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Atari XL/XE Space Harrier Conversion Project
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| Dec-03 | Mar-03 | Jan-03 | Dec-02 | Jun-02 | Apr-02 |
30th June 2002
A few things slowing me down the past week or so, putting me behind the rough target of one stage per month.
So, Stage 3 is still not complete. The scenery layout is done and all the objects are drawn except the 2 headed dragon face. Some of the objects took much longer to draw than usual, for several reasons:-
a) Some had significant small details which didn't scale down well, so required much more freehand drawing on my part than usual.
b) The other problem was what I would call "colour clash" - due to the method of interlacing colours, some colours appear to flicker much more harshly next to each other than others. The Stage 3 tall plant in the last work in progress screenshot had to be redone several times to try and avoid this (you'll notice it looks a bit different now).After some debate, decided it was worth trying to have several different coloured mushroom types at the same time, rather than just the one type like some computer versions. The scenery handler had to have some changes to accommodate this idea.
Experimented with the code for rotating the 2 headed dragon, which is the boss for Stage 3. For me, it was always going be a bolt-on piece of code, as the rotate seemed to overcomplicate the pattern handler which controls all the other alien creature movement otherwise. After considering circle data tables and controlling every individual dragon segment separately (amongst other things), in the best 8-bit tradition, simplicity won out in the end. It won't look quite the same as the arcade machine (sorry!), although it will be similar. I'm just going to control the (outside) dragon head position in the usual way, and then the connecting segments will be positioned like a string between the head and a central segment - so hardly any real mathematicians will be harmed in the process. Also, it should come as no surprise to 8-bit programmers that there will be 3 segments between each head and the centre segment.
