Posted By
MIK
on 2014-09-23
08:35:13
 |  Re: Manage tons of enemies theoretically
I have already said but I'll put it another way.
Think of Gauntlet as nothing more than a multidirectional Space Invaders. You can only ever shoot the enemies in front.
If you have 8 Ghosts chasing you in Gauntlet along a corridor 2 wide, not only are they running on Magnet Code to save processing time but there are only 3 units in total being processed. What's behind the front 2 Ghosts is a unit of 6 being controlled as one in the code.
As soon as a front Ghost is hit one behind takes it's place...
What really happens is that Ghost you just shot pops back up in to play and then the unit is displayed as a team of 5 behind, they can't go any where until the front one's have been shot. It must be quicker to display a unit of 5 Ghosts on screen than it is to make one disappear to then have the remaining Ghosts have minds of there own from that...
I'm sure if you play Gauntlet on C64 it plays out just like I said. Only a handful of Ghosts are ever fully controlled to make contact with the player, the rest following are a unit. In big open spaces all Ghosts turn into a pyramid that follows you with 1 Ghost at the head of the pyramid chasing. While it may look like the whole screen is chasing you it's nothing more than a V shape formation and only the Ghosts in the front of the V shape can be hit. As soon as one Ghost is hit, the animation of that Ghosts disappears but then it redraws it's self only updating the unit sat behind the V shape to display 1 less. The process repeats until all are gone. It's all maths. 
EDIT: If you need to see an example of Gauntlet on Plus/4 take a look at the game Spore.
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