No, currently a 3 level grayscale sprite is drawn like this:
00 = White
01 = Gray
10 = Black
11 = Black

and there is no way to do transparency without adding an extra sprite layer.

@DJ, no you are being clear, I think it is me who is not being clear.  In the example you posted, if someone wants to format their data like that then that's their decision (although kind of a stupid one given you can get much higher efficiencies with your own formats).  My point was that you can't ban certain data layouts just because they resemble BASIC.

Sprite rotation is actually much trickier than flipping, those are both on the wishlist already.

Something I was wondering though, would anyone be interested in specialty sprite routines?  Sprite routines which are designed for very specific applications.  Some ideas I had were:

• 3 level grayscale compact masking for 8x8 sprites.  I used this in Pyoro, it basically allows you to use the unused bit combination as an extra transparency layer so you can have automatic grayscale masking without needing an extra mask layer. 00=transparent 01=white 10=gray 11=black
• 16x16 aligned sprite drawing.  Its a super fast and small way to draw 16x16 sprites when they're aligned horizontally and also using a more convenient array for the sprite data than trying to make 4 8x8 sprites.
• Unclipped unsafe 8x8 sprite drawing.  Speeds up sprite drawing significantly for sprites that are always drawn completely on-screen for applications where speed really matters.  But it would crash/corrupt data for sprites drawn partly or fully off-screen

Would anyone be interested in any of these?  I would probably use the Plot1() - Plot3() tokens.

DJ, I'm confused.  How would you be able to tell if a BASIC variable was created in Axe or not?  For instance, my music generator creates a BASIC program that can be imported into Axe but suppose someone ran out of room so just left that program in memory and read it from the main program to play the music.  That would be non-Axe generated file but definitely Axe compatible.  Or what if you typed your data file in the TI-BASIC editor and it had a similar format to TI-BASIC for whatever reason?  That would have to be allowed since its data.

The main problem with this is that Axe can generate ANY file with ANY combination of characters inside so technically all files are "Axe Created" and everyone will claim that they are.  It is extremely easy since you can just fill the Data() command with all the tokens you need and then Copy() them into the program.  I think what you're worried about most is that people will find a way to make a BASIC hybrid program somehow.  But let me reassure you this is impossible due to rule #1 since Axe will not support any commands to run BASIC programs or Assembly programs during the duration of the contest (other than the Asm() command which is forbidden).

Yeah I'm not sure what DJ is talking about.  Especially for large games, it will become impossible to keep all the data in a single program and it would be silly to have to package data in other axe programs just so they can be extracted.  Unless he is referring specifically to the BASIC language and not to the BASIC variables themselves which I think is what he is referring to but I'm not sure what the rules are about external data and if there are limits or not so please correct me if I'm wrong.  Its possible that external data might be forbidden, that is, entries must be a single program.

EDIT: Actually, after re-reading the rules, I think its pretty clear that you are allowed to use them as long as they're not being executed or interpreted by the OS.  So I think DJ just misspoke.

I might be able to do the increments in the for loops.  I will see if I can get them optimized enough.

EDIT: calcdude, it appears to be another "end of line" bug.  Just make sure you add an extra enter to the end of the program and it should work fine.  I'm fixing that now.

Yeah, DJ is mostly right.  But a pause 9000 is still a pause 9000.  The thing is, it pauses a little first, then subtracts 1 before checking if its done pausing so a pause 0 is actually a pause 65536, which is even longer than a pause 65535.  This is only done for size optimization (obviously not speed since this is a pause command).

Its pretty interesting actually.  Let me explain using decimal and then you can extrapolate to hexadecimal.

So say you have two 4 digit numbers, always positive.  If you do a multiplication, what is the largest number you can possibly get?  Well, that's simple to find:

9999 x 9999 = 99980001

Notice how we end up with an 8 digit number.  Since our variables can only hold 4 digit numbers, like the input, we have to decide which 4 digits to keep and which ones to throw away.  We have now have 3 methods to choose (only the underlined part is kept):

9999 *   9999 = 99980001
9999 ** 9999 = 99980001
9999 *^ 9999 = 99980001

There is a little more to ** when you have negative numbers because its signed instead of unsigned, but this is basically how all of these commands works.  Don't forget, you won't get these answers on the calculator because my examples are in base 10 for demonstration.

First of all, matthias1992 I can tell you're new to assembly.  The .org is an organization command that keeps track of what to make the jumps, calls, and labels.  If you had .org $9D95 and in your code you were jumping to a label which was $20 bytes past your .org statement, the assembler would know to make the jump address at $9D95 + $20 = $9DB5.  The .org statement itself does not contribute anything to the code, rather it is a command to tell the assembler what to add for each label.  I don't know what compiler you are using, but at this point in time, computer compilers are the only reliable way to compile assembly language programs.  However there are some promising projects in the works.

DJ, quasi_Phthalo was referring to the example code matthias1992 posted which would be like in BASIC: Lbl A:While 1:GotoA:End which just causes a stack overflow and crash.  There isn't really any exploit you would use this for so he is right in questioning his intentions.  I think he just misunderstood that this is just some example code to help explain what he is talking about and not an actual program.

Out of curiosity, why was the "Forum Users Online In The Last 30 Minutes" bar moved to the top of the page instead of the bottom.  I'm used to seeing it on the bottom in most forums I visit and I kinda liked it there.  I have it minimized now so I can see the new posts at the top of the page.