Demolition Man

This movie is so fucking awesome!

I wonder why I haven't watched it before.

Your time is running out, foolish object!

So I started working on game objects. Objects/entities/whatever in other games are usually models/sprites with a position, acceleration, size and/or bounding box. In my earlier games and thoughts I always tried to use delta values and motion vectors for movement and just everything. But recently I had the nice idea of skipping all delta values but using delay-based timers for movement. In my game, the minimal movement is 1 pixel/character/symbol/tile. If I cut all bigger movements per frame into smaller steps (1-tile-movement) I can easily avoid expensive line geoemetry, rasterisation, etc... If the periodical timer check gets performed fast enough, I could reach a maximal speed of 1000 tiles per second! But that's a) unnecessary and b) unlikely. If a graphical frame delay requires up to 16 milliseconds, the maximum movement speed per axis would be 62,5 tiles per second - which isn't that nice, especially for highspeed bullets or somewhat fast objects. So, the only way to get around this is a) a high timer resolution (but how?) or b) floating-point based step values by time delta division (delay time between last timer check divided by step delay/inversed step frequency). I'm currently implementing way b. It's the most accurate variant and still simple to implement. And it's probably not that slow. Even if there's a float division, it's only required for highspeed objects. The bad things that I need to rasterize the resulting way between original_position and new_position... This is bothering me! But hey - I did tons of line rasterizers. Shouldn't be a problem. But if I think further, movement vectors would require the same strategy. So... wouldn't it be the same by implementing movement vectors? Hm. The timer version is good for slow stuff, the movement vector isn't. Also, the timer version is very accurate in cases of framedrops, hm...

Time implement both of them.

Non-themed music

Some months ago I had a lot of ideas for music tracks and audio in general, but I reached a point where I need more orientation. A point where I actually need a reason for making music. A concept. A theme. But maybe it's just because I don't like my own creations, because I got tired of making distorted beat music, because I always wanted to make (and have) soundtracks for games - not just senseless, non-themed electronic music. Video game soundtracks always fascinated and it's truly what I want to compose (if I compose...). The problematic part is that I don't have a game yet and I really need a completely finished game where I could put my score in... Yes, I could also try to make a soundtrack for an existing game, but I'm sure that I can't make music for games I haven't created by myself. I'm looking forward to my Korg DS-10 which I ordered two weeks ago. It's an oldschool synthesizer on the Nintendo DS with modern interface and better output.

Music is shit. Let's go programming.