After a gruelling four hours hacking away at the Blast Engine… it looks almost exactly the same as when I started – oh the irony!
Well, it’s not entirely identical visually; along with a small cosmetic change that converts them into travelling single-particle explosions when the smart bomb is triggered, the enemy bullets have changed colour because they’re now managed by the nasty object linked list rather than their own stand-alone one and that list doesn’t yet have colour control options. This change was partly for general efficiency (four linked lists is now reduced to three, two player to nasty collision checks boiled off to just the one) but it also allows for more complex bullet movements, multiple types of bullet (that would’ve happened anyway, of course), bespoke handling code in the same way the nasties themselves will be including the option for bullets to spawn other bullets… and most importantly of all it means the linked list for the player’s bullets can be renamed from MissileList to BulletList!!
Yes, not really the most important point of course but you probably wouldn’t believe just how irrational I was getting about that naming… it came about because the nasty bullets were added before the player’s, so they got first dibs on the name.
After a little break from the computer (the new season of Hustle starts in fifteen minutes) I plan to add the colour handling for objects and optimising the function that spawns nasties. After that, the next major change is optimising the wave script interpreter and building a better spawning system to simplify the launching of multiple waves – but that code’s not been touched for a while, so I’m expecting a disaster or two along the way.
Tags: BlitzMax, game, PC Software, programming, seu, shmup, shoot 'em up, STG, vertical