Aim Demo/Source

[Mord]

As I mentioned over in the homebrew forum, here's a demo/source/tutorial/etc showing a way to aim projectiles at a target. It's basically a way of setting the X and Y speeds of a projectile based on the coordinates of the firing enemy and the target. The source has some commented out code that can make the enemy a little less precise at aiming, which can be good for having it spread it's fire out.

 

You can move the player with player 1 controls, or the enemy with player 2 controls.

 

binaries, source, and a zip of both attached.

 

 

aim.bas.a78

aim.bas.bin

aim.zip

aim.bas

[+Atarius Maximus]

Nicely done, Mord! I could definitely see this as very useful for a game.

 

I took a quick video of what it looks like here: http://youtu.be/CN5PbCp5sig

 

http://youtu.be/CN5PbCp5sig

[RevEng]

Very impressive demo!

[Mord]

Thanks, hopefully someone finds it useful in their own games or at least gets them thinking. The demo has several places it can use improvement or be tinkered with, including making it a bit more generalized and turned into a standalone function, or adjusting the minimum speeds - or trying to cap a maximum speed. I'll be doing stuff like that in graze hopefully during this week along with a bunch of other things - weather pending. Heat makes me useless.

[Dalta]

Hey would someone mind explaining a part of this code further please?

 

Particularly, these two lines:

if HeroX <= BulletX[z] then BulletDirection[z] = BulletDirection[z] | %00000010  else BulletDirection[z] = BulletDirection[z] & %11111101
if HeroY <= BulletY[z] then BulletDirection[z] = BulletDirection[z] | %00000001  else BulletDirection[z] = BulletDirection[z] & %11111110

I understand what an 'and' and 'or' operation is, but I don't understand what's actually happening here.

I copied these lines into my own code to see what happens. I had to flip the '<' signs and I also replaced 'BulletX' and Y with the 'enemyX' and Y variables. But after that my enemy sprites only fired imprecisely and only down and to the right. Does anyone know why I got that behaviour in my code as opposed to the precise shooting in this code? It's probably worth mentioning that I have two direction variables, one for up/down and one for left/right rather than just 'BulletDirection' which seems to be the case here.

 

I think I just need to alter the part after the 'else' to get it to fire up and left too, but unfortunately I don't know what's actually happening in order to change it.

Thanks for any help

[Mord]

Those two lines are defining the direction for the bullet for vertical and horizontal directions via two bits in the "BulletDirection" variable.

 

Based on what I'm seeing above it looks bit 1 specifies if the bullet is travelling left or right, and bit 0 specifies up or down.

 

The bullet wants to go towards the player, so I guess if bit 1 is 1, it will travel left. if bit 1 is 0, it'll travell right. If bit 0 is 1, it'll travel up. otherwise, travel down.

 

All it's doing to determine this is comparing the screen coordinates of the target (the player) with the source (the shooting mob). If you switched the < conditions, you might need to switch the then and else portions of the if statements as well.

[SlidellMan]

I have to say that this demo is quite helpful. Might have to use it to replace the current enemy bullet code in my shooting demo.