A menu command!!!! So you can quickly create a menu without going through all the hassle; this would be extremely useful!!!! Please do consider this Runer112!!!

I will likely eventually want to create a command that creates OS-style menus. I've added this to my todo list for Axe, which is unfortunately very massive already, though. But for any different or more graphical menus, you'll have to write the code for them yourself. There is no one universal code that could render and control any menu a programmer could want.

-a tutorial!!!! Axe REALLY, REALLY needs a tutorial that is made for beginners, as there are not to many GOOD tutorials for axe at the moment, which is pretty rediculous considering what a popular language it's become...

Have you fully read through the Documentation.pdf file included with Axe? It's a little outdated and only covers the basics, but it does so fairly well. To help with the outdated-ness, I'd also recommend reading the attached Changes.pdf, which details some of the big changes that were introduced in Axe 1.0.0 and haven't found their way into the main documentation yet. After that, you should have enough basic knowledge of Axe to begin reading through the Commands.html file and learning/trying any commands which seem useful for you and your projects. And if you have any questions about how perform specific tasks or how commands work, just ask!

As for an actual tutorial, I'm not sure if it's really possible to make a complete "tutorial" that will teach you how to do everything with a whole programming language. I think the closest approximation would be learning the dictionary and grammar of the language and learning how many regular tasks and algorithms would be handled with the language.

By far the most complete tutorial I know of for Axe, by kindermoumoute (where'd you go? ), can be found here. It goes very in depth on an amazing breadth of topics, has tons of examples, and even has quizzes. I am extremely pleased with the work he put into it, and I think it's far better than I could ever do. There's a catch, though: it's written in French. For now, the best solution is to use something like google to translate each page (Chrome should offer to translate it automatically when you visit pages). The translation is mediocre, so take it with a grain of salt. And I've found it can mess with example code, so I usually keep an untranslated view of the page in another tab for looking at code.

-a command for sprites such as Gif(X,Y,[],[],[],[],[] it would allow you to have up to maybe around ten sprites(of which you write in hexadecimal in the brackets and the command annimates the sprites from left to right at the X Y coordinates specified. Along with this there should be a command like GifRepeat(X,Y,[],[],[],[],[] that will do exactly the same as Gif( but instead of stoping after the animation is over it should loop around and repeat the animation forever. You could also have ones that repeat it a certain amount of times, execute it until its False and one until its true. Do consider this as it would be pretty cool in my opinion.

It sounds like you believe that the calculator/Axe has some sort of underlying rendering engine, but unfortunately there isn't one. Every ounce of rendering logic has to be provided by the programmer/user. Drawing commands simply draw the one thing you tell them to draw, and that's it. They don't have memory areas that can keep track of animation progress for arbitrary sprites; they're stupid. The programmer is what makes programs smart, providing logic about how to act and what different things to display.

-an easier alternative to tilemapping(tilemapps are extremely hard)

For drawing 2D maps of tiles, there really is no other way than tilemapping. Tilemapping is, by definition, the method of rendering a map composed of tiles.

-an on-calc bitmap creator; they are not worth the time to make manually

This is the kind of thing that would be a completely separate program/application for image editing, or perhaps integrated into an IDE. It wouldn't be part of the Axe compiler, and the Axe bitmap format is publicly available so such a tool doesn't have to be made by an Axe developer (me). Anyone can make such a tool, even you!

-there are plenty more features, but ill start with these; please do consider these Runer112 and whoever else is working on axe!!!

Feel free to keep suggesting!



EDIT: Why didn't anybody tell me I forgot to attach Changes.pdf?

Quote from: Dapianokid on June 12, 2013, 03:06:08 pm

If you try to go to an error in the prog editor straight from it, it will cause buggy things to happen. It won't usually crash right away.

Yeah I have this issue too, though zStart's compilation shotcuts fix it. The thing is when you run into it it causes all of your free RAM to be leaked and forces you to reset.

Can you elaborate? I'd love to fix bugs that have plagued users, but I have to know about them first.

EDIT: Can't seem to replicate the issue in a few quick tests, so more information would help. The absolute best thing you could provide is a ROM file (via pm, don't post ROMs publicly!) with instructions on how to recreate it, but I'll work with whatever information you can provide.

Perhaps try deleting the AxeData appvar? Then clear RAM, check that lists and stuff work, run Axe and immediately exit, and check the lists and stuff again.

Have you tried this tutorial? It's probably the most straightforward Axe tilemapping tutorial available, and it starts out pretty simple with a non-scrolling 8*8 tilemap that fits the screen.

If you try it or have tried it and got stuck/confused at any part, tell us what part and what problem you're having and we'll help!


EDIT: I just noticed an error in that tutorial. In some places, it includes [0F0F0F0F0F0F0F0] as sprite data, but that's missing a hexadecimal digit; make it [0F0F0F0F0F0F0F0F].

Quote from: adrusi on June 05, 2013, 09:59:24 pm

I'm thinking of writing it in C on computer first where it's a lot easier to make changes, then porting it to axe.

Lolwut ? This prolly isn't a good idea because Axe is way different than C.

Axe is missing a lot of higher-level features that C has, like types and structures, but the low-level features of C and Axe like program flow, arithmetic, and memory access make them quite similar. C is probably the most similar major programming language to Axe.

If you want to write something in C and later port it to Axe, just be careful not to rely too heavily on features that Axe doesn't support or that you can't easily enough mimic with your own code.

You can't simply shift data in archive. Once you reset a bit of flash memory, you can't set it again except by erasing the entire 64KB sector to set every bit. Effectively, to make an arbitrary change to any byte of flash memory, you have to perform at least two sector erases and two sector copies. Doing this frequently is slow (think a garbage collect/defragment every time) and also probably not great for the health of the flash memory.

Could you provide example maps? Different approaches could perform better on different data.

Variables in Axe are two bytes large, and you only allocated FOO and BAR to be one byte apart. The second byte of FOO overlaps the first byte of BAR.

Two solutions:

• Allocate your custom variables two bytes apart instead of one. The standard solution.
• If you know your variables will fit in one byte each, you can keep them allocated one byte apart. All uses of the variables only allocated one byte should then be followed with a superscript r, like FOO^r.