathfinding.
I was about to comment about a randomized routine after X amount of tries based on insects.
Can I have some of your likes please?
@@Margarinetaylorgrease
hahah sorry.
David already implemented that on planet x2. didnt work that well.
Although i think a map test and pathfind routine right after the loading screen would be best.
They do it on old counter strike games like 1.6
This is absolutely amazing. I've always wanted to develop my own pixel/voxel game but have always felt discouraged at how difficult it would possibly be but this is pretty inspiring and I'll definitely give it another shot. Can't wait for the full release :D
Man, this project looks so cool, the graphics look great, and particularly that Adlib music sounds really good.
Very hi tek disk copy system there! I can see this will be an amazing game!
Great work so far, the VGA version looks amazing!
(to be fair, even the CGA version looks good too, even on the IBM 5155 and it's amber CRT)
In fact, the amber CRT looks kinda retro-amazing, maybe we could have a amber filter on the game? (just kidding)
My bet is, if you release documentation about your graphics routines, someone will make patches for the other graphics cards/modes(like EGA and Hercules) after the release.
I believe anyone that really wanted to play it in amber can set DOSBOX to do that.
My first PC monitor was a yellow phosphor monochrome Lucky Goldstar (which became LG). I much preferred the yellow colour to the more common amber screens of the day, and the green ones were just ugly.
@Martin Green: Were Goldstar's yellow-ish screens less reddish-brown than common amber monitors? Did they use something other than the common P3 phosphor type? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_types
I don't know what the phosphor was, but it was truly yellow, no reddish tint at all. I don't think I ever saw another monitor back then even close. Wish I had a photo to share but I trashed that (still working) monitor many years ago.
This video was so perfect...! First things first, is very nice to see Dave attention to many video modes, so no one was left out of the party...! The VGA graphics are looking very good, love pixel art...! The music, it's catchy, extremely interesting. And the copy production party, sensational, I would like to see an extended video of that day, listen to you guys talking, making jokes, etc... I'm thinking about to buy the game and play on the DOSBOX within my Windows 10 machine.
Looks awesome ! Your attention to detail is very impressive. I really like the AdLib soundtrack.
Also, I'm kind of bummed you didn't use Git since that would have been a really nice way of traveling back in time through the source, as well as see reasons/rationale in the comments on when and why certain decisions were made. It would also make it much simpler to open source later and allow for collaborators that want to fork or fix things.
From the folders he has he can still create a git repository if needed/wanted. You can even date back commits so the date reflects the actual date of the changes. With these daily snapshots it's just much harder to track single features.
And the commit message can be extracted from the bug/todo file by comparing it to the next directory.
Yeah, I realize this but I was hoping for individual commit messages and more granular commits. A lot can happen in a day and the diffs become pretty unreadable once more than a few changesets are involved.
ProgAndy This won't be possible. The TODO file was separate from the version folders and is being mutated. Once Dave is done with his TODO list the entire file will be empty and all the messages will be lost.
And what if David doesn't want to open-source?
Where do the floppies come from, are they still manufactured or is there enough new old stock out there?
I am also curious about this.
Like many other type of retro tech such as vacuum tubes, I believe Russia still produces floppies.
In the video about Planet X2 he said that he was able to get new old stock floppies
+Martin Green
Old stock floppies 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 that have never been used is not that difficult to find and most work fine even when they was made 30 years ago.
-bknesheim - *especially* if they were made 30 years ago! The quality of the manufacturing tended to go down as the format got older and more out of date.
Hanging out for Planet X2 in the shop again, thanks. :-)
This is awesome. Truly amazing talent. Keep up the awesome work.
Ejj There are Pizza Stains on my copy of Planet X2 :P
Could you ever review NESMaker?
man 8-bit guy you're a machine! Game looks great btw, hope people really enjoy it!
I was waiting for ages for this! Thanks!
why dose everyone use VGA's standerd mode 13h (320x200) insted of the VGA Mode X (320x240) for square pixels?
grk70s Maybe some VGA clones don't scale mode X correctly. Simple superVGAs like Tseng labs and Realtek on actual analogue monitors will probably do fine, as the scan doubling is done via generic registers and the video signal is identical to 640x480. But LCD/Plasma laptops, cards with DVI out and modern GPUs might fail in unexpected ways.
I think Apogee's Stargunner uses it. I've got a recording from DOSBox which seems to be 320*240.
I wonder if we will see Planet X3 the movie? Maybe something kind of 80s retro feel?
I'd back that Kickstarter!
+Steve Fernandez Kickstarter? This has to be a financial and emotional commitment! This has all the hallmarks of a great production of high dramatic content. It deserves major financial backing and considerable treatment in production and artistic investment. It could be a film that is talked about for a long time and launches a franchise that lasts for decades. I am serious. If it is treated right, it could be huge.
he could ask the Cinemassacre guys ^^ "AVGN presents:..:"
+Jigo James Rolfe makes campy comedy. His brand is nostalgia based around children's products. It would be different than how I imagined it, but i mean, whatever.
Planet X3 = Planet XXX
I wasn't going to watch this but I couldn't stop. It was so interesting, I was surprised people still play games like this. I started playing games when they were like this, simple and full of adventure. Good job man! I always wanted to design my own game as well, perhaps I will.
So much cool stuff in one really neat video. Can't wait till my copy arrives :D