As usual, real life and other projects have been slowing me down a bit, but I finally got the shooting mechanisms in place.
All three elements of the shot selection are in this screenshot, although the look of them is of course subject to change. The first step in shooting is aiming at a point on the hogline. This is what that remains of that little arrow are to the left of the line. I don't have the code in to clean up the cursor yet, so the rock just plows through and erases it.
Other projects and my real job have been keeping me away from this project, but I've made some interesting progress.
I have the first bits of interaction in place, the aiming cursor is now active and can be moved with the joystick. I'm planning a 3-stage shot system.
First, you aim across the hogline, similar to the way Intellivision Bowling does it. Next, you set the weight of your shot (this is how hard you're throwing the rock, for those unfamiliar with curling lingo).
Afte
Did some more line work on the sheets. There's now a center line, and I have the hogline on the other end.
You can also see the hacks on the left. Due to sprite limitations, I don't think I'll be able to put the rings on the shooting end. That's OK, since they have no function on that side, in effect I have a one-sided curling sheet. I also don't have the necessary objects to put the T line on. In real curling, this line is important since you can only sweep opponent's rocks behi
Well, I managed to put the handles on the rocks.
Those two pixels were really hard to pull off, and I'm still not entirely satisfied with the routine I wrote to do it. This is now the third version of the rock drawing subroutine, and hopefully it's the last one. It now handles both player colors as well as eight possible handle directions. I think it's time to actually get the program to do something interactive. That means I need to start putting together the lower sheet display
Another new screenshot, this one shows the first rock:
It's the little yellow thing near the top. This was surprisingly difficult to do. I have the curling sheet laid out as one big memory block so that the bottom display can scroll along it. Each row is 85 bytes, so every row of the rock has to span that gap. I also had to account for rocks that could stride two consecutive bytes, which was a special kind of annoying. I plan to add some kind of simple handle to the rock so you ca
Another somewhat modest looking screenshot:
I've added the hogline and the backline using the player 0 and 3 missiles. I can't use players 1 and 2 because they will turn red to match the inner ring. Most of my work this week was behind-the-scenes type stuff. I've redone the display list and memory layout to allow the bottom ice sheet to pan to the right with the shot. The top sheet will always show the house so you can see what you're shooting at, while the bottom is where you actu
Got some rings made!
The rings are constructed from the four player objects, arranged side by side. A couple of screen interrupts change the colors to produce the inner ring. This was much easier to accomplish than I had expected. I thought the 5200's wonky pixel size ratio would really screw things up. I think the next step is to figure out what the rocks are going to look like.
After completing my first 5200 project, Ratcatcher, I've jumped right into another project. I grew up in the Buffalo, NY area and spent a lot of time watching Canadian television. Therefore, I grew up very familiar with the grand sport of curling. My wife and I played for a few years in a local curling club here in Seattle, so while I'm no pro, I do know quite a lot about the game. Over my many years as a hobbyist game programmer I've noticed that sports games seem to be quite rare outside
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