Revisiting My Old Projects

Going back to an old unfinished game project can usually end up one of two ways - you're quite impressed with the way the game is, or you're imagination has been playing tricks on you and you wonder what on earth you were doing when programming it, since you weren't concentrating on the game. I had both these feelings the other day:

I went back to a couple of my old games, in order to remind me of them for my Freegamer Interview. The first was DangerMan, a platformer with weapons. And I was (IMHO) quite impressed - the gameplay was solid, there were no glaring bugs, and it moved at a reasonable speed.

Then I took a look at Metal Glove Solid, my Gauntlet remake (which will have additional features later). Oh dear, it wasn't very good. It was dog-slow and the collision detection left a lot to be desired. How come I don't remember it being like that? It's time for some emergency programming!

The problem seemed to be my method for storing sprites. Gauntlet is famous for having a lot of sprites on the screen at once, and I needed an efficient way of keeping track of them for processing and collision detection. Usually in my games I just store them in a long list, but this can be quite slow.



My method was to have two two-dimensional arrays - one for storing each sprite at it's mapsquare co-ordinate (so drawing would be efficient as I could easily identify which sprites needed to be drawn, based on the area of map that was being shown on-screen), and one storing each sprite at each mapsquare co-ordinate that the sprite was covering - this would improve collision detection since I could easily identify all the sprites that shared the same mapsquare with the sprite I was testing for collisions.

Both of these methods seem sound, but the drawback is that every time a sprite moves, it needs removing and re-adding it to both arrays. This is what takes a long time. My not-so-difficult solution was to get rid of the first array and simply store the sprites in a tried-and-tested list. Performance is much improved, and the latest version (1.1) can be downloaded here.