Making an Advanced Shmup #75 - Ground Enemies

[@JadeLombax]

The math actually isn't too complex to make essentially a flag system for entities, I'm using one of those in my WIP Pico-8 port of Super Mario Bros. I just use the actual power-of-2 values to turn behaviors on or off. For example: 128: map collision 064: interact w/ other entities 032: hurt player 016: can be stomped Then I just made a little function called flag() that you input values into, and it tests if that number (or collection of numbers) are present or not using the '&' operator. Since it only requires one number input, you can put it inside quotes, so each function call only takes 2 tokens. Of course, this is just for on/off type features, other properties are separate values, but each entity's data is stored as a string that's turned into a table via split().

[@molochz]

Noice! I want to put loads of ground enemies in my game.

[@WardenAzdron]

Once more, unto the breach brothers! also dont copy more than like 5 ground enemies or the placement starts to wander.

[@llpBR]

At 34:48 there is an character that looks like a comma but is inverted. What??? That actually caught my attention 😅

[@terry-]

Great!

[@maxine_red]

To be honest? Doing it the way you do (not doing it bitwise) is smarter, because it is a lot more readable and will save you a lot of time later. Often it is smarter to optimize for readability, than to squeeze out 4 bytes of memory or a couple microseconds over the entire game.

[@JadeLombax]

Packing data in tighter can be useful when you're making something ambitious that's running up against storage limits. If you have plenty of headroom, yeah, simpler is better.