Wow that's amazing, it looks really good. I've been waiting for something like this. The possibilities are endless! Very nice work. Keep it up.

The thing about the keyboard layout is that the SAT and ACT define a computer as a device with a screen and a QWERTY type keyboard that can store information. Computers are not allowed, however calculators are. The reasoning is that you could copy the test down onto such a keyboard equipped device. then use the test questions at your leisure to find out the answers to take it again and cheat the test. There are a few versions of the test, but a small group of people doing this, along with a few days of analysis could result in several people getting scores that are not realistic.

Personally I think TI needs to get off their high horse about open source development. The only thing they've accomplished by encrypting their stuff in the past and present, is to make a whole generation of programmers angry and want to break in that much more. If they simply just let us program these things, and supported it, there wouldn't be this many problems.

thanks jsj795, that's very kind of you. I'm glad you're enjoying them.

Maybe the scrolling could be set by the client program, so that each game could scroll the background as they liked. Plus that could allow a program to use the background to make clouds moving in the distance when the player stood still. It would make programming games for the engine much more programmer friendly. 

Well backgrounds could be used in place of floor textures, I used that method to make a "floor" in DOA. I can see how the actual floors would be done pixel by pixel, I wonder if there might be another way around this though, like a tile map that was stretched to the perspective of the floor, and then drawn before the walls were drawn. Like a Mode7 engine built into the rendering loop. I wonder if that could be done and make things look real still.

I'm also wishing I had an nSpire right about now, things seem to be getting pretty interesting with them.

When this comes out, I think I may have to put my next project on hold so that I can write a game for this engine! Keep up the good work, so that I can show off your engine's capabilities!

By the way, if you could figure out how to do it, it would be awesome if you could make walls with transparency. It would be a neat feature. I think the only way this would look correct is if the "wall" was rendered like a sprite with a fixed rotation angle, and then rendered in the center of the space for a wall, that way games could use that to make fences or similar barriers that you could see through. I think there would have to be two types of this, one at the horizontal angle, and one at the vertical, so that the engine knew which way to render.

Just a thought I had, I wanted to use something like this in my games before.

Also, do you plan on adding support for different heights of sprites? If so I could make use of your engine's looking up and down feature, by adding a weapon that can shoot up and down as well as left and right. This would end up being probably the most advanced FPS for a calculator that I know of.

Now whether or not I could pull something like that off effectively or not is another matter, but if I can't someone else probably could.

Anyways, I'm pretty much amazed at the quality of your engine, and I can't wait to get my hands on it to see what it can do. Good work!

Thanks

Yeah definitely, all the wall textures are designed to blend in with each other so they are very difficult to find, even if they are plainly visible in the room. I plan on adding a few more types of hidden areas to spice things up as well.

Also;

I've gone through the code for my save game/load game feature and edited it. I removed some code that was unnecessary and reduced the average save file by about 2,200 bytes or so. The maximum save file size is 10,200 bytes. so its still pretty big, but I'm still figuring out ways to pare that down to a more manageable size. My goal would be to reduce that to about 6,100-ish bytes, that's assuming I can remove the section of the save/load function I've been thinking of working out of the code somehow. 

Also I've been altering the way that the game accesses some of the data that the game uses, it now requires a bit less code to access some commonly used things. I'm not sure how much ram that might save, but I'm hoping that it's significant. If nothing else it makes my life a bit easier, and makes the code a lot simpler.

Anyways, I've started coding the mini game but I don't really have anything to show for it yet, most of what I've done so far is just structure stuff to make the mini game run.

When I get more done I'll make a screen shot. 

I finished up the story stuff for the last finished level. I'm going back over the levels and polishing them up graphically, so that they are a bit more interesting, plus I'm adding in hidden weapons and secret areas.

More to come.