Re: Bug in Xarchon

[Robert Rendell <rob@serc.rmit.edu.au>]

capmikee@home.martnet.com wrote:
} 
} I started looking for those files and guess what? They never were there!
} 
} Even though 0.50 works fine, it still has no fire.up or fire.down for
} the banshee scream.
} 
} Does anybody know what's going on with this? Is Rob Rendell still around?
} I think he was the last one to work on actor sprites.

Yup, I'm still here (lurking :)

The machine I did all my Xarchon work on has died, so I don't have my
original files around, but if I recall correctly, I mucked around with the
shape of the clouds after experimenting with the original game.  In the
original, vertical distances were compressed - everything moved half as
fast vertically as horizontally.  Thus, while people remember the phoenix
and banshee's clouds appeared as ovals, twice as wide as they were high,
they were effectively circular.

To make that equivalent in XArchon, which doesn't compress vertical
distances, I changed the ACTOR_WEAPON_CLOUD case of field_paint_weapon() to
draw a circular cloud, using the cloud_shape array in field.c.  This array
is applied in a rather tricky fashion; it names which orientation of the
cloud sprite to use at each location while drawing diagonal stripes of the
cloud.  If I numbered the 3x5 elements of the array like this:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
a b d
d e f

Then those values will correspond on the screen to a shape like this:

    3 6
  2 5 9 c
1 4 8 b f
  7 a e
    d

I think I'd made some temporary graphics for the up and down images of the
banshee's scream.  You can either do the same, doing some new tiles, or
modify the cloud_shape array to avoid using STATE_FIRE_UP and
STATE_FIRE_DOWN.

							Have fun,
							 Rob R.
							  \((/
							  ~oo~
							  /))\