Odds On progress

So, I have been spending some time thinking about where I go with Odds on.

Ive got a fully working (well, kind of!) 2d race engine and the results of which are affected by the odds of the horse, however there are some elements of the design in not entirely happy with, and others I'm having to think long and hard about to find the best solution.

So, my first design issue is how do you track (no pun intended) the horse you have bet on (or horseS for that matter). Initially I had 50x50 pixel animated sprites which looked WAY too small on the track, but with them being so small I had space to "trail" the names of the horses behind them so you could see which horse was which.. yes, they all had their own individual colours but at 50x50 it was tough going to see the colours as they were so tiny.. So my first decision was to up the resolution of the sprites to 100x100 - much better. Can see the colours no problem at all - though the new size sprites look a little jaggedy edged (but can change that simply enough later on), however now the trailing names are very much lost..

Ive toyed with the idea of doing a "live" leader board, which updates every frame, need to work on the code for this, but I guess this might work... if a little slow doing a nested for-next loop sort.. I already show the bets made on the screen in the bottom left.. so maybe i could make the bets animate in some way if its likely to pay off? But then you wouldn't need to look at the actual race.. I guess another way to do this would be to keep the horses names in their respective "lane" - so its simple to see which horse is which. But if I did this and wanted to change the way the horses run (i.e. all congregating to the middle after the first 100 yards) then it wouldn't work.....decisions decisions...

Also tried to make the track get muddier as the horses race across it. I can make this work, but its slow, basically because I'm grabbing an image of the entire track every frame, which takes its toll on the processor.. so i need to address this too.

Once Ive sorted all this out I can progress to sorting other data which may affect a horses performance such as going, form, jockey, etc. etc. This SHOULD be relatively easily achieved by use of a database of horses and jockeys...

.. lots to do and not enough time to do it....

Oh yeah, and I got cut up by some F*$&*£ at least 4 times on my way to work this morning. Ah feel better for that!!!

Pic of the race with small horses

Pic of the racetrack (old version)