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Main loop: Main flight loop (Part 8 of 16)

[BBC Micro disc version, Flight]

Name: Main flight loop (Part 8 of 16) [Show more] 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
Context: See this subroutine in context in the source code Variations: See code variations for this subroutine in the different versions References: No direct references to this subroutine in this source file

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
CPX #OIL \ If this is a cargo canister, jump to oily to randomly BEQ oily \ decide the canister's contents LDY #0 \ Fetch byte #0 of the ship's blueprint LDA (XX0),Y LSR A \ Shift it right four times, so A now contains the high LSR A \ nibble (i.e. bits 4-7) LSR A LSR A BEQ MA58 \ If A = 0, jump to MA58 to skip all the docking and \ scooping checks \ Only the Thargon, alloy plate, splinter and escape pod \ have non-zero high nibbles in their blueprint byte #0 \ so if we get here, our ship is one of those, and the \ high nibble gives the market item number of the item \ when scooped, less 1 ADC #1 \ Add 1 to the high nibble to get the market item \ number BNE slvy2 \ Skip to slvy2 so we scoop the ship as a market item .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 \ By the time we get here, we are scooping, and A \ contains the type of item we are scooping (a random \ number 0-7 if we are scooping a cargo canister, 3 if \ we are scooping an escape pod, or 16 if we are \ scooping a Thargon). These numbers correspond to the \ relevant market items (see QQ23 for a list), so a \ cargo canister can contain anything from food to \ computers, while escape pods contain slaves, and \ Thargons become alien items when scooped JSR tnpr1 \ Call tnpr1 with the scooped cargo type stored in A \ to work out whether we have room in the hold for one \ tonne of this cargo (A is set to 1 by this call, and \ the C flag contains the result) 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 ASL NEWB \ The item has now been scooped, so set bit 7 of its SEC \ NEWB flags to indicate this ROR NEWB .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