VECTORLIST - The Mailing List For The Technical Discussion of Vector-Based Arcade Games

February_2000
Re: VECTOR: RE: Space Wars


From: Paul Kahler ( )
Date: Thu Feb 03 2000 - 08:36:09 CST


> >Ya know, I am wondering why a co-processor is needed for Space War on Space
> >Duel hardware, since SD manages to do the colision detection, AND keep all
> >the other objects moving.
>
> Not to answer on Jeff's behalf or anything, but he's doing real
> point-on-line collision checking which is a fair amount of math. Space Duel

I too am wondering why a co-processor is needed. To say "he's doing real"
hard stuff doesn't justify adding a co-processor. Just don't do such an
elaborate collision detection. Here's a suggestion:

1) Do a bounding box check first - there should not be more than 1 or *2*
bullets within the box at any time. I assume he's doing this already.
2) For each bullet within the box, rotate/translate the bullet into
ship coordinates and check against a table representing the outline
of the ship. Ya, the rotate will take 4 multiplies, but that's gotta
be faster than anything dealing with each line :-)

<ramble>
BTW, as for the scenix. I was a little let down that they cloned the PIC
'54 architecture. I wrote a chess program for the PIC16C63 that just needs
a little more RAM and stack than the scenix. It takes 30-60 seconds to make
a move and can look up to 6 moves ahead. I've been meaning to wire up a
PIC 16C923 with built in LCD controller to run it :-) No doubt this is the
smallest chess engine in the world (written in C yet).
</ramble>

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