In an attempt to flesh this website out, and to highlight things I've been working on, I thought I'd give this a go. It may crash and burn. I wanted to have a short update available on the front page every month, but that doesn't capture what I do when there isn't anything to show off.
First off some Channel F stuff, sometimes I let my youngest child help out with making some silly projects which gets him learning about bitmaps and some basic assembly.
This is an example of my son working with bitmaps. Not much to see here tbh.
This is slightly more advanced as the man moves with cursor keys. It is called minecraft and has a item menu with no functionality. The arrows are because he thought you needed to click on visible controls like a mouse and click game and have yet to be removed. We improved the mans refresh rate today.
Here is what I'm working on, and its making some progress. This is the second day of working on it. The first day I established the table with diamond layout, and Billiard ball starting locations. I also started on cue stick targeting but didn't work on movement until today.
Billiards will likely be my second "proper" game for the Channel F that has full functionality and feels like a real game. Today I worked on targeting some more. The plan is for 16 directional movement for the balls. I have implemented 8 direction movement today, with cushion rebounds. The movement is simplified, and there is no way of changing where on the cue ball you hit it, so it just goes in the direction you aim with no bounce or backwards movement. I still need to have a power bar display for distance the ball travels, but pulling up on the controller raises it without a display. It currently just overflows and starts from the beginning, I'll either force the player to live with that mistake at full power or allow it to overflow. The other alternative might be to let it then slide back down again down then back up but that would be more work. Currently only the "white" (green) ball is movable. The Blue represents the spotted or yellow ball. The Red ball is the target ball.
Current plans for modes includes practice mode (1 Player, pretty much as above), Straight Rail, 1 Cushion and 3 Cushion rules. Balkline might be a future possibility but let me get something basic first! AI player seems like an unlikely possibility, I don't think I can handle it for the Channel F, perhaps a more advanced console where I can cheat by saving more variables whereever I want, or perhaps I'll take advantage of extra RAM.
The next thing to do with the game is make collision with the other balls and the final 8 directional movements. Probably the movements first. Oh, and the power bar so you know how hard your hitting. After that, 2nd player controls and rules can be implemented. Scoring for display is already in game, I just need to display it. The game revolves around an agreed score between players, so I'll need to implement that too. Tracking cushion hits will be easy enough for 1 and 3 cushion game modes but will be implemented near the end.
I think I will have some more headaches yet, with a lot of recoding, reordering or rejumping yet to do. But I feel there is a chance of a finished project or at least something to download soon.
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