Talk:2770: Tapetum Lucidum

Added possibility of XPilot as inspiration, as a different branch of "triangular ships in 2D worlds" from Asteroids, which is a single-player PvE with no static walls or rebounding shots. The shots from xpilot ships can, if the map is set to do so, bounce off walls. Or be distorted by gravity, so aren't lasers. (Or maybe they can be, but it's been decades since I played it and development moves on!) But I'm sure the ecosystem of clone-games arising from both these inspirations (and other predecessors to both/between their respective releases) is nigh on uncatalogued so who knows if Randall's depicting some actual specific release or just a memetic interloper that just has the right narrative features for this particular comic's "message". 172.70.85.169 12:56, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Lasers are distorted by gravity. If we are talking about black holes, at least. -- Hkmaly (talk) 20:54, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

(Technically lasers aren't distorted. The space they pass through is. ;) )

Not as much as physical things. I too was an XPilot player/hoster, a few decades ago now. Ah, nostalgia...

The "bullets" could be fired into a cluster of gravity-blocks and whip around like mad until they timed-out or managed to escape from whatever 'random' side their chaotic paths led them to. Great fun to include such features when editing maps (adding detailing and fine-tuning with a text editor to the conversion of some interesting image to the map format, often obtained via netpbm piping and a bit of other automatic/manual editing), especially with shields a disabled feature so as to make it a risky proposition to enter combat in close proximity (and a rather desperate escape-route, if piled up between walls).

Or set your map with huge time-to-die (bullets, drifting mines, etc), a high number of wall bounces allowed and skew the pickup populations with many multiple spread-shooters (front and rear) and let the players create a 'bullet soup' situation oh so easily! 141.101.99.98 22:40, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Come on, Randall- Tapetum Ludum was right there! SaturnVI (talk) 11:49, 2 May 2023 (UTC)