SpiceWare's Blog

Lookin' good. Now that Stella can support these kinds of roms, the fixed debiug colors reveal that individual sprites can alternate betwen P0 and P1. That's a sign of a sophisticated sprite drawing algorithm.

Thanks! The sprites are handled the same way in Frantic. I'm able to support more sprites in Space Rocks(51) than in Frantic(24) because the collision routines are only called for the ships, saucer and shots.

 

The collision routines scan all the other objects to see if the specific object being tested has collided with any of the others (using pixel perfect testing). With 6 shots, 2 players and enemy saucer there could be 9 * (MAX_SPRITES-1) = 9*50 = 450 checks done in Space Rocks.

 

In Frantic, anything can collide with anything, including the playfield as well as the 6 shots (and shots even collide with each other). So that's 30 * (MAX_SPRITES+MAX_SHOTS-1+PLAYFIELD) = 30*30 = 900 checks.

 

If you care to look in the source, the C function DisplaySprites() is what drives the filling of the DPC+ datastreams that the kernel uses. It's located in /custom/main.c

Although visible thrust in public is usually illegal, I like it. Looks better this way.

crap - don't know what I did, but my latest build is doing odd things such as getting a score of FF0910 and showing things where they shouldn't be (such as an explosion occurring behind the ship when the saucer isn't on-screen).

 

As such, I'm going to have to roll back to a prior build and what's in the blog posts are my roll-back points. As mentioned in busy busy, I don't have much time to test at the moment, so I'd appreciate it if anybody with some time over the next few days could play this build (July 1st) for an hour or so and see if it works as expected. If it's fine, great, if not then we'll need to play test the prior versions until we find one that doesn't screw up the score.

 

Thanks in advance.

<testing><testing><is this thing on?>

 

hmm, been over a week and I haven't seen any feedback on whether or not this build has the bugs I mentioned. I'll be returning to work on Space Rocks next week and would like to know which build I need to roll back to.