sound!

Just recently I started to collaborate with Eirik, he’s going to produce the music for Flipper. Today I received the first test song. I got so excited I started working on the sound code right away.

I feared this was going to be hard (since I had a lot of trouble with sound on the gba, especially getting it to sound right). But it really wasn’t a big deal. Within an hour I was able to play the song on the background. Everything gets streamed and it almost doesn’t slow down the game.

The only thing that’s worrying me is the filesize. The wav songs I currently use are between 6 and 20mb each! Increasing the rom size tremendously. All code+art is around 1,5 MB in rom size. Now the final rom is 28 MB thanks to the songs! I need to find something for that.

I still got enough to do on the sound part, but the fact I got the songs playing without sucking up too much CPU is a big relief. So I’m quite happy right now!


I’ve also added a feature that when you click on a sprite (or close by) the character will move to the exact location of the sprite. Previously you had to tap on the ground (were the sprite layed/standed) and it resulted in a lot of ‘miss-grabs’ (the player stood close, but not close enough to pick it up, so you had to tap again).

And last but not least I’ve tweaked the pathfinding a little. Now it works even better. I guess it’s not the last time I need to tweak it (since there are so many possibilities to go around the level, there’s always an exceptional case that I didn’t take of).

All in all it was a very productive day.