…been wroiting a tile editor. Well okay, i’ve just been working at it for the last four or so hours but despite being a hideous botch internally it somehow compiles in SuperStrict and can edit, load and save tile data! Now all i need are some actual tile graphics…

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!

i’ve just given the Blast Engine a multi-speed firing mode; previously, the “Aim” firing command threw a single bullet in the player’s direction and the “Aim-V” chucked a V of five their way, now “Aim-M” will launch four bullets directly at the player but with different movement speeds so they begin as a cluster and spread out. The straight shot firing modes are now Aim, Aim-V and Aim-M to take direct shots at the player, Forward, Forward-V and Forward-M to shoot whichever way the nasty is moving, Backward, Backward-V and Backward-M to fire in the opposite direction to movement. On top of that are Cross and Star, which launch four and eight bullets respectively with aiming based on the current angle of the nasty and Ring chucks out 24 bullets in, obviously, a ring.

Here’s Cross producing a pretty pattern on the left, whilst the new Cross-M gets busy on the right:

The new firing option on the right, compared to it's more sedate counterpart!

The observant will notice that the status characters have changed, the code now processes text itself (using the Vinculum character set for now) rather than relying on BlitzMax to do it.