Ideas and obstacles

To relate to a youth audience, it is important to make the game fun and interactive. This can happen by thinkign outside of the box and brainstorming new ideas.

Using a large bitmap is inefficient because of the high use of memory compared to using tiles; though we want the roads to stay the same so it is useless to use tiles. Instead of using a huge bitmap, we will use a fair size, and zoom in to provide a scrolling effect.

One huge obstacle would be forming an efficient collision detection algorithm. My first thought was to program every road with x and y limitations, but this is highly inefficient. Then I thought I could make every single coordinate into a list with the map being the linked list. This would be inefficient because of the high use of memory.

Another collision detection technique would be to use a colour that seperates every object and sides of the road. This would make it easy to determine when objects collide. This may be efficient, but it would not look that great. Another option is to have a bitmap for every other car on the road and possibly for every side of the road. Then we could check if two bitmaps are overlapping. The problem with this is that it is also very inefficient because of the time and memory it uses.

My best idea so far is to create a list of roads with limitations, and areas where they switch off to different roads. They will all be given a number such as route 101. The roads they switch to will be provided in the information in a file, so when the object enters a different road, you only need to search the other roads given in the selection. Cars may also need to be incorporated into what is on each road, along with streetlights and train tracks.

Another obstacle will be planning the map to work properly with lights, cars, and trains working as though the environment was a real life situation; This is one way to engage the gamers. This also provides a sense that the game is never the same when it is played.