Monday 18 May 2015

Conga Continued


It's been a few weeks since I last wrote about our adventures in game development, and although Jamie and I have not made quite as much progress as we'd hoped, work on Pan-Dimensional Conga-Combat has continued to move forward. Oh, and we released a new C64 game too - but more on that in a bit.

So what's new? In the previous update I explained how we were using timelines to synchronise in-game events to the soundtrack and discussed some of the problems we were having with 'frame-slippage' on less powerful hardware. Thankfully, this part of the project is now complete, and Jamie even fixed the sync between the game and soundtrack by incorporating a frame counter that starts as soon as the timeline and audio playback begins. This 'timer' is then compared against the current position in the timeline every frame, and if there's a difference the game simply jumps forward and realigns itself.

There is of course a small risk that the game will occasionally miss scheduled events, but so far the method seems to be pretty bullet proof and it's a huge improvement over what we had before (where even something as trivial as alt-tabbing out of the game resulted in everything falling slightly out of sync).