Saturday, July 21, 2007

It's working - time to break it!


After couple of changes the game now seems to run solid 25 Hz on PAL C64 (and should do 30 Hz on NTSC C128 but I have no means to verify that), but to make sure it stays that way I'm finally replacing the old droid table with a proper droid allocator à la Mike. That avoids copying data every time an object is removed.

Direct result of that is that I can freely add more data for each droid as I don't have to worry about removal time. I have some ideas how to use that to speed up the game and add new features, like droid behavior when its visibilty changes. Now droids actions between waypoints are limited to whether to fire or not, flee/pursuit decision is only done at waypoints. I want to make droids more intelligent, even if it's nothing more than pause and then reverse their direction when visibility changes. That way 123 entering a room when player controls 999 will get second thoughts about going where it was intending to, and retreats instead.

I hope that the current beta works enough to keep you happy, it may take a while before the game works again...

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