[stella] Riding shotgun with Pole Position

[Kirk Israel]

Unfortunately I don't even have speculation for your Pole Position pondering.

I just want to say, for me, the true world-beater for 3D graphics on
the 2600 is Battle Zone. Pole Position feel as if it could be more or
less "faked", by just having a few variables and tweaking them until
they felt right. But Battle Zone... I don't think any other game comes
close in modeling a 3D environment as that time when you hear a shot
fired offscreen, throw the stick back and to the side, and watch the
bullet pass harmlessly in front of you. (It's why I'll always consider
it superior to Robot Tank's "you can't see it, it can't hurt you"
Ostrich defense.)

I don't know if there's any smoke or mirrors involved, but it feels
like there's some level of polar coordinate<->X,Y plotting going on
(i.e. getting from the radar display to positioning an enemy tank or
aircraft at the appropriate location and vice versa) and I find it
very impressive.



On 8/19/07, Pete Holland <petehollandjr at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've been getting into 3D programming as a hobby (just
> starting, so I have nothing to show off yet).
> Learning how it works only increases my admiration for
> the coders of yore, since they had nothing to work
> with and had to build everything from scratch.
>
> This, however, prompts a lot of "howdthey do that?"
> questions in my head, and the biggest one (at the
> moment) is Pole Position on the 2600.
>
> I've been thinking it over and playing the game on my
> 2600 (I've never been able to get PP to work right on
> an emulator, it always crashes when I hit the first
> turn).  I'm thinking that, on the straightaways, the
> coding is simple -- take the player's velocity and use
> that to calculate the distance traveled, adjust
> graphics in the background as needed.  Instead of
> turning on the straightaways, the car seems to slide
> left and right as needed rather than altering the
> vector of travel.  But then there's the turns.
>
> Does anyone know or how an idea how they did the
> turns?  It seems there are two things to consider
> here.  The first is calculating the car's vector
> through the turn and adjusting the position of the
> sidebars accordingly, and then figuring out if there
> is too much speed or whatever to make the car drift
> into the sides and collide with them.  And of course,
> there's how much distance covered depending on speed
> and angle, to tell if the player has left the turn and
> update the position on the racetrack's virtual map.
>
> I know I'm over analyzing, because the Atari has very
> limited resources that have to be built from scratch
> every time the power switches on (math co-processing,
> for example, is a no-no).  But I can't see how they
> could do it.  This isn't like Enduro, where the track
> curved but there was no overall map to it, or topdown
> racers like Grand Prix.  Anyone have any ideas?
>
>
>
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