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Spit into the Wind! - revisited


Nathan Strum

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I've been playing Incoming! lately, and it's brought back to mind one of my Stupid Game Ideas!™, namely Spit into the Wind! - which is basically Artillery, with Cheetos.

 

One of the things I didn't have in the original mock-ups, was a feature I mentioned that I really liked from Artillery, which is that it would leave a trail behind when it fired a shot, so you could see the trajectory.

 

I figured it probably couldn't be done on the 2600, but then as I was thinking about the game again recently, I think I came up with a solution.

 

The missile for each character could (maybe?) be used to draw the arc. The trick would be drawing each half of the arc, every other scanline. For example, the left halves of the arcs would be on even scanlines, the right halves on odd scanlines. This way, you'd never have two copies of the same missile on any given scanline. So the results would look something like this:

sitw_mockup_4.gif

 

Not sure if it would be possible to actually make that work in a game or not, but the Color Bar cart is apparently doing something similar in order to draw circles on the screen. Of course, that's not actually a game.

 

The difference with this and Artillery, is that even if this could work, you almost certainly couldn't leave multiple trajectories on screen. Maybe you could have two for each player if you drew each half-arc using every fourth scanline instead:

sitw_mockup_5.gif

 

But I'm thinking strictly in terms of graphics here, and not all of the calculations actually required to make this stuff happen, so it may not be possible anyway.

 

Anyway, I thought I'd throw this out there, just for kicks. :)

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Vines, ropes and such are possible is because it's easy to nudge the missile -7 to +8 pixels per scanline (or -15 to 0 without HMOVE lines) but in this case you'd need to theoretically position +/- 160 pixels, so you need the longer, general reposition routine that takes nearly a full scanline for a single object. And you have two objects :lolblue:

 

However, you could do something as shown if you allow 30Hz flicker (alternating between the upward and downward trajectory of the arc.) You may still need to alternate scanlines (or even every 3rd, 8th, or maybe 20th scanline), however, as you will either need a lot of RAM or do trajectory calculations mid-kernel, and/or use some very large or fancy lookup tables.

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However, you could do something as shown if you allow 30Hz flicker (alternating between the upward and downward trajectory of the arc.)

Or left and right player's trails.

 

You may still need to alternate scanlines (or even every 3rd, 8th, or maybe 20th scanline), however, as you will either need a lot of RAM or do trajectory calculations mid-kernel, and/or use some very large or fancy lookup tables.

Without wind and friction, horizontal speed would be constant. But since we need to consider this, we would have to calculate vertical speed and position, plus horizontal speed and position. For two objects! I hardly can see how lookup tables could help here, so calculations mid-screen seem pretty much impossible.

 

So extra RAM seems to be the only possible solution.

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