Monthaversary!

Well, it's been a month since I started... when I put it in that perspective I've done quite a bit. From rebuilding the computer, finding docs and programs, to having a decent system friendly setup, scrolling background, a fair bit of graphics work done, as well as the main sprite moving, animated, and firing.

There's still a lot to go, but it's starting to come together into something that may become a half-decent game.

I managed to get a full printout of the devpac manual and have been pouring over it the last few days - reremembering bits and peices like setting up proper macros. Rebuilt a few of mine, as well as getting the whole startup code to work with the include files a bit better.

I also came across a nifty directive: rs. and rsreset.

Basically rather than declaring a block of space, it just gives you an offset, which may sound a little useless (why get that when you can just declare the space and be done with it?) - but is REALLY useful. Since leaving the Amiga I've gone on to learn other things, and other styles - such as C, whose data structures are REALLY useful. RS gives you a way to do that in Amiga assembly.

If each lable past RSRESET gives an offset, you can use it to address indirectly, and if you have an RS with a value of 0, you can calculate the size of the whole - which means I can write just ONE structure for bullets, declare the space for each, then with a single routine, manipulate all of them by just changing the base address.

It's one of those things where you'll either read it and say 'Oh yeah!' or you'll say 'huh?'.... and no amount of explaining will change it..

Anyways - the upshot is that I've been rewriting all my buggy, bullet, and movement routines to use this - it's actually brought the code size down considerably - and each time I find myself re-writing the same code I look to my object structures and say 'what can I add to make this more modular?'

Lots to do over the next month - the main focus will now be on objects like craters and rocks, bullet collision and minor tweaks to movement, firing, and special effects...

Cheers.