Tower of Babel Forum

Artinum · Zapper Beiträge: 184

Hum, game logic. I have no idea how the original game actually operated, but I see it all as happening something like this:

First, a note on the continuous nature of time.

Reality is continuous. Depth is infinite - no matter how close two events are, no matter how much we think they are simultaneous, there is always a tiny gap between them. And if we were to have a third event in between them, we'd have two smaller gaps. How to explain...?

Event one - takes place at 0 seconds.
Event two - takes place at 1 second.

These two events are not continuous. There is a gap of one second in between them. If we then have
Event three - takes place at 0.5 seconds,
we have two gaps of half a second each. Indeed, we could keep splitting this up further and further. Events at 0.25 seconds, 0.125, 0.0005... they still leave gaps between events!

Computers - and, from this, the universe of TOB - are NOT continuous. They run at an ever increasing number of frames per second. In this they are rather like a film, with lots of frames all running one after another. By running them quickly enough, they give the illusion of motion.

Now, back to TOB.

TOB is not reality. Every frame of the TOB "film" is a frozen moment in time. Every object has a set place, every animation is set as one thing. You are right when you say that everything needs to be worked out at once and THEN moved. You don't move Zapper first, then Pusher, then Grabber, then the other elements in some list. You work out where they all go in one lump and THEN move them all.

The key element of the game logic is TIMING. There are X frames per second, and all movements take a number of frames to be completed. All spiders walk the same speed, as do worms, lizards, hoppers and watchers. You can push blocks faster than you can walk - but how much faster?

The questions to ask are, therefore:

How many frames per second?
How many frames do objects take to perform all their movements and actions?

Once you have that down, you just need to sort out the animation over that many frames and then test it all with much tweaking.

Can anyone design some towers that really test the frame rate?

Artinum
(Gosh, I waffle on sometimes...)