Thursday, August 02, 2007

Day 7 - Improving Presentation

A productive session. Firstly as promised I improved the collision detection. The 3 frame pic above shows: (note the blazing sun!)
  1. how bad it was
  2. overzealous detection
  3. just right
I added the parabolic reflector, I think it looks pretty cool. Note also how I have removed the collision clash zone boxes as I thought they were offending the eye. Of the two bars at the bottom the higher one shows "how hard" the Vectrex is working, clearly a good sign that we appear to be on about 60% remaining output at the moment




This final pic shows again the laser emitter and also three cities at the bottom, these will be Player One's lives. I'm not entirely happy with these at the moment so if anyone wants to offer a Vector sketch of a "missile command style" city then feel free to email me. I'm looking for something of less than 24 lines, preferably that can be drawn without taking your pen from the paper. :)


As you can see the cities have taken a fair bit of processing cycle to draw. (We're down to about 40% remaining.) I'll need to keep my eye on them.

Compiled code size 5785 bytes

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,
The graphics are looking good. The parobolic reflector is recogniseable as such.
Question, how can you know how hard the Vectrex is working? Did you make a routine thats generates the bar and makes a calculation how busy the CPU is is?
cheers
Ian

Anonymous said...

use this code:

lda $d009

sta timing

jsr Wait_Recal

read out $d009 and store it whereever ya want (i use (obviously) a
variable called 'timer'), i usually display this value as a line on
the screen to see how much cycles i have left to spare..
Please note, its important to do this procedure directly before you do
your wait_recal subroutine...

hope i could help you,
greets,
Michael

Vectorzoa said...

Michael is absolutely correct, its a superb way to find out how hard we're working. (Since it is imperative to maintain a 25-30 fps refresh.)

You can see in the photos of Day 7 the line Michael is refering to. (And in fact the number in the bottom right is a "print" of the value too.)

Anonymous said...

I'm still not sure exactly what type of game this is going to be Alex, (something like a cross between missile command, one of those 'flood' type games where you have to use a limited set of 'pipes', and some other stuff too! - my Laser Chess comparison was probably a bit wide of the mark, seeing the way it's developing now) but it looks very, very interesting none the less! :-)

Megatron

Anonymous said...

You are not the only one...But i feel i am getting the idea somehow...Or maybe its just giving me some weird gameideas that don't have anything to do with what alex has in mind...

Anyway, interesting stuff.. ;)