Sprite Rotation

[Domarius]

Thanks for the response. I enjoy reading some of these threads where you guys share your knowledge of retro games. It's very interesting.

So how does it work with 45º rotation? Would one have to just use an additional sprite image drawn at 45º?

Check out this 2nd level boss from Super Contra 3 / Super Probotector (I prefer the latter, because it's the version we grew up with and robots are way cooler than humans)
https://youtu.be/pybOtiV2ggI?t=601

The level previous to this boss has a cool top-down mode where instead of rotating the player, the whole background rotates instead, so "up" is always "forward".  This background uses the scaling/rotating feature as you'd expect.

But when the boss appears, it scales and rotates the whole time, on a background that is still rotating with the player when he turns around!  How is that possible when only one background can be scaled and rotated?  Well the boss is actually using the background rotating & scaling feature.  The road itself is just a pile of tricks!

It's my guess that the white lines are just being drawn in real time using line drawing code or something, using a flat colour because they're just boxes.  But the cracks in the road are just sprites!  If you watch them closely, they snap between 8 degrees of angles.  So there's actually 8 pre-drawn crack sprites at different angles.  And the rest of the road is just a flat fill colour. This is why the background looks so much simpler here than in the level previous.

It's a technical marvel, and well worth it - it blew our little minds; it was very cinematic and dramatic, with the boss zooming in and out, and the view rotating and panning - while other games were just scrolling left to right.

Have you tried the new features? Full background bitmaps and mouse support should enable you to do "Worms" without much effort

I will definitely have to have a play with it!  I think Godot can do it, but I've yet to finish my other game first.  In any case I will need to play around with Tilengine even if I don't go with it for my main project, it's very tempting.