[stella] JoustPong: more exciting than ever!

Subject: [stella] JoustPong: more exciting than ever!
From: KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 23 Feb 2004 04:06:10 -0000
"Pterry" is now a resident of the magical JoustPong kingdom!

I had probably my single most productive day of 2600 hacking. It's not 
quite done, I want to get Pterry swooping around a bit, and tweaking the 
bounce algorithm when the ball hits him (as opposed to a player, but overall
I think it adds a lot to the game) A lot of little hurdles I had to
overcome...the usual stuff of player-graphic reuse, plus I'm using the 
players for the score at a different part of the kernal, that kind of 
stuff.  Usually I just hacked around issues by applying overgenerous
dollops of RAM. Fortunately I had plenty to spare.

The other major improvement came from me thinking about what made the game 
so tough. I went back to 2600 and MAME Joust and I realized that while 
I am doing a fair approximation of the physics of the flapping, there's 
relatively little in Joust that comes at you as fast as the JoustPong
ball.  (Pterry swooping and the angirest type of computer rider, 
maybe).  So I gave subpixel tracking to the horizontal position
of the ball to slow it down and resimplified the vertical positioning to 
fixed angles (none of my algorithms for changing the vertical speed according
to what the player was doing worked very well.) This not only makes it easier 
for the human, but harder for the CPU.

Let me know what you think! I noticed I haven't been able to stir
up a lot of conversation on the game lately...is this at all because 
I link to a URL for the ROM and source, as opposed to an attachment?
Just a thought... (I know it's mostly because I haven't been that 
interesting lately, but I don't know if people have a strong preference
for attachments, which are almost impossible for me to do from this 
account.  The good news is that I plan to make any bin/source URL I post 
here permanent, so they won't go missing from the stella archive.)


Journal (w/ a cute animated GIF of my Pterry) 
at http://alienbill.com/joustpong/

Latest bin:
http://alienbill.com/joustpong/20040222.bin
Latest source:
http://alienbill.com/joustpong/20040222.source.txt

-- 
KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx    http://kisrael.com
"God or somebody save us from any society founded on Darwinian principles."
   --Richard Dawkins 


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