ACAC - response below jack's.

Jack:

Nope, no more secret passages. =) You also make a valid point with the rocket / plasma combo. I'll have to see what I can do to entice usage of other weapons, like the superweapons and such (and especially the utility weapons). I wouldn't mind seeing the bouncing betty, sound like a cool idea.

On the ray tracing: I don't check every pixel on the target line, I check every other pixel. But being that this is my 3rd incarnation of this game, I've developed a very highly modified / optimized bresenheims line algorithm. It's suited for exactly what I need to do, and does it very quickly. On why the AI is kinda quick: I use timing to my advantage, it only executes intensive routines at certain times (say every .25 seconds), and it tries to spread out the processing for all of the AI so it doesn't all happen on the same frame.

AI: Nope, I don't generate an A* pre-visited map at the time when the map loads. I programmed the AI with the focus on the game being memory limited, not processor limited. Each AI generates his own individual A* map, and when he is done processing, he wipes the map and only stores the target lines. I split up calculating the node map over a certain number of frames as well. I also keep the cells for A* rather large (16 x 16 pixels) and did a basic manhattan heuristic.

I did think of precomputing a map for the AI to use, but I eventually decided against it: To get accurate results, you would need to copy the entire global map (the map computed before the game started) to a location specific to each AI every time you needed to compute a new path (what happens when 2 AIs run paths in the same general area if you are using a global map? Their paths would become intertwined and useless -- Well it wouldn't be the shortest path anymore). Since I'm running under the precondition that I'm memory limited, I chucked that.

If I missed any q's feel free to shout at me =).

ACAC: The foreground terrain itself is basically one huge 32bit bitmap (though i can be 16 bit if desired -- This is where the memory limited stuff starts coming into play) with the appropriate collision map attached to it. Actually rendering it efficiently along with the background is a different story entirely however...

[edited by - DreadID4 on May 16, 2004 7:34:37 PM]

quote:
In a short time I had myself a ‘Bouncing Betty’ – the booby-trap used by the VC in the Vietnam war known for, upon triggering, flying into the air and exploding at head-height.

I thought they bounced up and exploded at croch-hieght, or maybe that was something else.
Anyways, I haven''t had the chance to try your game yet, DreadID4, as I don''t have winex set up yet and I don''t have windows on this box anymore. Did you, perchance, code this game with a cross-platform library? Anyways, once I get winex running I''ll try it.