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Project GunMary - PlayStation homebrew "experiment"


xdaniel
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Sooo, after a lot of posts in ex. my random junk thread, here's one specifically for this...

 

Project "GunMary" will hopefully become a homebrew game for the original PlayStation someday. It's on a good path I'd say, I just have to proceed and plan carefully, as opposed to diving into stuff headfirst and failing hard... like with SharpOcarina.

 

...and in celebration of this new thread, have a short video!

 

 

...and also, have an actual demo of the above animation viewer: http://magicstone.de...gm-animtest.rar - BIN/CUE CD image, ready to run in your favorite emulator (ex. pSX v1.13, which is what I'm using for testing); no guarantee right now that it'll run on hardware.

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Heh, it's not really much yet, tho :P

 

Anyway, one more "behind-the-scenes" screenshot - the debug menu that's from now on the first thing a debug build will show the user:

 

Posted Image

 

Next up is finishing object definition storage (how and where all objects - player, enemies, projectiles, etc. - are defined), then comes extending the existing object logic to the point where you can actually shoot things (making projectiles collide with other objects, applying damage and destroying objects), then comes planning how levels will work (definition, storage, loading, display, collisions). Then I should have the basic gameplay working, so next would be the design phase where enemies, levels, etc. are created.

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Hrm, getting to the combat might have to wait until tomorrow... I just spent several hours tracking down the source of a bunch of different crashes which kept throwing gigantic wrenches into my plans, and I'm kinda exhausted.

 

tl;dr: My code was accidentally far too greedy and never freed up the memory it asked for after it was done with it, until it couldn't get any more. I fail at malloc and free. <.<

 

Long version below...

 

The title demo loop, or what will someday be just that, kept crashing on me after seven iterations. Either the game crashed when it tried to load my test enemies (always at exactly X 497 or 498 in the "level"; they're set to appear at 500), or when entering the demo, or when loading up the title. It also crashed earlier in the loop if I previously did something else, like enter the game from the menu, then back out to the title. Also, this happened in emulation and on real hardware.

 

A bunch of things came to mind... Am I using uninitialized variables? Am I not clearing some structures between iterations? Is there something wrong with file loading? Are the function pointers getting corrupted? I check all of those and couldn't see anything wrong there. I added more safeguards - like explicitly clearing certain variables like the function pointers, more checks for null values and such, yet nothing helped. Now, as it turns out... my C really has become quite rusty. I'm using malloc to allocate memory for ex. each game mode's working structure. Yet what I didn't do - and what doesn't cause any problems until it's too late - is actually free the memory I allocated. I kept asking the system for more and more memory with each iteration, until it couldn't give me any more! Sooo, some frees whenever a mode is about to finish, and voila! Just let the demo loop run 15 times and didn't get a single crash whatsoever.

 

 

EDIT: Crashes are definitely fixed - the demo loop has been running on my PSX for the last 20 minutes without any hickups at all :)

 

Oh, and have one more animation viewer screenshot:

 

Posted Image

Edited by xdaniel
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Haven't done as much as I would've liked over the past few days - been coming down with a cold as it seems - but did add some features to the animation system (ex. an "is animation done?" flag for mode "once", finally did the "alternating" mode), added effect objects (ex. used for the newly added explosions, will also be used for things like signs popping up or anything else that doesn't require much interaction) and improved the piercing shot mechanics a bit.

 

Also whipped up a title screen logo earlier today; while not exactly finished, it already conveys the general idea I have in mind:

 

Posted Image

 

EDIT: Felt like replacing the ptPrint-ed Press Start message and menu with something graphical:

 

Posted ImagePosted Image

 

The Press Start message blinks, and the menu options' color subtly cycles between white and a shade of blue - they also scroll smoothly, instead of just switching over abruptly.

Edited by xdaniel
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