SpiceWare's Blog

F.Y.I. The shields just flicker in this build, almost like... Well not like the throb at the start of a game. This was a quick observation in blue and b/w mode, vector.

Again (& again) great job!

The ship warp-in effect and slower explosion look great now.

Oops - had made a chance to the "CycleColor" routine so the ship explosion would look better in the monochrome game variations. I forgot the same routine was used for the shield coloration. I restored the code to the prior version so it'll be fixed in the next release.

Thanks for the updates. On the normal rom, I feel the size of the window is too big in the beginning rounds when there are not a lot of space rocks. Maybe the initial size should be correlated to the number of space rocks on screen? In the debugging test rom when there were lots of space rocks on the screen the big window worked well.

 

On the normal rom with just a few space rocks though it seemed like that there was always just one space rock slipping through the corner that prevented re-spawn.

 

 

I'm betting you don't have the cycles or rom left to do some elaborate calculations to see if the asteroids on a trajectory to the re-spawn location, hence use of the windowed area approach.

 

 

Edit:

Forgot to say I haven't looked at the code at all. Not much time for a few days yet.

It's easier to have one size window than having to resize it based on the number of asteroids on screen. I can make it so the window shrinks faster, it's defined by a constant in defines.h:

 

// shrink respawn zone every x frames

#define RESPAWN_ZONE_SHRINK_TIME 60

 

 

Just finished adding "select your own color". Instead of the 3 hardcoded presets, you can now select any of the 16 base colors. Surprisingly enough, doing this saved quite a bit of ROM over having 3 hardcoded monochrome presets. Now I have to add some conditional compile logic so the PAL version selects from the 13 base colors, otherwise PAL users will have 4 choices for white