C64 :: Catching up

i was doing odds and sods as well as coding over the weekend, so here's a quick update that covers the last three days; the character bullets were tweaked but there's a "ghosting" bug that means a bullet gets decommissioned but left on the screen until it gets filtered out by the buffer copier and the buffers flip, i thought i had it but that needs further investigation it seems. The background starfield went in as well, although it's using it's own routine for speed, again relying on the filters in the buffer copier to remove stars cleanly and a feature of the "colour per tile" colour scroller for speed; the bullets currently inherit the high res colours of the stars as they pass over them, that's on the "to do" list when i go through the bullet code looking for that ghost.

The status bar font was also slapped together and a layout bolted into the code before all the score handling routines were installed; the scoring itself is pretty arbitrary right now since any hit to an active object gives ten points and destroying it another forty but the score itself is displayed correctly and, if it tops the high score, the latter updates as well. The lives and level counters both work as well although the code to decrease the lives hasn't been added for the moment.

The final job was writing up some notes on the object and animation systems for the fluffy bunnies doing the sprites, then passing said notes to the first designer to add some to the pool and whatever specific ones are required for his level; this is, hopefully, where the game starts coming together because it'll be when the first level-specific movement patterns start getting bolted into place... it'll also be the point where my worst fears will be realised and i might start getting raster over-run problems because the damned object system really is too CPU intensive so there might be some re-writes around that area of the code on the way too. Since i'm waiting on data for the moment, i'll give the cosmetic stuff a bit of thought as well; i've had a quick tweak of the backgrounds (we're now using 256 characters of the first font!) and details such as the way the ship arrives and leaves play at the start and end of a level have been improved a bit; the code also spots it's "game complete" state correctly, so the ship zooms off and then it falls into a loop because there's no code for that condition just yet...