This is the worst case. But remember this: The
player won't hardly notice anything of that, since
it takes only ~ 8 Milliseconds until the sort order
is completely restored. Besides, I can't even
imagine how a worst case could happen at all.
<<
I haven't been following the thread that closely, but as far as how many
sprites to flicker on a line, I think the best approach is the Doug Neubauer
method as he described in Stella at 20.
His method is to allow as many objects as you want on the screen, but the
movement routines intentionally avoid crossing.
If you study Solaris or Radar Lock you'll see that there is a "preferred"
vertical separation in which the sprites tend to stay vertically separated
and when they do cross, they don't stay on the same scanline for very long.
Like in Radar Lock, if you are going up against multiple fighters, one might
tend to stay in the top half and one at the bottom and they will
occasionally swap positions but they do not find themselves both staying for
long in the same vertical range of the screen.
It's kind of ballet-like and synchronous rather than having each object's AI
completely independent and oblivious of the position of other objects.
The net effect is to minimize flicker and still give the illusion of
complete freedom of movement.
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