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📝 Posted:
🚚 Summary of:
P0078, P0079
Commits:
f4eb7a8...9e52cb1, 9e52cb1...cd48aa3
💰 Funded by:
iruleatgames, -Tom-
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To finish this TH05 stretch, we've got a feature that's exclusive to TH05 for once! As the final memory management innovation in PC-98 Touhou, TH05 provides a single static (64 * 26)-byte array for storing up to 64 entities of a custom type, specific to a stage or boss portion. (Edit (2023-05-29): This system actually debuted in 📝 TH04, where it was used for much simpler entities.)

TH05 uses this array for

  1. the Stage 2 star particles,
  2. Alice's puppets,
  3. the tip of curve ("jello") bullets,
  4. Mai's snowballs and Yuki's fireballs,
  5. Yumeko's swords,
  6. and Shinki's 32×32 bullets,

which makes sense, given that only one of those will be active at any given time.

On the surface, they all appear to share the same 26-byte structure, with consistently sized fields, merely using its 5 generic fields for different purposes. Looking closer though, there actually are differences in the signedness of certain fields across the six types. uth05win chose to declare them as entirely separate structures, and given all the semantic differences (pixels vs. subpixels, regular vs. tiny master.lib sprites, …), it made sense to do the same in ReC98. It quickly turned out to be the only solution to meet my own standards of code readability.

Which blew this one up to two pushes once again… But now, modders can trivially resize any of those structures without affecting the other types within the original (64 * 26)-byte boundary, even without full position independence. While you'd still have to reduce the type-specific number of distinct entities if you made any structure larger, you could also have more entities with fewer structure members.

As for the types themselves, they're full of redundancy once again – as you might have already expected from seeing #4, #5, and #6 listed as unrelated to each other. Those could have indeed been merged into a single 32×32 bullet type, supporting all the unique properties of #4 (destructible, with optional revenge bullets), #5 (optional number of twirl animation frames before they begin to move) and #6 (delay clouds). The *_add(), *_update(), and *_render() functions of #5 and #6 could even already be completely reverse-engineered from just applying the structure onto the ASM, with the ones of #3 and #4 only needing one more RE push.

But perhaps the most interesting discovery here is in the curve bullets: TH05 only renders every second one of the 17 nodes in a curve bullet, yet hit-tests every single one of them. In practice, this is an acceptable optimization though – you only start to notice jagged edges and gaps between the fragments once their speed exceeds roughly 11 pixels per second:

And that brings us to the last 20% of TH05 position independence! But first, we'll have more cheap and fast TH01 progress.