The people behind Adventure Quest have a retro NES game Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ar ... urequest-f
The game itself looks pretty crap and I'm not a fan of how they're marketing this, but it's another one to watch and see how it goes.
Project incubation news
Fast 60 FPS 3D - very usable for world-map and battle scenes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMydtJwSrHE
There is a lot of 3D mathematics and camera stuff going on here. Matrices are fully implemented to work, so traditional 3D logic can be applied for getting the camera to point and move about the scene.
Sprite/Objects
Right now I'm working on sprites/object data. The Nitro animation cell format is once again pretty darn good for this too, it was used for the Pokemon animations in Pokemon Black & White. The format basically describes how the object memory should be set up on the GBA to display a particular "frame" of animation, it contains everything an object needs for display. Magic/attack animations, enemy animations, sprite animations, pretty much everything animated will be using this format I expect - combined with the Nitro animation resource format.
As an example of how flexible this will be; I'm 99% confident that the MV animation system can be used to create GBA animations with these formats and that will eventually be one of my tests.
There will be 3 types of sprites: 2D, affine and 3D. 2D will just be regular sprites as you expect, affine will allow 2D rotation and scaling, 3D will use the 3D camera system to scale sprites in the same way that a 3D "particle system" would do it - this would be perfect for objects on a world map like town and city markers, might work in a battle scene too but I'm not 100% convinced of that.
Real Time Clock
I've been working with the mGBA emulator developer to fix some obscure bugs that I encounter, one of which is that the RTC clock chip found in the Pokemon games and Boktai failed to work if the ROM size wasn't a power of 2, so the RTC is now working pretty fantastically.
This means a time-of-day system can be implemented on systems where RTC is available (Emulator, Flashcart with RTC chip).
The code written for RTC can be extended to stuff like "tilt" cartridge sensor - something emulators can hijack for analogue movement (bind analogue stick to tilt).
General project health
The C++ library is getting more and more complete. I've re-written debug logging to work for different environments, so mGBA will use mGBA logging, other emulators will use AGBPrint and EZ Flash Omega will write to a log .txt file on the SD card (not implemented right now).
My plan is to get the library feature complete then put it on GitHub for the GBA dev community to critique and improve on, I'd then move over to working on the RPG engine (and TileD/MV to GBA conversion tools).
The major components missing at the moment are sprites (working on right now), sound (have ideas for this), serial IO (link cable stuff) and some graphical effects (windowing). Most of everything else is actually finished, but there will be some extended features I'd want to add (Game Boy Player detection, SD file system access, dynamic library loader, render to tile).
The game itself looks pretty crap and I'm not a fan of how they're marketing this, but it's another one to watch and see how it goes.
Project incubation news
Fast 60 FPS 3D - very usable for world-map and battle scenes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMydtJwSrHE
There is a lot of 3D mathematics and camera stuff going on here. Matrices are fully implemented to work, so traditional 3D logic can be applied for getting the camera to point and move about the scene.
Sprite/Objects
Right now I'm working on sprites/object data. The Nitro animation cell format is once again pretty darn good for this too, it was used for the Pokemon animations in Pokemon Black & White. The format basically describes how the object memory should be set up on the GBA to display a particular "frame" of animation, it contains everything an object needs for display. Magic/attack animations, enemy animations, sprite animations, pretty much everything animated will be using this format I expect - combined with the Nitro animation resource format.
As an example of how flexible this will be; I'm 99% confident that the MV animation system can be used to create GBA animations with these formats and that will eventually be one of my tests.
There will be 3 types of sprites: 2D, affine and 3D. 2D will just be regular sprites as you expect, affine will allow 2D rotation and scaling, 3D will use the 3D camera system to scale sprites in the same way that a 3D "particle system" would do it - this would be perfect for objects on a world map like town and city markers, might work in a battle scene too but I'm not 100% convinced of that.
Real Time Clock
I've been working with the mGBA emulator developer to fix some obscure bugs that I encounter, one of which is that the RTC clock chip found in the Pokemon games and Boktai failed to work if the ROM size wasn't a power of 2, so the RTC is now working pretty fantastically.
This means a time-of-day system can be implemented on systems where RTC is available (Emulator, Flashcart with RTC chip).
The code written for RTC can be extended to stuff like "tilt" cartridge sensor - something emulators can hijack for analogue movement (bind analogue stick to tilt).
General project health
The C++ library is getting more and more complete. I've re-written debug logging to work for different environments, so mGBA will use mGBA logging, other emulators will use AGBPrint and EZ Flash Omega will write to a log .txt file on the SD card (not implemented right now).
My plan is to get the library feature complete then put it on GitHub for the GBA dev community to critique and improve on, I'd then move over to working on the RPG engine (and TileD/MV to GBA conversion tools).
The major components missing at the moment are sprites (working on right now), sound (have ideas for this), serial IO (link cable stuff) and some graphical effects (windowing). Most of everything else is actually finished, but there will be some extended features I'd want to add (Game Boy Player detection, SD file system access, dynamic library loader, render to tile).