UncleSporky wrote:
It's already not going to be anywhere near what a real DDR game is like, though. As you say, it can only support two players at once, so we make that concession. It can only do 5 channel chip music, so we make that concession. Why then can't we make concessions for less colors and less available sprites?
Two players is a concession for fewer available sprites. Use of DDR-style steps and jumps instead of ITG-style handplants and mines is a concession for fewer available sprites.
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And again, thought experiments about songs like Afronova and Max 300 doesn't seem worth it to me, because they don't have to be included. There's a huge range of songs to choose from.
Even comparatively easy songs like Cowgirl heavy and 5.1.1. heavy have gallops, or red arrows that overlap a yellow arrow 12 pixels down in the same column. The one song concession I'd make in a 2-player DDR clone for NES is
no Bag. Bag is the only song I know of that routinely has six arrows in one beat.
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If a certain level of play is going to be too fast for the engine, then I guess they'll have to be left out and those hardcore players aren't going to be challenged by the game.
I guess I was just spoiled by the development process of LJ65, where I was able to make it fun for casual players yet still challenging for the hardcore players who frequent HardDrop.com and TetrisConcept.net.
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DDR on the NES would be a novelty - you're not going to be able to capture the exact same experience as the full game and few people are going to play it
Yet Konami earnestly tried to market DDR for Game Boy Color.
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the solution I'd probably adopt involves cutting down to 2 players, drawing arrows as sprites, and using the following sprite cycling scheme to handle the occasional tight overlap in step-jump combos and 16th note runs: Draw left halves of arrows in front in even frames and right halves in front in odd frames.
You tend to list things that are problems in porting gameplay over to the NES, but you don't always offer potential solutions.
I thought I already did: limit to two players, with a sprite cycling method to handle pathological cases. As long as no more than four steps are in one beat, the worst cases (spurts of 16th notes and runs of 8th note jumps at 1x) would end up flicker-free in 1-player and still readable in 2-player. Besides, even hardcore players aren't guaranteed to run into flicker so quickly. By the time the player is tackling 9-footers like Matsuri Japan and Rhythm and Police, the player will be used to fast scrolling in the light and standard charts of songs like Drop Out, The least 100 seconds, and Across the Nightmare, and thus is likely to pick 1.5x for songs in the 180-200 BPM range.
But living in software patent country and dealing with a company that has shown itself to be willing to take infringers to court, I can't really work more on this until 2018.