Artillery (patters)

Set the angle and velocity, compensate for terrain and wind. Simple.

A fun little physics toy for a single player, best enjoyed against a human opponent.

I tried unsuccessfully to make this game in the early 1990s. A lack of physics knowledge and the challenge of drawing the trajectories at a reasonable speed defeated me. Over two decades later, and inspired by the nostalgia of the recent Black Mirror special Bandersnatch, I decided to have another crack at it. I used Wikipedia to create the physics model, and with some tricks I got the trajectory traces fast enough to make the game viable.

This work is free to download, but it remains protected by copyright, and I offer no licence to the user.

Credits:

I started this Sinclair BASIC game almost 25 years ago using a Spectrum +2 and a C60 cassette tape. I wrote the bulk of it during a couple of weeks of late nights in February 2019, using Fuse for macOS in 48K mode with a Recreated ZX Spectrum bluetooth keyboard for the authentic keyword typing experience. The tool listbasic from fuse-utils was invaluable for allowing code review on a decent resolution screen.

Artillery by Kirk Crawford on a Macintosh Classic for the original inspiration

BMP2SCR 2.11a by Leszek Daniel Chmielewski was used to create the loading screen