Soldiering on

Although it's now January 2011, things have been moving forward since November last year. I just haven't had a lot of time, and the time I've had I've spent doing things rather than writing about doing things.
We found and moved house over the xmas break - scoring a much bigger place for LESS money per month, AND A YARD! Also a large office for my work and hobbies where I can sit, smoke and work on larger scale projects.
Scramble progresses, and does so pretty nicely. I discovered I could slot about a half hour, two to three times a day into the babies nap-time (back when they napped at the same intervals, and it was as simple as laying them down). I set up the old A2000 with them, as I was using the 1084 monitor to run Baby Einstein videos through a DVD player.
After tooling around and fixing it (seems the 030 card has packed it in) and not having any way apart from old MS DOS floppy to transfer stuff to it, I decided to look over the old Scramble code and fix up the bugs that plagued the WinUAE version. The only display I have for this machine is an NTSC C= monitor, so some rewriting was done - bugs fixed - enthusiasm regained.

I'll post a few screen shots, but here's a list of things worked on since Nov 2010 (nearly a year to the day I last worked on it)

- Rewritten for NTSC running
- Optimized tile blitting routines
- Main ship blitting - animated sprite frames
- Level and map interpreting (not finished)
- Joystick control
- Main ship - background collisions
- Static object handling (missiles , fuel, bases - non-moving)

Many many under the counter reusable routines for object queues, list handling, hex/decimal digit conversion, score handling, and MUCH restructuring of the code.

Many of these routines will be optimized over time, but the flexible originals will be put aside into a game framework to speed up future development. Apart what screenshots would show - there is a LOT of the grunt work finished.
Workflow at the moment is developing on WinUAE (running fullscreen on one monitor) set up as an approximation of my real Ami (with 030) running at full speed.
I then test major updates regularly on a cycle exact ECS setup before sending it to the actual A2000 via AmiExplorer for a final run over.

Usually this turns up a bunch of timing issues to fix as I want the game to run fullframe with no double buffering.

A lot of work has been done this last 3 months, another two or three of solid work could see this near finished.
That being said, 10% of the work usually takes 90% of the time.