PROJECT G UPDATE

Beta Stage is totally scrapped and back to square one. Here's why:
The Beta Stage and the Gamma stage that followed were supposed to be ground-bound missions, making use of two FRAXY tricks. One is the CREATE2 command that spawns enemies at specific coordinates.
The other is that you can set a background to scroll at the exact same speed as the player moves across it.
With these two things in mind, I decided to create buildings atop "destroyed" foundations drawn on a background. An example of this technique is shown in the BGTest Try file.
This also enabled gun turrets, as well as the boss I designed.
Since the background would move at the exact same speed as the player movement toward the enemies, all static enemies would move along with it.

Immediately, problems started cropping up.

#1 was that the entire level could not be loaded without grinding the game engine to a 0 FPS halt for a matter of seconds. Deadly for a shmup. The solution was to break up the level's backgrounds into tiles. Easy enough, right?

#2 was that a background doesn't load right away. It blends. Thus, the background "tiles" needed to overlap to make the blend invisible. That distance needed to be the distance that the player could boost during the blending process.
The time that a background takes to blend is about 3 seconds, and at full boost, a player can cover 960 pixels of distance.

The #3 problem and the final straw was the background tiling delay seen in the construction of the BoundBox script. When a background is drawn, it's only kept track of partially, and drawn more than once only when it's needed. Thus, near the edge, the game engine takes up the task of drawing the background again.
With a large enough background, there's a delay while it's being redrawn... and the player flies over dead white space until the background suddenly pops into view.
Therefore, regardless of what FRAXY's try_eng.txt file says, the maximum size for a background is 1024 x 1024 pixels before these delays start.
With the player boosting 960 pixels and the maximum size 1024 on a side, there is no way that the blend can be hidden. At top speed in a single direction, a third background needs to be loaded and blended right after the second one is blended in.
Worse, the screen size behind the player is blending as well, making this technique impossible should the player turn around.

So now I'm faced with scrapping the entire procedure and loading one BIG background instead, which will drop the framerate to a dead zero while the darned thing loads. Not good.

That said, ground based enemies or Try files with ground based targets are problematic if not impossible in FRAXY unless the background is tiled in a relatively small size. With these game engine problems in play, the scenery will be obviously simplistic and quickly repetitive, making it impossible for use as a depiction of any specific ground details. This also makes a close flyby of a planet impossible too because of tiling issues.

...Unless someone comes up with a better idea than I had.

Suggestions? I can't continue past the Alpha Stage without help in tackling this monster level design problem.
- Zaximillian

PROJECT G RANKING SYSTEM

The Project G ranking system will look at two seperate things: how fast a player completes a stage and how many points that player gets during that stage. There will be six categories for speed, and six for score:

Category I: less than 1/2 (50%-) the distance between low and high score or time and the record
Category II: over 1/2 (50-75%) the distance between low and high score or time and the record
Category III: over 3/4 (75-88%) the distance between low and high score or time and the record
Category IV: over 7/8 (88-94%) the distance between low and high score or time and the record
Category V: over 15/16 (94-100%) the distance between low and high score or time and the record
Category VI: beat the record time or record score

Time categories and score categories will be seperately recorded by stage, and a title built using one of six words:

Time: I - Line, II - Quick, III - Speed, IV - Super, V - (secret), VI - (secret)
Score: I - Pilot, II - Gunner, III - Blaster, IV - Sniper, V - (secret), VI - (secret)

First, the time category will generate a word, then the score category will generate a word, forming a title for the player's performance that stage, such as "Line Pilot" or "Super Blaster".

Finally, the time category and the score category will be cross referenced to generate one of eleven ranks:
F - E - D - C - B - A - AA - AAA - (secret) - (secret) - (secret), with the final ranking only achievable by beating both the best time and the best score simultaneously for that stage.

Suggestions for anything I discussed here are definitely welcome. Thanks for the continuing support... now play Project G again and send me some times and scores!

The problem with the background is filesize, right?

No, filesize is only partially the issue; the game engine doesn't like it when a graphics file is more than 1024 pixels on a side. It has trouble tiling at the edges when a player moves over them. That causes a cascade of other implementation problems for static backgrounds. I need to find a way around that in order to build the Beta Stage.

Project G UPDATE
With the new additions and a new version of FRAXY out, player ships are now added to version .003. The .img files are updated and posted already.