This is amazing stuff . Hope a game of some sort comes out of it at the end if you find the time / cpu to add that logic . Still C based code here ?

Thanks :-) the team is really pushing hard on this.

MD is a very strong 16 bit platform for moving a lot of sprites around so shooters are right up its alley.
We have a 60 fps target at all times , we are targetting zero slowdown.
Optimising early so later on speed is baked in.

One option is to not play sfx during a fade ( therefor no stall ) which could give the fade effect more importance anyway.
The sgdk / xgm2 developer has said he can largely fix this , so that is good news.

The quality is retained and its still at 60 fps , its just taking extraordinary amounts of cpu to play sfx during the fade due to the way the fade is handled . So it would become an issue in a busier scene . Thankfully these fade outs occur at the start of boss sections so nothing much is going on .

Thanks, we are progressing well - this was more a surprise than anything. Hopefully get a video update out soon !

Everytime I look at these traces I seem to find some blinder in terms of cpu use somewhere where its least expected . The goal for Parodius is 60 FPS at all times - so hence Im keeping a close eye on things !!

What I'll need to do is speedup any music fade outs / fades in and make sure not to do a music fade at critical CPU load times...

So putting aside all the fantastic things XGM2 brings to the table - hugely reduced rom footprint etc , music fades are costly & in fairness its noted they are in the driver notes so no surprise, but they also seems to affect playing SFX on following frames during the fade , which is a concern...

This function is part of the SGDK / XGM2 sound driver we are using for Parodius - its the same sound driver being used for Lufthoheit and SOTA also ...

Its still 60 FPS in this frame , we have ~ 25% cpu free after that stall but if you saw it on screen almost nothing is happening visually - its just as the periscope would be coming out of the water etc.

Normally playing a PCM SFX uses ~ 260 microseconds, here its taking ~ 4000 microseconds...

Its actually when the music fades out just before the Catboss enters the Level as the prior music is fading out , and on the next frame we go to play a SFX ( it could be a lazer firing etc ) and it seems to stall for nearly 25% of the frame ( see getAccess - the pink bar ) ...

Wheres our worst frame on the level for performance ? is it when 5 lazers colide with the catboss eg fully powered up ? no - not even close. In fact those frames we have 40% cpu free + we are at 60 FPS and we can optimise further yet - so we handle that with ease ...

Its looking superb !!
What would a couple of other racers do to the frame rate ?
Be great to see .

If it was just a bit more accurate it could replace blastem possibly as my daily driver , the LUA scripting is lovely .

Haha , yes , when Pryon told me its a direct translation from the arcade text I could hardly believe it ;-)
Yes, there literally is a blast in this stage too and some processing , so its not all made up after all haha.

We are having some fun with the White Bell power up text , Pryon has come up with some slogans we all say in our sleep and its translated really well here !!

The blue bell bomb , is using sprites and taking advantage of mirroring and flipping / the fact the core is solid white and a few other tricks to get the tile usage right down.
Its 40 frames of animation and uses at most 147 tiles in vram.
It uses a heavily modified SGDK sprite engine.

One issue was the water, at the waterline we essentially need 3 background layers for the Catboss and we only have 2 on the MD , thankfully the sprites are very flexible , so we have sprites for the water , sprites for catpaws , periscope and cannons . The rest is forground animation.

Can't write novels here but I'll give you the TL;DR version.

Catboss was very hard , much harder than he looks to implement this far. Several animating parts and cant use sprites for all of him as it would lead to sprite overload readily. So hes a combination of Forground + sprites.