i’ve been thinking quite a bit about how the Blast Engine works. At the moment, attack patterns are literally a single “move”, meaning that they contain X and Y positions, angle and speed of movement to initialise things, then speed of rotation, speed of movement and destination speed along with an optional timer that keeps those extra values from taking effect immediately.
That timer (and to a degree the speed destination) are key players; the Vinculum engine supports multiple move commands (up to thirty two, although there’s nothing using more than half that) but Blast Engine can already replicate almost everything Vinc does with it’s single delayed command. And that “almost” is what has been bugging me…
Thing is, i’ve been giving this quite a bit of thought and apart from memory considerations (which shouldn’t be an issue if the tests i did earlier are anything to go by) there’s nothing stopping a similar logic being applied to the firing system!
Tags: BlitzMax, game, OOP, pc, programming, seu, shmup, shoot ‘em up, vertical, XML