Ballistics


After getting all the bullet collisions working correctly, I moved onto the actual bullet logic itself.  Not that any of the characters have anything like that - they have axes, and orbs, and magical olde-(under)worlde things like that instead.  Now, as per the PC version, each character's "bullet" lasts a different amount of time, and has a different delay until the next can be fired.  This means that two of the characters can launch multiple bullets - something I hadn't accounted for when I began writing this, but luckily with my sort-of object-oriented approach it was pretty straightforward to add.

Whilst adding the extra bullet handling the great development ogre of running out of memory occurred again (it's always lurking in the shadows)  This isn't actually running out of memory - I've got about 12K of that left to fill with monster logic, more AY-music, and the like - but rather running out of memory in a particular 16K bank.  As usually I did some optimising and moving things around, and all is good again.  One of the dynamic buffers for the graphics was about 340 bytes larger than it needed to be, which was an easy fix for a nice bit of memory, and I've also removed some of the collectable objects which are in the original, but make no sense in the reduced Speccy version.  Mischief Managed.

Other than that I've been fixing some bugs.  There were three rooms which were populated in such a way that, on the reduced Speccy resolution, some of the doors would overlap the display of the held objects on the bottom-left of the screen, causing some overlapping and colour clash.  Those rooms have now been redesigned slightly so that no longer occurs, and everything looks nice again.

I've also addressed a problem with the player being "guided" towards the door when they aren't quite lined up with it.  This works really well, but things became a bit weird when the player was in the right position but the door itself couldn't be used - when it was either locked, or the grill was down - which led to the player frantically twitching left & right instead of waiting patiently.

Comments

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Sounds like good progress Bob.

Thank you again Bob!

Seems like you're quite in the flow again. Thank you for sharing :)

(+1)

Yes, I does, doesn't it?  It's beginning to feel like a game!