Stephen Pair wrote:
> 
> Couple more comments...if you increase the number of ticks per second
> for the animation, it makes the game play much smoother.  However, if
> you add a lot of aliens, this may really slow things down.  IIRC, in the
> original game, all the alien move together and drop together.  The whole
> idea was that you wanted to eliminate columns (rather than rows) first,
> so that the alien took longer to traverse the width of the screen.
> Maybe moving all the aliens together in a single tick would make the
> game play more responsive.  Also, the bullets take a long time to add to
> the world.  Maybe there's some way to speed that up.
> 
I know there are some speed issues and I don't know what
to do with them. I think the ticking/stepping and the screen
update are the two separate speed bumps. I don't know how 
they sync up, maybe there could be something to gain there if they
indeed are out of sync ? I really don't know.

The bullets getting added also is a speed bump as you mention. 
That's because of the copying of the player, and that involves 
creating and compiling a player in the image, so that considered it 
is quite fast:-) But a more elegant solution is crying for 
implementation. I think a separation of the model and view could 
be good here, so there was only one bullet model that could 
have several views. Or something in that direction. 


Regarding the alien strategy:
I have not yet written the end of the tutorial so I don't know
yet what my answer is :-)
There is quite much left to do to be able to call this a finished
game and there is quite a bit of that that I have not touched
yet, like enemy bombing, levels, game scoring etc...
I'll see if I get around to deal with that. But I also think I reached
to a point in the tutorial where the readers of the tutorial should 
be able to continue on by their own. And I have to say deployment 
is not my strong side. 

Karl