Missile glitches, trouble adding sprites, trouble with color sprites

[Tyler Frisbee]

So I've started creating my first Atari game and figured it wouldn't be too hard since I know some other programming languages...oh how wrong I was Anyway, my game isn't very much so far but I haven't been able to make much progress as a few issues (mostly graphical) have been tripping me up. The first issue is that I get errors whenever I try to add more than two sprites or when I try to add color to my existing sprites, and missiles only seem to fire occasionally when pressing the spacebar and when they actually do fire, I can't seem to make it look like they are coming out of player0's gun. I obviously don't expect anyone to troubleshoot my code, but does anyone have any ideas as to what the issues may be? Thanks for the help!

prototype.bas

prototype.bas.bin

[+Gemintronic]

I'd look over the examples and code snippets pinned in the batari basic section. It'll give you a feel for the kernel options and how the drawscreen command works.

 

Basically, you need to declare which batari basic kernel you are gonna use:

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-commands.html#kernelopchart

 

You only get two sprites, two missiles and one ball. The sprite and missiles share sizes and colors too. The ball shares the color with the playfield. You can kinda fudge it with the multi-sprite kernel but that's pretty quirky.

 

You need to set up how your colors and sprites look before each drawscreen command. Most of those settings get forgotten after the drawscreen.

 

 

UPDATE: Many of the games in my sig have source. It's not terribly proper but at least it could give you a feel for working code.

[bogax]

play with the offsets until the missile
starts where you want it to.
you could try +9 x and -11 y

you park your missile off screen in the y direction
but it keeps moving in the x direction and you
can't fire again until it reaches 241

also the missile and player1 move 3 pixels (relative
to each other) so eg if player1 is only 2 pixels wide
sometimes you'll miss

Edited June 17, 2014 by bogax

[Tyler Frisbee]

Thanks so much for the help guys, I managed to work out most of my problems. I apologize for the nooby questions!

[SeaGtGruff]

I apologize for the nooby questions!

 

This forum welcomes nooby questions!

[+Gemintronic]

Thanks so much for the help guys, I managed to work out most of my problems. I apologize for the nooby questions!

 

Heck, you've seen my code. I'm STILL a noob!

 

If you can't find the answer by searching and it's too small for a topic just PM me. I can't promise a timely (or best) answer but I'll try

[SeaGtGruff]

Also, even if you figured out the answer yourself, it's probably still a good idea to post a description of what the problem was and what you did to fix it, since others might conceivably run into the same issue and your post might help them.

[freshbrood]

Hello guys, another nooby question. Is there a way to share player color data the same way we can use data frame1lo and data frame1hi for sharing sprites? If so, a very simple example would really help. I am using the playercolors kernel.

 

Thank you!

[+Gemintronic]

Hello guys, another nooby question. Is there a way to share player color data the same way we can use data frame1lo and data frame1hi for sharing sprites? If so, a very simple example would really help. I am using the playercolors kernel.

 

Thank you!

 

You cannot swap color statements made for player0 or player1. Altering the start and end of a sprite does not let you mix and match arbitrarily. Basically, you can make one very long sprite and move the pointers up and down to present a vertical slice.

 

You CAN mix and match sprite data and color data for a specific player. So, you could have player0 sprite data with a purple bat and a yellow key on one sprite data block. You could use a different player0 color statement to have a purple bat and a black key.