Lasso: a simple snake-like game

timboe · December 12, 2023, 1:18pm

Love the shockwave

crwi_uk · December 12, 2023, 3:12pm

Thanks. I initially tried it as something a bit like a fragment shader by modifying my bitmap in place, but it was too imperformant. I mean, it was about 30 FPS on-device, which is acceptable in some contexts. Good to roughly know the limits. At 400 * 240, that's 92,000 iterations in a loop, and you can just about get away with it if you accept the drop in framerate. Could make for some interesting effects if you were careful to limit it to certain on-screen regions (e.g. a water ripple + reflection effect on the lower portion of the screen is totally doable at 50 FPS, I reckon).

Anyway this is more of a "cheat", by only updating position offsets on the "stars", limiting my loop to only around 200 iterations or so.

timboe · December 12, 2023, 5:39pm

Sounds perfect, I'm more surprised the fragment-shader-like method was 30 FPS on device, I'd have guessed something close to 3 than 30 based on my large-bitmaps experience (though I am drawing a lot of smaller bitmaps onto the larger ones... plus rest-of-game, plus rendering).

Having the medium instead just be the sparse grid of stars is playing well to the PD's strengths.

keithlittle · December 27, 2023, 1:28am

I wanting to play this game it looks cool when will it come out?

crwi_uk · December 27, 2023, 1:49am

I'm chipping away at it over the holidays, but I'm quite busy otherwise with work so my progress is slow! I do have a couple of quick progress updates to make. Realistically I won't release this until well into 2024.