This code appears in the following versions (click to see it in the source code):
Code variations between these versions are shown below.
Name: Main flight loop (Part 8 of 16) Type: Subroutine Category: Main loop Summary: For each nearby ship: Process us potentially scooping this item Deep dive: Program flow of the main game loop
The main flight loop covers most of the flight-specific aspects of Elite. This section covers the following: * Continue looping through all the ships in the local bubble, and for each one: * Process us potentially scooping this item
In the enhanced versions, the high nibble of the first byte of each ship blueprint defines whether a ship is scoopable, and the type of item that we get when we scoop it (so scooping Thargons gives alien items, and so on). The cassette version implements this functionality using hard-coded conditional statements, while the enhanced versions support more flexibility by using the ship data block to determine scoopability.
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.oily JSR DORND \ Set A and X to random numbers and reduce A to a AND #7 \ random number in the range 0-7 .slvy2
LDY #78 \ This instruction has no effect, so presumably it used \ to do something, but didn't get removed BCS MA59 \ If the C flag is set then we have no room in the hold \ for the scooped item, so jump down to MA59 make a \ sound to indicate failure, before destroying the \ canister LDY QQ29 \ Scooping was successful, so set Y to the type of \ item we just scooped, which we stored in QQ29 above ADC QQ20,Y \ Add A (which we set to 1 above) to the number of items STA QQ20,Y \ of type Y in the cargo hold, as we just successfully \ scooped one canister of type Y TYA \ Print recursive token 48 + Y as an in-flight token, ADC #208 \ which will be in the range 48 ("FOOD") to 64 ("ALIEN JSR MESS \ ITEMS"), so this prints the scooped item's name
In the enhanced version there is a difference between a ship that has been killed and a ship that has docked or been scooped, unlike in the cassette version where they are the same thing.
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.MA65 JMP MA26 \ If we get here, then the ship we are processing was \ too far away to be scooped, docked or collided with, \ so jump to MA26 to skip over the collision routines \ and move on to missile targeting