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Elite on the BBC Micro and NES

Tactics: TACTICS (Part 3 of 7)

[BBC Micro cassette version]

Name: TACTICS (Part 3 of 7) [Show more] Type: Subroutine Category: Tactics Summary: Apply tactics: Calculate dot product to determine ship's aim Deep dive: Program flow of the tactics routine
Context: See this subroutine in context in the source code Variations: See code variations for this subroutine in the different versions References: No direct references to this subroutine in this source file

This section sets up some vectors and calculates dot products. Specifically: * Calculate the dot product of the ship's nose vector (i.e. the direction it is pointing) with the vector between us and the ship. This value will help us work out later on whether the enemy ship is pointing towards us, and therefore whether it can hit us with its lasers.
.TA21 LDX #8 \ We now want to copy the ship's x, y and z coordinates \ from INWK to K3, so set up a counter for 9 bytes .TAL1 LDA INWK,X \ Copy the X-th byte from INWK to the X-th byte of K3 STA K3,X DEX \ Decrement the counter BPL TAL1 \ Loop back until we have copied all 9 bytes .TA19 \ If this is a missile that's heading for its target \ (not us, one of the other ships), then the missile \ routine at TA18 above jumps here after setting K3 to \ the vector from the target to the missile JSR TAS2 \ Normalise the vector in K3 and store the normalised \ version in XX15, so XX15 contains the normalised \ vector from our ship to the ship we are applying AI \ tactics to (or the normalised vector from the target \ to the missile - in both cases it's the vector from \ the potential victim to the attacker) LDY #10 \ Set (A X) = nosev . XX15 JSR TAS3 STA CNT \ Store the high byte of the dot product in CNT. The \ bigger the value, the more aligned the two ships are, \ with a maximum magnitude of 36 (96 * 96 >> 8). If CNT \ is positive, the ships are facing in a similar \ direction, if it's negative they are facing in \ opposite directions