Coolcrab

This is great thanks! It plays well and the menu looks much better. I've uploaded this version with some small tweaks to the main post. I found and solved two glitches, both were already in my code I think. The star could move off screen on the top and if the score was low and the star went offscreen on the bottom then the score could flip to 999999 beause of the score=score-25 thing. Both seem to be fixed now. Two more things id like to add are: a satellite. Use the bullet to zip past the screen at a random height at high speed when rand & 127 = 1 for example. But I don't know if there is enough space for that. (15 bytes) And a pause function, but I assume that that wont fit. I also added 100 to the score at the beginning of the game when the right difficulty switch is set to A.

Oh no, that's a very sloppy way to keep it moving after a sound. Because sometimes a sound started when slowdown was high and then it reset to high, so you had a second or so where the star just hung motionless. This was my quick fix But if the sound plays in the main loop then that problem goes away

That would be cool!

Makes sense

Ah state is from bogax's code. I'm not sure what it does but it has to do with the paddle simulation or the drawing of the telescope line. Cloud_rot stood for rotation. But type is also fine

Cloud_rot decides the nuz1 (so the shape and multiplier of the cloud) i think. And cloud_v is the cloud velocity. _state is the menu blinker I think? (Don't have the code infront of me, where is it used?)

The paddle part was by bogax. It basically is a script that allows the telescope to point anywhere, with p the 'x' position and q the 'y' position of the end point of the beam. In his original script you could move the line anywhere and let it terminate mid air if you moved the pad0down. I changed it to move along the edge of the map. So it starts in the low right corner, moves up (in q) then reaches the upper left corner and moves right (in p) until it reaches the upper right corner and then moves down (in q) I didn't rename them because I didn't want to touch that script too much. But you could call p _telelescope_point_horz and q _telescope_point_vert. (Or something similar) [small side note, the edge of the field is not the same as the edge of the screen, there is about 1 block missing on both sides, can that be drawn in somehow to make the telescope beam touch the window edge?] And I have no idea what _blink is for. Probably something to do with the menu but it got replaced by something else. so yes that can go.

In the _score label (which is sloppy of me, should be __score), on line 415. There I say the same thing. So the randomness in level 2, if game mode 2. But good point to have it start on level 1

I think so, can't really think of much more things to add. Especially because the space is almost gone. ~250k left I think.

The game modes. In the old version I had this on the right A/B switch. Gamemode 1 is a progressive game where the clouds change by adding +1 to NUSIZ1 and every 7th level the clouds become faster. (this should probably happen quicker). But its predictable in the way of what the next level will be. Gamemode 2 is more random. Each new level will have a random NUSIZ1 and place the cloud at a random speed and location. The star is also in a random location. So its a bit harder and less repetitive for people who don't wat the same level over and over again. ​I also wanted to add a difficulty setting on the AB switch that I freed up to make the star_int a bit lower and maybe give more points per star. So that it is more forgiving.

Yes, this was what I meant to do. I think that I meant to put _level into _score. But its a bit double as _level doesn't get killed until you restart the game anyway.

Oh that is strange indeed. That has to be _level I think.

In the main loop score is used as a countdown. So at line 320 it ticks down and at line 414 it can go up. (when a star is observed) At 294 I say _level = _level +1 and count it that way and at 349 I replace score by _level and go back to the menu. (all in the 0.8 version that I uploaded last time.) Is that what you meant?

Aha I didn't know! I don't have a 7800 unfortunately. But in that case it is a good point indeed. Yes, ok then that won't be too heavy to implement variable wise. Did you manage to free any variables up by the way? That is nice indeed. I love how nice and helpful this community is.

1) int stands for integrate. So how long the telescope has to look at it to go up or down one block on the healthbar/observation bar. The star_int might have to become longer at higher levels. But then there's another thing to balance 2) this does seem like a good solution and if it fits it might be nice to have. But requiring the switch to be in a certain position is not to strange is it? You have to also make sure the left and right switch is set properly. 3) the idea was to save the high score. But if wouldn't give it the highest priority. My method should work though right? Because I compare the value that I put into the score with a different variable. And not the score itself. (That gets redrawn each time with bogaxes secipt) since I use the score for a countdown anyway and don't display the level until after the player dies. (Although it would be nice to show that somehow. But it seemed confusing to show the level in score and add a second Life bar that counts down as the timer. Input on that is welcome.) Thanks again for looking into this. And I really have to read your site more, as it keeps surprising me how everything is there.

Cool that you are still looking. It does get a bit messy at the bottom, sorry about that. I didn't have time to look myself the last two days so also no progress from my side.

That's what I was going for. "If slowdown - level then " should be true shorter than "if slowdown then" if you are calling "slowdown=slowdown-1" every frame. But there are better ways of doing this now that I think about it.

It's odd that it accepts it though. But this is good to get rid of yea. Also dId you manage to find where the score=5 came from by any chance? I still can't find that one.

Strange that didn't give me an error. The idea there was that the cloud will move slightly faster each level. Instead of every 30frames it would move every 30-level frames. But this gets very hard very quickly so maybe it should be removed (and put back into the if _slowdown check 1-2 lines below.) Making it progressively harder is difficult all together. Is there some general rule for how to speed things up properly? But odd that it doesn't compile for you. Ww should have the same bB now.

Thanks! This would free up 6, so that would help. You mean just using player0x, etc instead of _star_x right? Yea you can use it for throwaway values. I used g in that way for example. But you can't store values in it right? Do you mean x1 and x2? They can't be constants right? It has to overwrite them when moving. I like having both paddle and joypad compatibility, so I'll probably leave it in. That could work. How would you do this? I don't really understand how that would work with tables. (Although I haven't done much with it yet) I did want to put some meteorites in, and that should work by just freeing the movement vars. But what you describe sounds very useful.

I've added mode setting in the menu,more sounds and a high score option. But there seems to be some kind of bug with the score. As it is set to 5 when pressing select (changing game mode) and I am not sure why. Also sometimes a star manages to go up above the screen, while this should be prevented by if _star_x < 25 && _star_y > 1 then _star_y = _star_y - 2 : goto skip_move if _star_x < 50 && _star_y > 1 then _star_y = _star_y - 1 : goto skip_move If you guys could take a look, that would be great Apart from that I'm running out of variables to do much more, are there any more that I can use other than a-z? Otherwise I'll have to check what I can resuse where. After this is done, I think that I have Incorporated all feedback so unless more will come (Especially longplays would be great as I don't know if the difficulty increace is fair) I think that it's mostly done. astronomerV0.8.bas

Did you make any more progress or did development stop? This would be fun to have on a cart, maybe with some other 2k game?

This is cool! how did you make the snow?

A wiki is fine too, can I suggest dokuwiki? https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki# with monobook template https://www.dokuwiki.org/template:monobook

Whoo, the game got a review on Retrogaming magazine. http://retrogamingmagazine.com/2017/12/13/view-heavenly-bodies-on-atari-2600-with-astronomer/