Surely if someone has an issue pressing two directional buttons at the same time on their clone they need to be reviewing their own design and adjusting it to meet their personal needs?
And of the 150 1st Edition and 250 2nd Edition Develoment kits produced, I would expect the majority of users would be in possession of the two-three fingers needed to play the game. Whilst it can be a little awkward at first it’s really not that hard once you’re used to it.
It’s even almost playable playing with one hand whilst filming with the other.
Playing some more I noticed you can’t crash into the objects so this is perfect in its current state for anyone with button pressing issues.
@filmote I just noticed that I also somehow managed to pick up a random group of passengers that stopped me collecting the second lot of hostages in this video?
Edit:
It looks like I picked them up by flying into the second building.
Edit 4 or 5 or something:
Yep you can collect all the hostages by landing at an unopened building.
As @Keyboard_Camper says above, if someone has built a frankenstein of a clone using buttons salvaged from one cold war equipment and has managed to install them six inches apart thus preventing them from using one finger to press two buttons, then they probably are having problems with any action game on the Arduboy.
I have just committed version 1.0.3 to the repo. It fixes a few little issues and requires you to use your toes for shooting.
Do you mean you flew through the building and this allowed you to pick them up? Did the building ‘open’ as a result of your flying through? A tank can open a building too.
Edit: Oh I see what you mean. That shouldn’t happen! I have fixed that too, now. Thanks for the heads-up.
It depends on the algorithm being used.
I find a lot of the time rand implementations rely on a Linear Congruential Generator which has been proven to have bias.
Throw in modulo bias and results can often have noticable trends (like travelling to the left).
I don’t know if that’s the issue here, but it’s worth considering.
It could just be shit code on my behalf. Will need to look at that. If nothing else, I should prevent them wandering off to the edge of the world (as we all know that is way out to the left).
If you’ve never encountered modulo bias, I find this SO answer is quite a good explanation.
I can’t find the random implementation on the github code. I’m guessing the implementation varies between chip, so I’ll have a dig around my local files for a better clue.
Not sure what you mean by ‘too much space’ though, LCG state only needs one variable (most likely 32 bit given that random returns a long), the modulus, the multiplier and the increment are all constant values.
I didn’t mean the state, I mean the code takes up a lot of flash space. I had to go through its disassembly looking for a bug and vaguely recall having seen much smaller implementations.
Back to the subject of Choplifter… I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, but I was doing a test with the build that’s in the repo. I simply started the game, didn’t take off, and after a while I got 16 hearts. Is that supposed to happen?
How long did it take? I wonder if the hostages walked off the left hand side of the world, overflowed, and reappeared on the right (which would automatically take them to the base)?
Edit: I have been sitting at base now for 5 minutes and it did not happen to me.
Oh, then my theory has some weight. They must have walked a long, long way as the x-pos for these players is a 16 bit integer. I wonder what Galileo would have thought about that - proves the earth is round even in Arduboy land.
