Art Of Destruction/unexpanded 3D [under construction]

[pixel]

EDIT: Here's the repository: https://github.com/SvenMichaelKlose/ArtOfDestruction

Sorry to break this out in a terse fashion. I almost finished a lengthy article and then the session timed out. Everything's lost. Shift! Please gear it up a notch.

A 3D tank game for the unexpanded VIC.

The game is made of the following elements:

* tanks
* towers
* sky and floor, maybe horizon
* mines
* mountains

You drive your tank over a plain ground around mountains, shooting enemy tanks and towers, avoiding mines, drop own mines and show your friends what it's all about.

* Only tanks and towers are polygons. Everything else is just characters.
* Only visible faces are calculated.
* Tanks and towers are made of two cubes and an extra rectangle for the tanks' cannons.
* Polygon edges are plotted pixel-wise.
* Polygons are filled with characters.
* Characters are also the Z-buffer; a frame is drawn over the old, front to back.
* Only non-3D objects use character colors.

[Vic20-Ian]

Exciting - sounds like Battlezone meets level 2 of Starwars Arcade - will the towers shoot out asterisks?

Put me down for some Beta testing please

[joshuadenmark]

Cool game idea, looking foreward to see a beta too.

I will look in to this session timeout thing tomorrow, sorry for that

[pixel]

I should've known about the session timeout... m)

Will put everything on Github, starting with the first line of code. Everybody's welcome to contribute!

[pixel]

Here's the Github repository: https://github.com/SvenMichaelKlose/ArtOfDestruction

Just a skeleton to get started.

[bills442]

Sweet, I will be sure to follow along. I'm still enjoying your last creation.

[Kweepa]

Sounds ambitious!
Really looking forward to it!
If I read correctly, you're planning filled vector graphics? Wow!

[pixel]

I'm already feeling bad about this... :p

[rhurst]

Don't ever feel badly. Just 'solve the problem'. Remember, it's a 1970/80s 8-bit computer. No one knew then what to expect from the 'next best thing' that would pop-up on the software shelf some Saturday morning visit.
The challenge is to find/make that sweet spot between action and game playability. Anybody can distract you with a fancy splash screen, sound effect, or raster effect. Atari did _that_ for a decade.

[pixel]

The challenge is to find/make that sweet spot between action and game playability. Anybody can distract you with a fancy splash screen, sound effect, or raster effect. Atari did _that_ for a decade.

Too true. That's why there won't be any filled polygons in the beginning. Optimization comes last.

[bills442]

Don't ever feel badly. Just 'solve the problem'. Remember, it's a 1970/80s 8-bit computer. No one knew then what to expect from the 'next best thing' that would pop-up on the software shelf some Saturday morning visit.
The challenge is to find/make that sweet spot between action and game playability. Anybody can distract you with a fancy splash screen, sound effect, or raster effect. Atari did _that_ for a decade.

This is very true. Although there are some nice warfare simulation games I get sucked into on modern PC's ... for the most part everything ( seems to me ) to be rehashed first person shooters and car racing games. There is a small bit of innovation being done on phones these days, which really amuses me, because they are basically making '8 bit' games with better a little better resolution. The VIC really does present a neat platform , it has just enough, but not too much.

Nothing wrong with unfilled polygons ... look how much fun Battlezone was .

[pixel]

Nothing wrong with unfilled polygons ... look how much fun Battlezone was .

The thing can now do some basic math and draw short lines. The Bresenham line subroutine got quite snappy, which makes me optimistic again: https://github.com/SvenMichaelKlose/Art ... r/line.asm
Figuring out how to generalize the thing for all octants was a nightmare, a debiliating marathon IQ test, a grab into the... you catch my drift.

[malcontent]

I think you would find Steve Judd's description of Tetrattack useful. It does polygons in 512 bytes. It's the last article in c=hacking 21

http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/chacking/c=hacking21.txt

[pixel]

I think you would find Steve Judd's description of Tetrattack useful. It does polygons in 512 bytes. It's the last article in c=hacking 21

http://www.ffd2.com/fridge/chacking/c=hacking21.txt

Wow! Thanks! That's a pretty cool one. Unfortunately it's optimized to draw only from left to right, so it can't be used for filling. Got to steal that main loop for lines only...

[pixel]

This thing is actually going somewhere. Just managed to fill polygon sections with whole characters! Everything's on Github.


This one got drawn within about 3 PAL frames.