Talk:Village/@comment-5394692-20130603235718/@comment-9531161-20130604035927

Ahh, I guess I should have clarified a little better about looking without moving in the description. If you hold L or R, you can face a direction instead of moving. I chose this path instead of the "tapping" one for a few reasons: I implemented the tapping originally and didn't like it due to the large cell size, and it took quite a large amount of extra code to get it to work like that (which meant I could do less per frame). I mean if it's really important to be able to do it without an extra button to hold, I can try to squeeze it in again, but I'll probably have to tone it down on the number of bugs/fish on the screen. I already have to "round robin" the frames so that fish and bugs share resources (fish move at 15 fps and occur every fourth frame, bugs move at 30 fps and occur every other frame (that isn't a fish frame), and the other one is extra processing. So: fish, bug, process, bug (repeat)). Since movement is processed every frame, anything extra I do there would trickle down to all the other stuff, so I really didn't want to do that. I'm sorry for the long-winded explanation! This is also the reason I cannot have a more complex water system (like lakes, beaches, winding rivers, etc.). Right now fish only need to perform "Y axis" processing, because the river is basically just a straight line. If I added fancier water, they'd have to process in two directions, and so I'd probably have to halve the amount of fish (which would stink if I'm adding more water). The other option is to just tone down the "fanciness" of fish swimming. Right now there's a fair bit of processing (for BASIC) just to get the fish to swim the way they do (which isn't all that fancy, but it's better than a flat speed and no variable movement). If I just placed the burden of processing fish on the sprite drawing mechanism by using the interpolation time field of SPOFS, fish would look uglier while swimming, but I could do way more with them. It's all up to you guys really.

Also, I was planning on adding placeable walls (and paths!) anyway, so you can make your own wall if you like.