Hi Billy,
That's a really whacky idea - very entertaining. I copied the LFO and put one on the 'thrust' control too, but the spaceship seems to end up off the screen most of the time!!
Like the AI idea - I could quite easily bring the array of asteroid positions to an output somewhere- though you have to be careful; it's not the closest one that's most dangerous, it's the one that coming straight at you!
To make the ship spin the other way, you just have to give the input a negative number (zero = no spin)
Anyhow, I just noticed that post because I was here t post the latest update - to the graphics classes and the game!
Asteroids has had a bit of a graphical makeover; a much prettier looking spaceship and rockets - and in the true 'retro-gaming' spirit, I also added some truly annoying as hell sounds as well!
And the graphics classes have come along a bit. The animated 'sprites' can now handle all of the standard FS vector shapes, curves, arcs etc., and I've added a bit of documentation and a quick example of how to build a new shape.
Loading shapes from .svg files, and getting my path editor finished, is the next thing i want to get working - lists of co-ordinates really aren't a nice way to build cute rocket ships out of bezier curves!
So, that's all kinda cool,
but all is not completely rosy...With the new, more complex shapes, the game really pushing the GDI+ graphics to the limit (which was what I made it for really) - more than about 10-15 asteroids on screen, and the audio starts to get really glitchy. I'd be interested to hear how bad that effect is for anyone else who fancies giving it a go. (Q6700 CPU here, and ASIO buffer at 160samples)
Not much that we can do about that really - GDI just isn't designed for animation, and we're stuck with it unless the dev's finally add some graphics hardware acceleration.
The good news is that the massive amount of Ruby processing to transform the shapes doesn't seem too bad CPU wise - it's just those damned GDI screen re-draws that are really killing everything. So the vectors should still be practical for plugin controls etc. as an alternative to bitmaps, but funky animated displays will fare not much better than they did in SM, CPU wise.
Also a possible FS bug...If I load the schematic with the audio driver disabled, and then turn it on after the game has started, the MIDI generated sounds don't happen. There is sound, because I can hear the engine noise (which doesn't use MIDI).
Breaking/making a link in the audio section brings the sounds back to life. Once that's done, I can turn it on and off just fine, but it simply won't initialise unless the driver is running at load time. Checking with a few readouts etc., it seems that the entire poly section in the soundFX synth is utterly dead until I manually reset the audio - not even any pitch data coming out of the VtoP.
Same problem with exported .exe's - 'stream' sound works fine, but no Ruby/MIDI sounds get generated after choosing a driver from the audio menu.
I'd be interested to know if anyone can replicate this before I report it - it happens exactly like that every single time here, and I can't see how it would be a driver issue, as the 'non-MIDI' engine noise gets generated just fine.
PS) My high score is now 34460 (level 6) - seems to be a little easier to play with sound, you don't have to watch so closely to check that you hit something!
