Erik Mooney schrieb:
> It's tricky, yes; and does give a sizable advantage to a player that fires
> such a bullet. In fact, I see strategy developing to establish control of
> the inviso-bullet, by timing it so that you fire again as soon as that
> sprite disappears and the magic bullet is again available.
Another thing I thought of is firing the invisible bullet when standing
very close to the river, so that your opponent can't even estimate the
direction it went :-)
> Have you given thought to expanding the bullet routines to allow many more
> bullets onscreen without scads of flicker? Specifically, try using a
> sprite-sharing routine to reposition one missile to display it multiple
> times. During scanlines occupied by cowboys, flicker any missile beyond
> the first, but in general the flicker would be much less bothersome, if
> you can do it :)
I've been thinking about that too, I was examining Colberts multiplexer
for this. But unfortunately there's several drawbacks of such a
solution, the major ones are:
- Immense RAM / ROM usage (Every bullet added would eat up some 5 or
more Bytes in the RAM)
- Immense Cycle ammount (Every bullet added would add lots of cycles
in the sort routines, it'd add more than a linear function)
(I posted a complete list of drawbacks of these routines (on my purpose,
not general!) sometime earlier in some post called 'Gunfight not
mergeable with colbert wizardry' or similar)
Another thing is that I'd have to cancel other features, like changing
spritecolors (I've some plans with these :-)) in order to make these
repositionings timeable.
You might think of an easier way, just repositioning where no other
objects are? I thought about that too.
But in the Gunfight gameplay scenario you'd come most likely to standart
situations like these:
C X C
O X O
W X W
B B
O X X X O
Y Y
1 2
Now you could only display one bullet out of six, which would be way
worse, or?
Now you could say 'flicker just pairs of threes' of them then. (That's
almost what I'm currently doing :-))
Ok, but with the Playfield obstacles added in, it's not granted, that
there's a free spot big enough (at least six lines then) to do a
reasonable(!) repositioning with three bullets. In the situation
pictured above there'd be no repositioning possible.
I've really given that lot's of thoughts and finally gave in to the
current solution.
I even like it as it is now. Don't you think that more bullets would
even cause complete gameplay chaos instead of a uhm... *strategic*
approach? :-)
Greetings,
Manuel
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