Lines of Sight (LOS)
To make all this work, I needed to trace clean lines of sight. This, it turns out, was no simple matter. Be warned: The next few pages are tediously technical. If you want to avoid the gory technical details, skip ahead to the line that says, “If you're a non-technical reader, you can resume reading now.”
Still with me? Good for you! Now, those simple 8-bit processors had no hardware multiply/divide capabilities. All calculations were carried out with 8-bit addition and subtraction. How can a program trace a straight line from point (x1, y1) to point (x2, y2) without any concept of slope (ΔY divided by ΔX)?
I couldn't just cram a software multiply/divide library into the game: There wasn't enough ROM. I needed a fast algorithm ...
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