RE: Sega Multigame and Vector Generator Card...

G'day folks,

No brightening, constant, darkening within a single vector as my below
example described. That's fine. I just wanted to check if you were
suggesting features that would support my difficult example. As you
(and Zonn) suggested splitting the vector into two parts where one
vector was only brightening and the other vector was only darkening
would be OK. I was thinking more of what Al was describing where
vectors fade into the distance in first player games.

Could we have curved lines like in Quantum? As I remember the "curved
lines" were actually lots of short straight lines that look like one big
curved line. This is a tall order, but if we are in the middle of
brainstorming up suggestions I'll stick my neck out!

By the way, while I have people focussed on Quantum, can anyone tell me
why they didn't do this game with a raster monitor? Come on. Curved
lines and solid filled objects. What's the point of using vectors?

                Steven S Ozdemir
                sso@dsc.com

ps - Of course, I'm the guy who's convinced that Qix should be redone
with vectors.

>----------
>From: Paul Kahler[SMTP:phkahler@Oakland.edu]
>Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 1997 1:59 PM
>To: vectorlist@spies.com
>Cc: Paul Kahler
>Subject: Re: Sega Multigame and Vector Generator Card...
>
>> G'day folks,
>>
>> Well, if the ships on Space Wars aren't animated well on a 19" screen,
>> then that explains why only Barrier had a 25" screen. There's no
>> animation in Barrier, and anytime someone brought up a 25" screen for
>> one of the later games this issue probably came up.
>>
>> I still like Paul's idea of having intensity differ within any given
>> vector, even if we can't make vectors fade to black (due to speed
>> constraints of the monitor). If I may speculate for a moment, wouldn't
>> it be difficult to specify via software how you wanted the intensity for
>> a vector to change? Let's say I wanted the intensity to increase slowly
>> for the first third of a vector, stay at the highest level for the
>> middle of the vector and finally return to the original intensity in the
>> last third of the vector.
>
> I don't think it'd be possible to have a single line get brighter in the
>middle and then dimmer using a 2nd order system (a 3rd order would work).
>but you could draw it in 2 parts, one brightening and one dimming. The nice
>thing is that you can derive a few equations to do different things and then
>just plug numbers in. I haven't derived it yet, but there are equations that
>take X1,Y1,X2,Y2,X3,Y3 and give the parameters to make a curve go from X1,Y1
>to X3,Y3 while hitting X2,Y2 on the way. You can also derive stuff to work
>with the velocity (inverse of intensity) instead of using 3 points. I'm not
>sure if there are other significant options right now, but I know those 2
>are easy - I'll do the general equations IF there is ever hardware to use it.
>
>X(t) = X0 + (dX)t + (ddx)(t)(t-1)/2
>Y(t) = Y0 + (dY)t + (ddy)(t)(t-1)/2
>
>or some such, where t is the "pixel" number starting at zero. This is the
>starting point for deriving something useful.
>--
> ___ __ _ _ _
>| \ / \ | | | || | phkahler@oakland.edu Engineer/Programmer
>| _/| || || |_| || |__ " What makes someone care so much?
>|_| |_||_| \___/ |____) for things another man can just ignore. " -S.H.
>
Received on Wed Dec 17 14:36:40 1997