Quote Originally Posted by Jonax View Post
Also you are right about the occasional misalignments when deciding hit or miss. Is possible due to rounding error, or possibly a case of finishing the loop and moving the ball yet a bit before the moving stops...
No I'm not talking here about rounding errors. What I'm talking here is about the scenario that you can see on next screen mock up. The paddle is moving downwards and the ball is traveling toward left an up.
Ponx_screenshot.png
In reality you could still bounce the ball in such scenario back to the game field but game registers that I lost the ball as soon as it crosses the left edge of the game field and thus doesn't give me a chance to bounce the ball back in such scenario.

Quote Originally Posted by Jonax View Post
Why the fast area in the middle? Well. I'm getting older and don't have reflexes for super fast original PONG style movements. Slower is nicer from a personal perspective and I generally prefer more contemplative gameplay. However having that slow game speed makes the gameplay boringly slow, even for me. Don't have the patience to wait for the ball to crawl over the whole field. So the fast area is a compromise..
Yeah I figured out that something like this might be the reason for the slowdown. It is a nice touch.
However the change between fast and slow speed is quite big and sudden so it feels a bit odd. Perhaps splitting the white areas to multiple smaller areas where each area would gradually reduce the speed of the ball might make this feel less odd.
In order to avoid performing multiple hit-tests against white areas for slowdowns you could instead you could just use the X distance from the middle of the gray area. Doing so even opens you the ability to go and for instance use logarithmic equation to calculate smooth speed transition.