One of Tom’s suggestions for Galactic Gladiators was that the alien shouldn’t just suddenly appear on the screen. It should arrive through some sort of portal.
At the time, I had no idea how I was going to do that in Visual FoxPro.
Then I created the particle effect for the player’s explosion and realised I could use the same particles again.
For the explosion, all 80 particles start together and fly outwards. For the portal, they begin spread around a large circle and spiral inwards towards the point where the alien is going to appear.
Once the last particle reaches the centre, the alien appears and the screen gives a small shake.
It took a bit of sorting out because the old respawn code was making the alien visible before the portal had finished. For a while the alien appeared first and the portal seemed to arrive afterwards, which slightly defeated the point.
That is fixed now.
The interesting bit is that the portal isn’t an animation or a video. Visual FoxPro is calculating the position, speed and movement of every particle as the effect happens.
So the particle code that started life as one explosion has now become two completely different effects.
I think we may genuinely have the beginnings of a small game engine.
In Visual FoxPro.
I still can’t quite believe I just wrote that.