Gwynne's Blog

The Reliant’s laser cannon is now functional. It fires from the wrong spot on the ship, hits the wrong spot on the enemy ships, has the wrong idea about when the enemy ships are in and out of range, plays its sound incorrectly, and doesn’t look quite like the original game’s laser, but it does work, and all but the last of those are trivial fixes.

As for that last, well, there’s this problem of Mike having taken advantage of old technology.

See, in the original game, the line that forms the laser would be drawn in one of two colors, then erased, and it was up to QuickDraw how quickly those pixels were seen by the user. The result in practical use was a semi-random flickering of the laser beam in and out, and a significant (while purely illusory) blending of the two colors. However, I use OpenGL to draw the lines and have no provision for erasing them, so the result is a far more solid line where both colors of the laser are easily visible. I’ll have to experiment a bit with OpenGL modes to fix it.

But the laser does work!