Talk:Point plotting

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[edit] Point plotting and computer games

I found this word in this article:

Each ship could be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, fire reaction engines that eventually ran out of fuel, and fire missiles of finite range and finite number. The ship obeyed Newton's laws, accelerating and decelerating under the influence of its engines and of solar gravitation....

But one thing it didn't do was do gravity on the torpedoes, and so there were a LOT of sexy techniques that took advantage of that anomaly. Also, Scott didn't mention the wonderful Starfield. Peter Samson had added it to the original SPACEWAR.

It was a real star field, generated by some incredibly clever code so that it had real constellations in their real positions and they slowly drifted across the background.

Collision of two ships produced a vivid, graphically depicted explosion on screen, and both players were out, whereupon the game restarted.

One should probably note that for folks weaned on 'Star Wars' and Super-VGA PC games, it wasn't really 'vivid'. Kind of a little star-burst. Very nice,and crystal-clear what had happened. But nonetheless fairly simple.

The display was a point plotting, no memory scope. ALL displays were 'animated' since there was no display memory: if you wanted something to persist on the screen, you had to be in a loop constantly redisplaying it. The scope had a neat, special phosphor which displayed green when fired, but then faded for short while in yellow. This made the display flicker a lot less, and it also meant that things left 'trails' as they moved around. It made for some quite wonderful 3-D effects.

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I don´t think that it´s linked with cartesian theory... --217.159.186.228 01:21, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

I am having a hard time following you. Oleg Alexandrov 01:29, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

What do you mean? I saw in the history that you worked on this article and i thank you for this :-). But the point plotting I mean is an informatic technic, like raycasting, etc. I´m actually working on the [spacewar article] and i wish make it the more complete possible, for have a good base for all the wikipedias. So, i won´t just say "this game was displayed in point plotting" without saying what is that ;-) --Meithal 10:41, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I expected to see some math comments in here, while this looks like computer game stuff. Got it now. Oleg Alexandrov 22:48, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for yout attention. But I think that a homonym page is the solution. And it´s not a "computer game stuff", but a programming technic (if I understood well...) --Meithal 21:37, 22 August 2005 (UTC)