UncleSporky wrote:
defeatist
You appear to have misunderstood what I meant by "one and two halves". I meant one, half of a second, and half of a third. Restrict backtracking partially and restrict destructibility partially, and things can be made to fit. Please allow me to elaborate:
UncleSporky wrote:
It's quite easy to design levels to have large vertical dropoffs partway through
Hence "restrict the level geometry slightly and pick one and two halves." If you're going to have an obvious
gravity barrier every four screens to purge the persistence of destroyed game objects, then a limit on backtracking is obviously one of the "two halves".
UncleSporky wrote:
You also have to clarify that by "destructibility" you mean "wholly persistent destructibility throughout the entire level."
Which brings me to restricting level geometry. Assume that the portion of a 2-way scrolling map through which destruction persists is 32 screens long, or 512 columns of 16-pixel-wide metatiles. If only one thing in each column is allowed to be persistently destroyed, the destruction buffer takes 64 bytes.
UncleSporky wrote:
Would people accept blocks respawning 5 screens behind them? Why would that be a problem?
In some games, players are supposed to backtrack and "farm" for a resource by killing enemies. In Mega Man, it's energy. In Zelda, it's cash. In a DW/FF style role-playing game, it's experience.
But in other games, farming is not expected. Is Mario supposed to hit a block, get the mushroom, go five screens away, come back, hit the same block, and get a fire flower? Or run back and collect the same coins over and over?
And then there's the other kind of farming, Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing style. If you have a huge plot of land, and you can plant things in each grid cell, the game needs to save what crop is planted in each cell and how long until it's mature.
UncleSporky wrote:
In a large number of games, enemies respawn off screen constantly.
And players got frustrated with it when they would defeat an enemy to clear the path, walk offscreen to get a running start to make the jump, and then the enemy would respawn, again blocking the path, and knock the player back into a bottomless pit. See the list of most annoying examples at
"Knockback" on TV Tropes.
UncleSporky wrote:
Is it completely impossible to do any compressing/decompressing on the fly as the player moves around?
It's possible. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Blaster Master, and tokumaru's pet project use multiple layers of metatiles to accomplish this.