Underground refueling suspended

[Retrospect]

On 11/16/2021 at 7:39 PM, SteveB said:

delaying the normal execution without shooting

If the player's laser is character which i suspect it must be, a suggestion might be to always have the characters there, in front of the ship, but coloured black.  When the player presses fire, colour it white (or random colours?) and then go to the routine that searches for collisions.  For the sound you could have a variable that declares when player presses fire, say "PS=1" and "PST=0" for player sound=1, player sound timer=0, so have a routine checked for the sound of the missile which then increments through different sounds whilst it's on, but using minus duration so as not to halt execution speed. This way it might take some of the delay away.  The only trouble is if the stars are characters they'd be wiped with the laser?  Nice scroll routine for the stars btw.

[SteveB]

On 11/26/2021 at 7:07 AM, Retrospect said:

If the player's laser is character which i suspect it must be, a suggestion might be to always have the characters there, in front of the ship, but coloured black.  When the player presses fire, colour it white (or random colours?) and then go to the routine that searches for collisions.  For the sound you could have a variable that declares when player presses fire, say "PS=1" and "PST=0" for player sound=1, player sound timer=0, so have a routine checked for the sound of the missile which then increments through different sounds whilst it's on, but using minus duration so as not to halt execution speed. This way it might take some of the delay away.  The only trouble is if the stars are characters they'd be wiped with the laser?  Nice scroll routine for the stars btw.

The laser is one of eight characters (FF, 00FF, 0000FF,...), depending on your vertical position, the color is also derived from your position, and is a plain CALL HCHAR, displayed while checking for collisions using CALL POSITION with sprite #1 to #8 (max 7 ships + fuel tank) and then blank it again. Could be optimized to skip 2 to 7 whith "Dramite" like levels, but controls shouldn't change between levels. @senior_falcon Could a CALL VREAD(768, 32, A$) speed things up? I guess ASC(SEG$(A$,I*4-3,1)) will eat all performance gains again...  The sound shouldn't block anything, I use the minus to stop the sound.  

 

The stars are simply the remaining sprites from #12 to #28 ?  I experimented with chars to be painted back with CALL DISPLY after the laser was displayed, but it did not look good. 

 

Do you have any ideas for additional levels? Level 26 uses now the "unused ship" you mentioned recently. Without at least 5 new levels a new release isn't worth the effort...

 

[Retrospect]

6 hours ago, SteveB said:

Do you have any ideas for additional levels?

I'll have a think about that.  I'm sure some enemies from other well known games could make a cameo appearance

 

[+Ksarul]

Some of the nice, strange aliens from TI Invaders would be great, if they aren't all in there yet. A lot of those were pretty unique. The ships from Rasmus' TiTanium would also be a good fit. . .I haven't seen all of the levels, so a lot of them may already been used here. Do we have a list of the ones that have been used, or is that a delicious secret knowledge?

[senior_falcon]

On 11/27/2021 at 1:57 PM, SteveB said:

 @senior_falcon Could a CALL VREAD(768, 32, A$) speed things up? I guess ASC(SEG$(A$,I*4-3,1)) will eat all performance gains again... 

 

Offhand I would guess that would probably be slower due to the string handling, but the only way to really know is to try it.