Re: Stupid Battlezone tricks...

>Ob90sDrivingGame:
>A "view" button (use the Start button during play) to cycle between
>"overhead", "10 feet behind and above your tank", and "first person".

Oh, yeah... only trick there is that the player's tank isn't ever rendered
currently. I guess we could just make a sticker that looks like a tank and
stick it on the monitor. ;-) ('ala, "night driver"... J/K... ;-)

>Someone did that and called it "Cybersled" ;-) Seriously, playing BZ in a
>continuously-regenerating maze could be fun... though there's always the
>risk that the game could build blocks so close together that you can't
>move.

Yeah, the problem with BZ is the lack of hidden line removal. Too many
blocks would be a bugger to "see". (on the other hand, sometime down the
road it would be cool to figure out enough of the game code to replace the
mathbox with a faster one and actually *do* hidden line removal!).
>Yeah, one thing to watch out for is "number of vectors drawn". The
>only "bug" I've seen in BZ is that there's a hard limit to how many
>you can draw at once.
>
>My high score list - with all the time I've played, and the BZ Save
>High Score mod, which I tweaked to save 9 scores, not 3, displays a
>*lot* of tanks. When it's up on the screen, the lower portion of the
>display is pretty mangled. It gets about halfway through drawing one
>set of initials and score and then just blanks out.

Oh, yeah. Good point. I'll have to fix that... (I accidentally
initialized high-score memory to 55,555,000 or something and saw *lots* of
tanks-- of course MAME doesn't care though...)

>Request: Gorfian bullets.

Oh, yeah... That would be cool to try. I'm sure it'd make sense if I'd seen
the original commented sourcecode, but BZ seems to do lots of semi-bizarre,
cryptic stuff with variables. (There seems to be several different variable
which all seem to signify in some way that a player missile is "active".)
I'll have to poke around-- it might just be as simple as ignoring the check
for the "shell active" when the fire-button is checked...

>(Alternate - a higher enemy turn rate would almost guarantee this strategy
>would no longer work

I was looking for the code that controls that earlier. (I wanted to see what
it'd be like if the enemy has the same accelerated turn rate the player
does.) I think I got distracted by the shell-range variable...

>As long as I'm blue-skying... "Matrix BZ" sounds a lot like submarine
>warfare.
>
>When/if anyone figures out the 3D object shapes:
>
>1) Replace tanklike shapes with sublike shapes.
>2) Make collision with underwater objects fatal.

(Actually, #2 might be interesting in the "normal" game. Those aren't
buildings, they're really poorly disguised land-mines! ;-)

Subs would be pretty funky. Reduce the "rotate" rate to a crawl, but keep
forward/turn rates good. Make reverse a lot slower, and straight forward a
lot faster. Change the "sweep" radar to a circular "ping" for sonar. Get
rid of the mountain backdrop and use the extra vector-time for more vectors
on the enemy. Make the obstacles octahedral floating-mines. It'd kinda be
like watching "Airplane!" though-- why does the submarine make a tank-engine
noise? ;-) (The thing to do would just be to turn off the tank-engine noise
and use the POKEY for all the sounds...)

-Clay
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Received on Wed Oct 11 14:53:44 2000