UFO racing game.ThatOtherPerson's Notes
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When I said that there was nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a few get/put pixel functions and a little bit of math I should have said with a VERY little bit of math. I improved some things, cut down on the number of calculations and got the game running far smoother. I took out the frame counter that was visible in the first version but for anyone curious its at all times over 50 and depending on where you are on the track often hitting the 60 frames per second throttle point.
The track is far larger now and is generated at start up using a series of tiles the placement of which are loaded from another image (similar to how the levels where in Swingball). In other words it will be super quick and easy for me to make as many tracks as I want. It also opens up the possibility for the future addition of an in game level editor (I love games with level editors).
I’m also now scaling up the size of the track which didnt seem wide enough to me before. I didn’t need to increase the resolution of the tiles though (which are basically just ripped from that track in the first version). Instead its just scaled up in realtime (because of how its rotating the track there isn’t really a relevant cost to performance to scale it at the same time) which pleasantly enough doesn’t really seem to make it look at all pixelated. With a 640×480 image stretched out onto a TV you really need to try hard to get it to look pixelated instead of blurry lol.
I added more frames of rotation for the ship so the animation isn’t so choppy for it when turning and I lowered the transparency of the glass so you can sorta see the alien in it.
The camera is positioned further ahead of you now so you have a better chance of seeing whats ahead of you before crashing into it.
There are other tweaks and improvements but nothing else that’s likely to be particularly noticeable.
At this point you still just drive around the track on your own.
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