RE: [stella] Horizontal Positioning and Movement

Subject: RE: [stella] Horizontal Positioning and Movement
From: Piero Cavina <p.cavina@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 13:55:28 +0100
At 14:01 -0500 2-09-1997, Robert "A." Colbert wrote:

>>Could someone please give me some assistance with horizontal moveable
>>object positioning and horizontal movement.
>>
>>I could really use a simple example of how it's done. Or at least a plain
>>english explanation of the process.
>
>O.K. a plain English example it is then:
>Now you're probably wondering if there is an easy way to translate a
>horizontal pixel position into the coarse/fine positioning values. Yes :)

(...)

>The only problem with the above example is that it wastes 2 entire scanline.

hmmm, if I'm not wrong the equivalent of "calcpos" used in "Adventure" is
more compact, thoght you'll always end wasting 2 scanlines (one to calc the
coarse/fine values, another to position the sprite).

My suggestion for the beginner is always:

FIRST write a little demo with ONE moving sprite, positioned during vblank
time using the above routine (or a similiar one).
THEN try to recycle a sprite to have multiple copies on the screen; you'll
immediately learn that it's much harder if you've to do something else in
the same scanlines used to position the sprite (ie to draw the other sprite
or a missile). You need to know very well what you're doing at this point,
so it's better first to gather some experience with some simple
single-sprite experiments.

>If you have only 1 copy of a player on a screen, then you can easily move the
>player around by setting a movement value in HMP0 and using an HMOVE each
>frame.  This would move the player the number of pixels represented in HMP0
>each frame.  Of course, with multiple copies of players, you have to keep
>track of each copy's position on the screen and move the player to that
>position before each copy is displayed.

It seems that this feature (moving a sprite with repeated hits to HMOVE),
together with RESMPx (the registers that reset the horizontal position of a
missile to the center of its player) were designed to help the programmers
to write some simple player/missile games. I doubt that they can have any
use in more elaborate games. But I might be wrong... :-)

P.




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