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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0201, P0202
Commits:
9342665...ff49e9e, ff49e9e...4568bf7
💰 Funded by:
Ember2528, Yanga, [Anonymous]
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The positive:

The negative:

The overview:


This time, we're back to the Orb hitbox being a logical 49×49 pixels in SinGyoku's center, and the shot hitbox being the weird one. What happens if you want the shot hitbox to be both offset to the left a bit and stretch the entire width of SinGyoku's sprite? You get a hitbox that ends in mid-air, far away from the right edge of the sprite:

Due to VRAM byte alignment, all player shots fired between gx = 376 and gx = 383 inclusive appear at the same visual X position, but are internally already partly outside the hitbox and therefore won't hit SinGyoku – compare the marked shot at gx = 376 to the one at gx = 380. So much for precisely visualizing hitboxes in this game…

Since the female and male forms also use the sphere entity's coordinates, they share the same hitbox.


Onto the rendering glitches then, which can – you guessed it – all be found in the sphere form's slam movement:

By having the sphere move from the right edge of the playfield to the left, this video demonstrates both the lazy reblitting and broken unblitting at the right edge for negative X velocities. Also, isn't it funny how Reimu can partly disappear from all the sloppy SinGyoku-related unblitting going on after her sprite was blitted?

Due to the low contrast of the sphere against the background, you typically don't notice these glitches, but the white invincibility flashing after a hit really does draw attention to them. This time, all of these glitches aren't even directly caused by ZUN having never learned about the EGC's bit length register – if he just wrote correct code for SinGyoku, none of this would have been an issue. Sigh… I wonder how many more glitches will be caused by improper use of this one function in the last 18% of REIIDEN.EXE.

There's even another bug here, with ZUN hardcoding a horizontal delta of 8 pixels rather than just passing the actual X velocity. Luckily, the maximum movement speed is 6 pixels on Lunatic, and this would have only turned into an additional observable glitch if the X velocity were to exceed 24 pixels. But that just means it's the kind of bug that still drains RE attention to prove that you can't actually observe it in-game under some circumstances.


The 5 pellet patterns are all pretty straightforward, with nothing to talk about. The code architecture during phase 2 does hint towards ZUN having had more creative patterns in mind – especially for the male form, which uses the transformation function's three pattern callback slots for three repetitions of the same pellet group.
There is one more oddity to be found at the very end of the fight:

The first frame of TH01 SinGyoku's defeat animation, showing the sphere blitted on top of a potentially active person form

Right before the defeat white-out animation, the sphere form is explicitly reblitted for no reason, on top of the form that was blitted to VRAM in the previous frame, and regardless of which form is currently active. If SinGyoku was meant to immediately transform back to the sphere form before being defeated, why isn't the person form unblitted before then? Therefore, the visibility of both forms is undeniably canon, and there is some lore meaning to be found here… :thonk:
In any case, that's SinGyoku done! 6th PC-98 Touhou boss fully decompiled, 25 remaining.


No FUUIN.EXE code rounding out the last push for a change, as the 📝 remaining missile code has been waiting in front of SinGyoku for a while. It already looked bad in November, but the angle-based sprite selection function definitely takes the cake when it comes to unnecessary and decadent floating-point abuse in this game.
The algorithm itself is very trivial: Even with 📝 .PTN requiring an additional quarter parameter to access 16×16 sprites, it's essentially just one bit shift, one addition, and one binary AND. For whatever reason though, ZUN casts the 8-bit missile angle into a 64-bit double, which turns the following explicit comparisons (!) against all possible 4 + 16 boundary angles (!!) into FPU operations. :zunpet: Even with naive and readable division and modulo operations, and the whole existence of this function not playing well with Turbo C++ 4.0J's terrible code generation at all, this could have been 3 lines of code and 35 un-inlined constant-time instructions. Instead, we've got this 207-instruction monster… but hey, at least it works. 🤷
The remaining time then went to YuugenMagan's initialization code, which allowed me to immediately remove more declarations from ASM land, but more on that once we get to the rest of that boss fight.

That leaves 76 functions until we're done with TH01! Next up: Card-flipping stage obstacles.