Start coding!

Right, enough theory let's get typing! I've set up my trig tables for later and confirmed the algorithm for the bouncing light. Now I need to tie it together in Vectrex speak! As I said before this can be tricky since even simple maths can get tough without fractions or dividing..

However, setting an angle and drawing a vector is trivial, so that happened very quickly and was more a question of remembering my compiler flags! The line was simple, but as is often the case the collision detection might prove tricky. What I needed to do was to draw a line, but to know exactly where each point was along that line. So I did a lot more maths to determine how to work out each 'y' for each 'x', generally its easy to trot along the hypotenuse but a little more effort to pop along a single axis. Anyway I got that in place and now you can see a very unimpressive line with some dots next to it. (What you can't see is the line rotated when the joystick is moved. Also the dots are deliberately shifted to to the right so the are clearly visible, yet still aligned.) These are drawn to show I "know" each dot along the line. In a later version I may go back to my sin/cos pairs but in this example I tried the slightly more tricky tan based method in case I need it later. (As I type this the sin/cos seems to fit the requirement once, more.. I guess we'll see over time.)

This is one of the things about Vectrex coding, some things are really easy and some things are more challenging and there is often a fine line between the two. In this case I was really pleased with my dots, even though they won't be seen in the final game and are just for behind the scenes calculations. Any also they look inferior to a line which is easy to draw! :)

Not sure when my next chance to code will be (hopefully soon), but I'm sure there will be a lot more visual results at that time, since must of the planning (for this stage) is now done.

Compiled code size 3814bytes