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My God, it's full of stars...

Here I am once again out in the wilds of Central Asia and today, with a few hours to kill waiting for a connecting flight, I struck upon a new approach to an idea that I'd been thinking about for a while. I wanted to look at the AGD Starfield routine and see if I could enhance it in some way. I'm not going to get into the exact ins and outs of the whole routine, but essentially there are five types of particle that can be generated in AGD - a horizontal laser, an explosion pixel, a trail pixel, a horizontal scrolling pixel, and a vertical scrolling pixel. Each one has its own routine that controls its movement - for example, explosion pixels spawn at the explosion point and have a random 'outward' angle. Trail pixels are spawned at the current co-ordinate, and slowly trickle away. Horizontal 'stars' are pixels which are spawned at the right side of the screen, and move from right to left, and of course Vertical 'stars' start at the top of the screen
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Recent posts

Breaking the Spell

Ever since I got my first 8-bit computer (a Dragon 32), I've always found coding to be something akin to magic. With the right combination of numbers and letters, a coder can appear, like pulling a rabbit from the proverbial hat, to conjure images and sounds from the very ether itself - or at least, in my case, from the 9 inch portable black and white television I was allowed in my bedroom. Nevertheless, I found that with a little imagination, epic stories could be told. Combine that with a little diligence, and whole new worlds can be brought into existence by the power of code and will alone. Then again, it could just be a buggy mess with lots of flashing colours plips and plops... and whilst the coder as magician may be a romantic image, it's not an entirely inaccurate one when it comes to the ones who know what they're doing. It would not be inappropriate to think of an accomplished game creator as a kind of spellcaster - the spell in this case being the means by whic
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Destructible levels

Ok, so I've been thinking over the idea of destructible levels in AGD for a while now. Basically the idea is to have a more advanced equivalent of the 'fodder' block - this kind of block can be destroyed by the player in game. The problem with this however, is that these blocks are restored when the player returns to a room. This means we can't create levels for players to open up themselves. What we want here is the ability to preserve the blocks that have been removed so that when you exit a room and then come back in, they will not be restored - they will remain the way that the player left them. This opens up the possibility of areas of game being inaccessible to the player until they dig or blast their way through. So, what are the considerations? The first and most obvious consideration is that we will need to store the changes made to the rooms somewhere. This could take up a lot of space quite quickly if we don't plan it properly. At the same time, it will
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Welcome

Hello there happy coders. I'm currently in a cheap hotel room in the Northeast of Bishkek, Kyrgystan. Watching the world cup, living mostly on green tea and cherries. Seems like a good time to start a code blog...
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