Re: [stella] H.E.R.O. bars

Subject: Re: [stella] H.E.R.O. bars
From: Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 10:16:54 -0700
At 11:44 PM 9/5/2000 -0500, you wrote:
Hello.  Here's my next big question for awhile.
In HERO, Seaquest, and Megamania, there is an energy bar at the bottom.  It
has more accuracy than the 48 pixels of the six-digit score routine, so it
seems to be very useful.  Has anyone looked at any code of this type to
figure out how it's done?
Thanks. :)

I was thinking about something similar, actually.


This may not be how it works, but it might be one way to do it.

You do it with a non-reflected playfield, and to gain the extra bits of horizontal resolution, you use a "filler" sprite that is the same color as the playfield. This could even be the ball sprite if you make it quad width, and then just adjust the horizontal position of this sprite accordingly to fill in the gap, between 1 and 3 pixels.

I was thinking about this because this approach COULD be used, theoretically, for a SMOOTH HORIZONTALLY SCROLLING playfield. You'd wind up sacrificing some of your sprites to do it, but for very simple backgrounds, I think this would work.

By simple background, you could have up to one playfield shape pass by horizontally (bordered by two missiles, probably, or a missile and the ball). You wouldn't be limited by right angles, necessarily, because you can fill in the jaggies still by HMOVing the sprites.

So it might be possible to do a kind of Dungeons and Dragons style of maze game with smooth horizontal and vertical scrolling this way. You'd still have both players and a missile left to work with, and you could flicker the missile if needed.


Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc


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