🚀 go-pugleaf

mgemmel@cs.vu.nl (Martin Gemmel) writes:

>Writing a pinball simulator is what I've been thinking of for a long
>time, too.

>f110019@hamlet.ucdavis.edu (Julian Burger) writes:

>} In other words, you would have a pinball-table description language which
>} would be parsed and a table created from it.

>The idea sounds good, but for the moment the most important question
>is just how to calculate ball motions and the effects of the various
>objects on the ball(s). I think a feature to read custom table
>descriptions could easily double the code, as you would have to
>precompute lots of data for each object (no doubt involving floating
>point operations).

>} For example:
>} bumper (50,30) {  ; center position (virtual coordinates) in parens
>} 	size 20			; relative to something
>} 	force 50			; kicker force, or negative if absorbs energy
>} 	points 50
>} 	...
>} 	etc

>I'm sure you don't want to have only bumpers, but how do you specify
>objects other than bumpers?

>Martin

My 2 cents worth:

Do the whole thing using an OOP language. Start with a base class:
CPost -- a simple object that collides with things as a point
source. Its behaviour serves as a template for any thing in the
machine (including the flippers and the spring-launcher).

A couple of obvious methods come to mind:
CPost.affectball(position,velocity,spin)
CPost.ignoreMe(position):boolean

And for construction:
CPost.placeMe
CPost.rotateMe
and so on...

The idea of the latter is to provide as rapid a method of
ignoring components as possible.

And if the ball has a CONTEXT as well as a position, velocity,
and spin, you can easily handle multi-level machines.

The best thing about all this is that it makes writing a
graphical construction utility a lot easier. You might
even write the construction utility using OOP and design it
to optimize out the OOP overhead during play.

Or you could write the whole thing in C++ and explicitly
call all the inherited functions, thus eliminating the OOP
overhead.


Tonio Loewald

-- 
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