Missiles face wrong direction when flying.

[keith.lamothe]

Don't take Kahuna too seriously and you'll do fine   We all have different personalities here.

On the missile flight thing I'm surprised to see them flying backwards; some deviation is normal due to the stupid-math-tricks I did to avoid actual trig calls (goodness those are slow) but that's not just off by a few degrees

[Anon]

Don't take Kahuna too seriously and you'll do fine   We all have different personalities here.

On the missile flight thing I'm surprised to see them flying backwards; some deviation is normal due to the stupid-math-tricks I did to avoid actual trig calls (goodness those are slow) but that's not just off by a few degrees

Oh no, those are going towards the marauders. I totally get why you'd need to do stuff like that, being a CS major myself. After reading up on it I figured it was because the trig calls caused some performance issues. Just wondering though, wouldn't it be a bit better to just use a bunch of static sprites to make the smoke clouds? A single particle flying toward the enemy puffing off static smoke that disappears would produce a similar result to this, but would require no messy angle formulas and would look better. Not sure how much of a performance hit that's make though, but I'm assuming that most computers could handle it.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, I see, you mean to use particle emission every few frames.  I see why you'd think that, but ultimately that would seriously multiply the number of sprites that need to be drawn every frame in heavy-missile combat, and that would really chug things in a hurry.  Drawing shots is one of the big performance hogs in AIW on the graphical side.  There's a lot of sprite batching and such to avoid texture swaps but it just gets to be quite a lot of draws and so on.

[orzelek]

One way to reduce this would be to produce a lot of point sprites by using a shader.
I haven't tried something like this and I'm assuming it would have limited applications - would require GPU that can do it to work.