Boulder Dash Forum

This is a great update. Now the TV mode works perfectly and the scrolling is amazing, just like the C64 but even better

I can say that it scrolls perfectly smooth both on my laptop (60Hz AU Optronics v7 95% NTSC color gamut) and on my PC (75Hz Dell 2209WA).

Excellent work!

Summer is coming! (This is an image drawn by one of my students)

Just make my day!

cirix wrote:The OpenGL stuff might not work on a Windows8, because (at least the version I tried) does not support OpenGL in 32bit mode. At least that's what everybody says in forums.

I read on the internet that this was a driver problem with some graphics cards. I'm not sure about that, but this could be the problem.

The opendialog issue is well fixed But I can't hear any sound after changing the graphics engine/video mode. I have to restart the application. The reason might be a missing initialization!?

Thanks for the great update

Whoops. That wasn't a bug. It was indeed my custom gfx bitmap didn't have transparency. Whoops again

I like the Phosphor-simple shader the most. It seems to give me the best experience at both 2x and 4x scale, as well as looking a lot like your classic arcade game machines.

The TV shader provides the most accurate TV emulation with the chroma blur effects and distortion. Looks just like a good old C64 at the default settings. Reliving the memories

Both shaders are amazing, and I haven't honestly seen anything as good as these.

benjamind2011 wrote:Both shaders are amazing, and I haven't honestly seen anything as good as these.

The micro64 C64 emulator has an extremely advanced shader, which adds even more effects. However, it has so many configuration options, that one just gets lost among them When I was writing the GDash-TV shader, I tried to keep te number of options small.
The Phosphor shader was written by Themaister for the bsnes emulator. It is in the public domain, so I could include it in GDash.

I'm not sure of this is a bug or not, but I notice that in caves with amoeba, when the amoeba grows big the smooth scrolling appears to be affected.

Do you know what would cause this?

benjamind2011 wrote:I'm not sure of this is a bug or not, but I notice that in caves with amoeba, when the amoeba grows big the smooth scrolling appears to be affected.
Do you know what would cause this?

yes. if the scrolling is still smooth when the amoeba has grown, it is a feature. if scrolling becomes jerky, it's a bug
the thing is, a lot of moving elements in a cave (fireflies, amoeba, stones etc) slow the cave down when some sort of c64 cave scheduling is selected. that's why scrolling speed can also change. you can test this easily if you create a cave full of diamonds in the editor, and then eat all the diamonds. if you press f8 during the game, you see the internal parameters, and also the speed of the cave (in milliseconds / frame).

That sounds logical - more objects means more CPU power being used to control those objects, but I can't see how it would slow it down that much because I'm on a 4 x 2.6Ghz processor PC.

I would have to do some more tests to see whether this is the same with different cave speeds (ie 100ms, 150ms, 200ms, 60ms etc). I use millisecond timing for all my new caves.

The latest updated fixed a lot of bugs for me, but I'm unsure of whether this amoeba size and scrolling slowdown is a bug or is caused by too many CPU/frame cycles being used for the growing amoeba.

Overall the performance is very smooth and apart from this it's perfect.

benjamind2011 wrote:That sounds logical - more objects means more CPU power being used to control those objects, but I can't see how it would slow it down that much because I'm on a 4 x 2.6Ghz processor PC.

The timing is based on a CPU with about 1 Mhz, not yours nor any other modern computer's. Use milliseconds based timing to run at a constant speed. However, if you change this on a C64 cave, it might not run as intended anymore, thus some caves would need further tweaking to be solvable.

benjamind2011 wrote:I use millisecond timing for all my new caves.

If you use the millisecond timing, then the iteration rate (movements per sec in the cave) should be constant, regardless of the size of the amoeba, and also regardless your computer's speed.
And yes, as LogicDeLuxe pointed out, the game tries to imitate the original speed when C64 scheduling is selected, but it is not perfect. (But the error is around 1-2%, so almost all caves work, only a very few need fixes.)

Hi all!
The new GDash is quite fantastic!! Thanks for all the work, cirix!
I just noted a bug with mazes. In Dustin's BD 3 I used in cave H a maze which should have the border element "none" and path element "space". The random fill is diamonds in dirt, so the border should consist of dirt with random diamonds. But with the new engine the whole cave consists of empty space.

Hope you have as good weather as we have!
Cheers Dustin

I tested this cave as well, there were lots of squares, and one small area with one piece of magic wall. Not sure if this is the same game or cave but it wasn't solvable

I've got an image that I took a snapshot of the cave in action.

Dustin wrote:The random fill is diamonds in dirt, so the border should consist of dirt with random diamonds. But with the new engine the whole cave consists of empty space.

Definitely a bug, I just found it. I will fix it in the next version.