At 01:07 PM 10/1/2002 +0200, you wrote:
When using the ball for the missiles, I'd have to blank out the complete
starfield while a shot is on its way... Awww!
Have you experimented with blanking out the laser on the scanlines the
missiles are in? If that looks too obvious you can introduce intentional
gaps in the lasers in a random distribution between the stars to mask the
fact that the stars are chopping into the laser. That way when you move up
and down you might not see the gaps move because in sync with the stars it
will just blend into the noise pattern. If you combined that approach with
the dashed-line approach it might work.
That way you can have a particle-like effect.
I think the playfield would look okay but only if you crunched down the
cannons so that instead of coming from each corner of the screen they are
closer to the horizon line so that you'd be drawing a natural 1-pixel high
diagonal. This might not look very good with a quad-laser configuration
but I think it would look okay with just two laser coming from below the
horizon line.
I also think flicker on the lasers themselves, if you need that, is fine
due to the nature of the laser. You can rationalize it. You can even
rationalize flicker on the stars. So I'd prioritize the flicker to favor
the ships over just about everything else.
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