Re: [stella] P2C+Cartesian to Polar = Night Pilot

Subject: Re: [stella] P2C+Cartesian to Polar = Night Pilot
From: Thomas Jentzsch <tjentzsch@xxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2001 19:25:20 +0100
Roger Williams wrote:
>>>Rotating the other player is actually trivial.
>
>>I'm not talking about the coding.  It's not trivial because 8 
bits of 
>>graphics are just insufficient for resolving many degrees of 
>>rotation.  Your shapes are going to look like garbage unless 
you stick to 
>>very primitive shapes (like the triangles in Asteroids).
>
>Yeah, very true.  I'll probably stick with Combat-like shapes
>which resolve to 22.5 degrees or 1/16 circle.  The overall
>rotation of the landscape and constant motion should help
>fill in the gaps.  Right now the first person orientation is 
only
>resolved to 1.4 degrees or 1/256 circle and it obviously
>isn't quite good enough, which is why the "linear" motion
>as you move forward is so jumpy.  I think that if this is
>fixed the eye will forgive a lot of other sins and 
approximations.

I had the same problem with the players ship in Thrust. 
I wanted to watch the aspect ratio (8:5), the symmetry and the 
size of the sprites. I did a lot of tries, where I counted and 
weighted pixels (left and right of center and total). 

But I didn't liked the results, until I decided that the aspect 
ratio is 2:1 for me. Then it became much easier, because I only 
needed three good looking different shapes for 0, 22.5 and 45 
degrees. The others can be simply generated by mirroring. 

Finally the ship became nearly triangle shaped, because that 
was the only good looking graphic I found.

There aren't many other games, were the sprites are rotated. 
Asteroids, Indy 500 and Sprintmaster (and soon Death Derby) are 
the only ones (I can remember now) with 16 directions.

Have fun!
Thomas

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