Today I decided that I'm going to try to persue my first decently large project: porting Dragon Ball: Dragon Daihikyo to SmileBASIC (3)! My current primary worry regarding the project is the sprite work. Is there an efficient way to port sprites to SB3 or will I be basically forced to recreate the sprites by hand?
By the way, in case anyone doesn't know about it... Dragon Ball: Dragon Daihikyo was the very first game created for the Dragon Ball license. It was released in 1986 for the rather obscure Epoch Super Cassette Vision exclusively in Japan. The SCV is somewhat difficult to emulate so I figured I'd try my hand at recreating this rather notable game inside SB3.
What do I do if there's too many sprites to fit onto a single sheet? How would I go about addressing them if they're on different sheets?
SB3 can only display sprites from one graphics page at a time. What this means is that you may have to load different sprites into the page at different times, depending on whether they're needed at the moment.
How you go about doing this will depend on the game. For instance, each level might have a GRP file containing all the sprites that level needs, or you might dynamically load graphics into a page with GCOPY as they're needed to avoid duplicating graphics across files.
I will say though that, judging from screenshots of this game, it seems like you ought to be able to fit everything in one page. Note that SB3 can also display tiled backgrounds, so the backgrounds don't need to be stored as a big image.
So here's a thing: the sprites were all able to fit on one page.. but they're not formatted properly and go off the edge of the sprite boundaries (sprite 1 goes off into sprite 2 and so on)
Be advised, if you publish a SmileBasic project that includes intellectual property that doesn't belong to you, it will get taken down once you get caught. This has happened to several projects in the past. Wouldn't recommend porting a game that uses someone else's characters.
So for example, you can't make your own Super Mario game. But you can make a platforming game that plays exactly like Super Mario but uses your own characters/setting/music.
I think there's a human element to it too, some kind of recrawl over programs sometimes (real people), and if the levels are exactly the same as say, Super Mario Bros, they might also take it down.
Exactly. If it helps, pretend that you're a rival game company. Microsoft can't add Mario as a character, or steal level designs from a Mario game.
However you can't own a game mechanic, like stomping enemies or collecting coins. Which is why you see so many games sharing the exact same mechanics. So feel free to make a legally-distinct clone of this game... but you're asking for trouble if you try to make a port.
