Introduction

Welcome to the ninth progress report on the development of the Gameboy Advance version of Payback. If you haven't read the earlier reports then you'll find them here. A lot has happened over the last few months - aside from working on the game we've been to ECTS and we're now talking to several publishers about releasing the game. Hopefully we'll be able to announce more about this in the near future.

Night Levels

One of the bigger features to be implemented recently was support for night levels. Originally this was done by darkening the textures but keeping the same palette to preserve the dynamic range. However, for the GBA we've just changed the gamma of the palette instead as it looks almost the same, preserves the dynamic range and requires dramatically less ROM.

Another aspect of the night levels that needed reworking for the GBA was the headlights on the vehicles. Originally, these were added by modifying the object's structure in memory. However, on the GBA this structure is kept in ROM so it cannot be modified. Putting two versions of every vehicle in ROM would be too expensive (we're already right up against the 8 MByte limit) so a special bit of code is used to draw the headlight illumination onto the screen using additive blending before drawing the vehicle over the top. This looks identical to the old approach but doesn't need a significant amount of extra ROM.

On night levels, the lampposts also illuminate the area around them using additive blending which is currently drawn as part of the object using the triangle renderer. The plan is to switch to using the scaled bitmap renderer in the finished code which will improve performance and quality.

Tweaks

Shadow support has been re-enabled on the GBA version. This not only looks good, but it makes it easier to judge the depth and position of objects. This was originally disabled for performance reasons but we've now come up with a faster technique that should also produce better quality shadows - although the code currently uses an interim technique that is faster than the old method but doesn't look as good.

The extra maps that can be unlocked in rampage and multiplayer mode now include extra vehicles hidden around the cities. This is a feature from the other versions of the game that has recently been adapted to work with the GBA code.

Over 30 bugs have been fixed over the last couple of months. The few that are left are fairly minor or easy to fix. Performance on the title screen and with the lens flares in-game has also been improved. The size of the vehicles relative to the buildings has also been changed to make them easier to maneuver around the streets.

What's next?

Aside from getting a publisher and fixing any issues they might bring to our attention, our focus now is on fixing the last few bugs and adding save game support. It might also be possible to improve the game's performance a bit by optimising the texture mapper even more and incorporating the latest audio mixer improvements from AAS. (Click here for the next report.)

Please feel free to email us with any questions, suggestions or enquiries. We do not yet have a publisher for the GBA version of Payback. For general information about Payback, please click here.