It was also great to see other work in progress games at the show. In fact showing me how it's done properly. There was Steve Bamford's Circe's Island, with stunning Nintendo-esque graphics and sophisticated gameplay, and Ciaran Anscomb's Dunjunz, a brilliant reconstruction of an 80's game dripping with 8-bit goodness.
Why I oughta
In other news, I got trolled by my seven year old son. He got me good...
I was recently trying to diagnose a problem with one of my Dragons, where it would intermittently fail on startup, or crash after a short time. After poking it with a stick for a while, I decided the problem was due to the CPU not being connected to the rest of the computer, or "dry joints" as the condition is sometimes known.
A little bit of soldering later, the machine started looking like it was going to behave itself, so I let my son Ed have a play to give it a test. I showed him how to assign values to numeric and string variables, perform some simple operations, and print the results.
After a while, a voice calls down the stairs: "What does 'FC error' mean?"
Me: "It's short for 'function call error'. It means it doesn't like the number you're giving it"
Ed: "But it happens when I try to print F$"
Me: "That's weird. Let me have a look."
I typed in '?F$' and sure enough I saw this:
?F$
?FC ERROR
OK
Stuff like that happens when memory gets corrupted so I thought perhaps the computer still had issues. I typed a few other things and it seemed OK but ?F$ kept giving "?FC Error".
After watching with amusement for some time, Ed started laughing and told me he had previously typed in F$="?FC ERROR" and then cleared the screen. He used my own knowledge against me like some kind of mental Judo. I've never felt so simultaneously proud and stupid.
The treacherous ratbag also prefers Flagon Bird to my game.
Anyhoo, back to the plot:
How to scroll in any direction, using just horizontal and vertical scrolling
The game design has the player ship fixed in the centre of the screen, with the player controls rotating the ship to point in some desired direction. The illusion of flying is created by making the background move in the opposite direction. I decided on having a total of 16 possible directions, mainly limited by my ability to draw convincing player graphics. After much frustration and cursing, I managed to create three base images that could be rotated or flipped to give nine images covering 180° of rotation. The other 180° could be covered by drawing seven of the existing images upside down:
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| Just taking the ship out for a spin |
We can go up, down, left or right easily enough by calling the appropriate scroll routine, but what about moving at other angles? Scrolling at 45° can be achieved by scrolling both horizontally and vertically at the same time, but there's a problem: The movement looks too fast. About 41% too fast, thanks to Pythagoras.
To scroll or not to scroll?
To move at the right speed it would seem that we need to scroll a bit less than one pixel per frame. Of course, the only options available are scroll or not scroll on any given frame, so the best we can do is to achieve an average speed as measured over a number of frames. That can be done with simple counters.
We need two counters, one for horizontal and one for vertical, and each counter will have some value added to it every frame. When a counter overflows, that means we scroll on that frame. So for the specific case of moving at 45°, we need both counters to overflow approximately 71% of the time and that will give us the desired average speed. (Pythagoras again: We want to move 0.5*√2 pixels in each axis)
It's tempting to make the counters eight bits in size, and use the carry flag to detect the counter overflows. That would work OK, except it's not possible to get an overflow rate of exactly 100%, the maximum rate actually being 255/256. To be honest it's not a huge deal; you would have to fly horizontally or vertically for several seconds to see the glitch where one frame didn't scroll, but I decided to avoid the issue and use seven-bit counters instead.
Using seven-bit counters, we can detect overflows using the sign bit, plus update both counters with 16-bit operations with something like this:
ldd scroll_ctrs ; load both x and y counters
anda #$7f ; clear x counter sign bit
andb #$7f ; clear y counter sign bit
addd scroll_ctrs_inc ; add x and y increments
std scroll_ctrs ; store both counters
bpl noscroll_x ; no overflow on x counter
jsr do_x_scroll ; scroll one pixel horizontally
no_scroll_x
lda scroll_ctrs+1 ; check y counter
bpl noscroll_y ; no overflow on y counter
jsr do_y_scroll ; scroll one pixel vertically
no_scroll_y
Give me a sine
All we need to do is work out the counter rates. Hey you know what we haven't had for a while? That's right: Spreadsheet!
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| It's got rows and columns and titles and everything |
There are 16 directions, giving us angles that are multiples of 22.5°. The horizontal and vertical components can be found by taking the cosine and sine of the angle, then multiplying by 128 gives us the rate values we need to add to the seven-bit counters. (Bit of trigonometry going on there, sorry about that. I should also point out that I'm using the mathematical convention for angles i.e. zero degrees is at the 3 o'clock position and increases in the anticlockwise direction, rather than something normal like starting at 12 o'clock and going clockwise)
Note that I'm using the absolute values of the rates and specifying the direction separately. That's because we need to know which scroll routine to call when the counter overflows. Strictly speaking I should be using signed rates, but I didn't see a quick and easy way of doing it, and this method seems to work well enough in practice. The difference is fairly subtle and affects the size of the turning circle when changing direction.
I've implemented this as a lookup table containing the 16 rows of counter rates and scroll routine addresses. The direction tells us where to look in the table, and the rates and scroll routines are accessed using indexed addressing. (Indirect in the case of the scroll routines)
Know when to stop
So that's how I do that. I was disappointed I couldn't find any good Pythagoras jokes. I was forced to try and make one up: The straw in the orange juice is equal to some of the straws in the other two pints. Needs work. A lot of work.
