🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a question for those who have done some game design in the past.  

I'm looking to write a game for the IBM, and I have all of the low level part
pretty much completed (read: graphic drivers) and working fast.  However, I 
started working on the engine that controls the characters, walls, treasures, 
etc, and I was wondering how people were keeping track of collisions?  
I thought that the way I did it was the way most people did it, however, 
talking with a few people, I have realized that there is a different way to
go about doing things. 

What I've done is created a library in C++, where, to create a character, I 
just derive it from an object called GAME_CHARACTER, with a few parameters 
such as initial position, the byte buffers that are displayed on the screen,
buffer masks, etc.  I also have a linked list of all of the characters that 
are currently in the game.  Whenever I move any character (or, it could be 
an object, like a bullet, but that is irrelevant), it goes through the linked
list of characters, comparing the new coordinates of the object with each of
the coordinates of all of the characters in the list.  The way I draw
everything to the screen is to have each object draw itself when it initializes
and every time it moves.  

Now, my question is this.  The people that I have talked to do things a bit 
differently.  They have a virtual buffer that they draw everything to, and then
every once in a while, go out and refresh the screen from the virtual buffer.  
They use certain colors for the background (maybe 10 or so), and the rest are
reserved for character objects.  Then, whenever something moves, it only needs
to check the virtual buffer for the chunk that it is moving into for any colors
that aren't reserved for the background to see if the object has run into 
anything.

So, has anyone ever played with these two methods?  What other methods do others
out there use (that aren't top secret)?  

Thoughts?

 
Matt Smith
msmith@peruvian.utah.edu
Student - University of Utah Department of Computer Science