never-obsolete wrote:
in which case i may need the extra sprites the vines use.
I was looking at some 2600 screenshots of Pitfall, and the vines don't start from the top of the screen as I thought they did (you probably know that, 'cause you're the one doing the port and you must have studied the original a lot!). That means that the area covered by the vines is actually pretty small, so I believe it can be represented with few sprites. I guess it would be at most some 48 pixels tall, wich would need only 6 8x8 sprites (making the vines out of 8x16 sprites would be more complicated, IMO), and that's not much at all.
If you make them somewhat "pixelated", as they used to be on the 2600, you could have 4x4 "pixels" within each tile, and just a few patterns such as these:
Code:
...o ...o ..o. ..o. .o.. o... o...
..o. ..o. ..o. ..o. .o.. .o.. .o..
.o.. .o.. .o.. ..o. ..o. ..o. ..o.
o... .o.. .o.. ..o. ..o. ..o. ...o
could be enough to make all the needed angles. One half could even use the same patterns as the other, and just flip the sprites when needed. So I guess only 4 patterns is enough.
I don't know how you'd code this animation, though. I can't think of any logic that would define the correct tiles to use for each section, and how much to displace them in relation to the previous section based on the angle, so maybe this animation will have to be hard-coded... Or maybe you could have some sort of line drawing algorithm, so as you calculate the "ideal" line with it, you check how much the line dislocates within each section (4 "pixels") and you can pick the appropriate tile to use there, one that displaced just as many pixels. Just an idea.