A little progress update about Cruiser-X 79

7th February 2021

I was asked a few questions this year (and last) "When will Cruiser-X 79 be finished and released". The answer is hopefully later on this year. I had loads of problems with this project over the past few years. If that wasn't bad enough, I had a fatal HDD wipe out on my old PC. The system ws slowing down terribly, and literally made the computer unusable. I completely backed up my important files and C64 projects. I re-installed Windows which had unfortunately completely formatted the HDD . I did do backups of my important files on to cloud drives. However, when it came to restoring those backups after the re-installation. The important documents folders of my personal files, all copied and restored, but for some strange reason, the cloud drives had deleted all of my C64 assembly source code and project files. I had lost everything I worked on for so many weeks, months or even years. This really stressed me out the past two days when the misshap happened. 

A couple of days later I ended up with a new system, so now I was able to properly restore some of my stuff. Sadly I wasn't able to fully restore *everything*, but I was able to restart the game project (and another game project). It was actually a good thing that I started the project from scratch, due to the problems I had with the previous version of the project. I spent about 2 weeks on Cruiser-X 79 restoring all of the test background and sprite graphics. This was all done by going through my old email archives and loading the graphics into Charpad and Sprite Pad later versions. I took the sound and music from the game preview, and reverse-engineered the sound effects tables. Then I programmed the game from scratch. 

The processing of the code took a short while to get the background scrolling in place. Then the player sprite was placed into the code, allowing it to move about and shoot. As soon as I was happy with the player being put in place. The sprite/background collision was being worked on. Unlike the previous preview of Cruiser-X 79. The player was able to shoot at the high walls, obstacles and the player bullet disappears. The player to background collision was more accurate, compared to the playable preview. A lot of progress was made in the 2 weeks. I had the time to make a temporary score panel for the time being.

This weekend I started working on the alien movement attack patterns. First I had to create the alien objects. Then add collision to them. The player could then shoot the aliens. However I needed to think about how the aliens should move. Something of which would suit this type of game. 

You may remember seeing the alien formation group movement in the playable preview. Unfortunately it was just too much like Zap Zone and Star Toast. The majority of  alien movement patterns were made using my Alien Formation Maker V1.0+. I did not want to use the same sort of movement patterns for this game project. The alien movement patterns I had in mind were to be based on time and speed, rather than a full 256 byte X or Y sprite position table. 

Last weekend I created a test alien pattern table.Yesterday, I worked on setting up the alien movement table where the alien pattern was based on the following:

* Start position X (Aliens 1 to 5)
* Start position Y      "      "      "
* Alien frame (Low-byte)
* Alien frame (Hi-byte)
* Alien Colour
* Speed X            
* Speed Y
* Time before reading next byte

Each table was set to 8 bytes. The patterns were fully tested before being confirmed as alien group tables. I was pretty impressed with what could be done as alien patterns. It is more or less a similar method I used with StarFysh, but slightly more optimised. However I have not finished this task yet. Although 19 movement patterns were implemented. I am more or less half way with implementing alien patterns, so hopefully more of this should be done this afternoon.

I am very determined to get this game project finished some time this year. At the moment I have a lot of free time spare, especially during the weekend. The alien patterns are turning out very
nicely, but after the test patterns are complete. I will need to code a routine which will select the aliens to spawn. Then after this, get the aliens to shoot. Once all of this is in place. I will ask Saul for the graphics for the next few levels. Of course, I will need to make a digital disk loader for loading graphics. The maps are quite big and to have 16 levels planned for it. That will be quite a challenge and impossible to squeeze into a single file  ;)