Rip it up and start again

When of the interesting aspects of coding on a platform you are not familiar with. Is that you iterate quite a lot, trying ideas and managing to implement features. Some times you can almost get a complete working product only to think of or stumble across a different way of doing things. This can often involve throwing away practically everything from the previous iteration.

This is very common (I find) with low level work, I’m currently onto revision 4 of stuntman and have decided to implement scrolling for the buses. This will allow 28 buses to be jumped while in standard portrait orientation (I am going to implement a tate mode with it’s own horizontal overlay, but will need to adjust the y scale to get 28 buses in).

I hacked up the existing code to see what the bottom row of graphics would look like when scrolling and it looks pretty good.

I don’t like the hacky way I got this to work (it was just for visual checking), so I’ve decided to work out and implement a 16 bit view-port system, this will in the long run allow me “easily” to implement sprites moving in and out of the current view-port. This involves quite a major re-write of handling routines. So hopefully in a couple of weeks I should have a good working base to get the Jumping mode of stunt man finished.

I’m enjoying programming the Vectrex and I think I picked a nice project to learn the machine on. Just need to implement a better scoring mechanic other than number of buses jumped. I’m leaning towards some form of landing accuracy system.