As we had a lot of artwork left I decided to start coding sequel to Arsantica 2 in right after Revision 2014.

Alien/pdx just did some mockup mood trailer of the first fx. it is the rotating shaded planet which was first planned to be the starting scene of Arsantica 2…

 

Now what to say about AD:6502…

There were some decisions made right at the beginning:

1st… it should be using 128kb RAM
2nd… trackmo style (=no loading time interruptions or at least have something in between loading)
3rd… better fx of course 😀

so… first fx which was ready… a rotating textured planet in 80×200 resolution… realtime shaded… Oswald of Resource had some nice ideas to make it fast…sad that his c64 lacks the power to do that :P.

Here is another early test with another shading map…

and when looking at the main loop… you don’t see much ;=):

Texture planet main loop
Texture planet main loop

As I still have a dream to code some Fractal flight… I adapted an older prototype of the Lucasfilm/Carpenter 3d Rescue on Fractalus line code to AD:6502:

In AD:6502 first part… I made it little bit faster… Again some knowledge was spread by Axis as he mentioned why not using delta encoding as the fractal heights are +4/-4… and as I am on a 128k machine I was filling the complete RAM banks with data… so actually the flight is rendered in realtime but not calculated in realtime… as when you see the old prototype which is calculating in realtime.

of course this lacks the proper 3d effect but is nice imho…

Right in the last couple of days before deadline I thought… well… let’s make an real hw test… as I was using extensivly 130 XE ram bankswitching and special ANTIC/CPU feature of the 130 XE (you can access different RAM banks by ANTIC & CPU… basicly the frame buffer and the data for the flight are both at $4000 but one is in XL main ram and other in one of the XE banks…) and look what happened then on real machine: