🚀 go-pugleaf

ersys!kumbach@nro.cs.athabascau.ca (Kevin Umbach) writes:
>I'm writing a video game for the Amiga that has 6 small men (12 by 11 
>pixels, 2 planes) running around on the screen. I currently have them 
>defined as animation objects and I'm using the Animate function to 
>move them. Even though I'm only using a 320X200 2plane screen, the
>anim objects move very slowly.
> 
>So here's my question:
>   Is it faster to use blitter directly and keep track of all positional
>   information manually, or do I have to be an expert programmer to 
>   get things moving faster than Animate?

My experience with Animate, back when I was doing the port of Crystal
Quest to the Amy, was that it was just too slow to do an arcade-game
type movement for any significant number of objects (where significant ==
3 or more).  I whipped up a quick blitter routine in assembly which
moved an object as desired (16 X 16 pixels), and it blazed - I could
have nearly 50 objects moving around before a noticable speed degradation
happened.  Of course, I wasn't doing background saves or anything like
that, but that would have been easy to add, and wouldn't have hurt the
performance all THAT much - six men, 12 X 11, should be a piece of cake.
Or, since you're only using 2 planes, how about setting 'em up as sprites,
which would take essentially nothing in the way of resources?

-- 
Mike Farren 				     farren@well.sf.ca.us