I'm working on a version of Super Breakout

[sweh]

Heheheh; bodges on top of bodges on top of bodges - that sounds so so familiar!

[1024MAK]

Heheheh; bodges on top of bodges on top of bodges - that sounds so so familiar!

That sounds a bit like hardware development...

Mark

[sydney]

..though yup I did find ball broke through arena on both left and right sides. .. also found that sometimes I could bounce off a brick without it disappearing - but that was rarer than the ball-through-arena-boundary bug.

It seems you've played the game more than me as I rarely get the arena edge bug but notice the non-dissapearing ball bug many times per level.

I've grabbed a screenshot of the first bug and it is not as I first thought. I thought the bug was a brick being erased inside the arena wall but it's not - it is the ball simply moving through the wall. I also think it's immediately after hitting the top of the arena so I need to check the collision routine when the ball is travelling down at the edge. Is this always the case when you see it and is it always in the top corners? I think I'm just going to bodge it!

[sydney]

Fixed arena breakthrough bug!
1 line of code was all that was needed.When the ball hit the top of the arena a sound was played but the horizontal collision detection was not called, 'jsr checkxaxis' was all that was needed!

I've attached the fixed version here. I'm going to try to remove the annoying flashing cursor and fix one more bug then I think that will be it.

[sydney]

OK. This is probably the final version of this. I tried 2 ways of removing the cursor and both cause problems so the cursor stays

The unbreakable bricks also remain but won't prevent a level from being completed so they also stay in the game.

The attached zip contains a disk image and the source code for the project.

[sydney]

I just tried this in elkulator and it worked fine. Could someone test it on a real elk please?

[Wookie]

I just tried this in elkulator and it worked fine. Could someone test it on a real elk please?

Works in both standard and Turbo mode with my slogger MRB (not much speed difference ), cor that was a serious blast from the past, I had to remember the "move code down memory" routine as my ELK has ADFS so page is at &1D00 and your code wanted to be at &1900

One of these days I'll burn a the PRES DFS rom for my AP3, just got to get that eprom blower from jms working...

[sydney]

Thanks Wookie! A new BBC/electron release then!
I could probably change the code to start at a better address if that would be helpful. Does anyone know the lowest address I could locate the code and avoid any conflicts?

[CMcDougall]

Great game Simon , level7 looks the best though
Only one little suggestion is to turn off flashing cursor, for either score+1, life-1 & game over

anyone know the lowest address I could locate the code and avoid any conflicts?

Page@1F00 if poeple are stupid enough to have DFS & ADFS 'on' at the same time (in a beeb /elk)

[dmckeran]

Ah yes the old games are the best! I need to 'breakout' my old BBC computer and see if I can get it to work and play some of these games.

I have got a programming suggestion. Keep everything in co-ordinates and do some maths to work out where on the screen they are meant to go. When you say 'collision detection' do you mean you are checking the screen to see if there is something in the path of the ball? If that is the case then you don't need to. If your bat is on the third row up from the bottom of the screen, and your ball is also in the third row, then you should be on the alert that the bat may have hit the ball. Subtract the x co-ordinates of the two objects ball x - bat x, and if the answer you get is less than the length of the bat then the ball has hit the bat. You can also do some clever stuff with the answer to encourage a level of skill in the player. If the bat is 4 squares wide for example you could consider these moves: ball x - bat x = 1, then the ball has hit the very leftmost side of the bat - send it rebounding leftways. If the answer is 2 or 3, then the ball has hit a central region of the bat - send it rebounding but continuing in the left or right direction of the ball's approach. If the subtracted answer is 4 the the ball has hit the right side of the bat, so send it back towards the right hand side.

[sydney]

I'd have to check the code to be sure but collsions with the wall and bat were done in this way, collisions with bricks could not be done as there was no information stored on whether a brick was there or not - I simply plotted them onscreen at the start of a round. I could have ceated an array holding the necessary information but chose not to. The main prioblems I had were corner cases where there was a collision whith both the bat and wall. My initial attempts would account for the collision with the bat and 'skip over' the wall collision causing the ball to be inside the wall. If I were to rewite the game there are a large number of changes I'd make but I'm happy with how it turned out and the journey was way more important than the destination.