Tuesday 26 March 2013

Jacky Watson Darts

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Jocky Wilson simulator
For those not already familiar with Darts, it is a game of skill played by the worlds finest athletes.
It’s 1979, Butlins, you are Jacky Watson (y’know the one Dexy’s Midnight Runners did the song about) and you must win the darts championship.
Ok, standard rules, 501 to count down.  You can guide the erratically dancing cursor around the screen and press P to select throw power.  Keys JFGH also have a function to do with focussing and steadying (well that’s the idea anyway).
No Bullseye detection?!
The game screen takes a very satisfying 27 seconds to draw, but it’s lovely to watch as Steve continues prove himself to be the master of PLOT and DRAW.  The code is pretty sophisticated  as it calculates the scores, draws the darts on and off in a mostly precise fashion (the odd dart does  fail to get properly deleted though).  I’d say that’s all quite difficult to do but the funny thing is it gets the easy things wrong!  It’s possible for the dart to wander out of the screen giving a return to basic and an ‘Integer out of range error’ and it fails to correctly subtract the last bit of the score (which means you can’t complete the game!*).

So, fatally bugged* but a really rather playable darts game.  I enjoyed it, and it would give some ofthe 1980s darts games a run for their money.  Thankyou Steve!

EDIT 27/03/13: the game is not actually flawed, though my remembrance of how darts works is (sorreee).  This is an almost perfectly playable game and is less crap for it.  For shame Steve!
Tipshack: Do as the professional darts players do: drink 8 pints and eat a mixed grill before playing.
HACK SACK: in line 180 change IF ttot<pt-1 to IF ttot<=pt to allow the score to be fully depleted.

3 comments:

  1. For those who didn't check the WOS thread... line 180 is preventing a non-double finish, so it's correct.
    The game will crash if you move the cursor off screen to the top or right, so beware.

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    1. Yep sorry about that, I suspected you knew what you were doing better than me. That hack should be considered as a way of making darts more playable, that bit at the end where you have to get the exact number is really annoying :-p

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  2. The other strategy is twofold in; for this situation none of the scores tally until the player has hit a twofold (the external ring of the dart board). Darts Shanghai rules

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