New screenies showing the new engine in action.  Note that there isn't a sizable delay anymore whenever the player hits a door/key/chip.  It also took me a few dozen tries to get these since I kept over-shooting (good indicator of the speed increase, bad for my temper )

Level 1:

(please excuse the horrible quality of that shot, the file was too large so I had to take the recording down to 9 friggin frames per second instead of 33)

Level 2:


Level 2 again:

I tried changing the sprite based on direction but now it just looks weird, so I probably need to get different sprites.

So if we used 1 ASM utility that only copied archived programs to RAM (Like Resource) to save space, then it would be considered Hybrid? even if EVERYTHING else was Basic?

For this contest, yes.

lol yeah I noticed all of a suddent almost an entire page of posts dissapeared

I try to not delete posts unless they could be extremly offensive to some users or when they contain illegal content but when deleted they land in the hidden trash bin anyway so if something is accidentally deleted it's pretty easy to bring back up. On the old board I accidentally someone's entire project thread which had like 90 posts and I couldn't retrieve it and he wasn't too happy

Well, a couple posts were a little uh.... over the top.

Hi all,

I'm JCW. I'm a moderator over at TIMGUL, working under Omni as the Anti-Riot Squad. We were assembled after the mayhem that went on over there, but I thought I'd join this community too as it interests me greatly. Look forward to speaking to you all around the site.

Hi JCW!  Welcome to Omnimaga

Have you done any programming on calculators?

I recently had a close call.  After just finishing the preliminary testing of a new movement routine (which already entailed major changes to the code), I was in the middle of converting the initialization code to accommodate it.  All the changes were in RAM-resident programs.  The new code utilized my String->Matrix ASM program; unfortunately, I accidentally transferred an old buggy version instead of the current one, and you can probably guess what happened next.  I ran Chip's Challenge, but when I got to the title screen I remembered I hadn't backed up, so instead of continuing (the next chunk of code would run that ASM program) I quit and backed-up.  Then I ran it and it crashed on me.

Morals of the story:  Delete or at least label old buggy versions of things, and of course back up major changes.

Anyone test this program out yet? I am working on homework, so I have not had the time...yet

That's a very good question!  Has anyone tried it yet?

Glad to see progress, you are doing some very notable things and I sullute you!

Thanks   I've decided to abuse Celtic III to its fullest.

The initial testing of the new movement routine has gone very well.  There's been a pretty good speed increase, and the execution time for tiles is somewhat more uniform.  I believe the reason for these improvements is twofold: (1) There aren't as many If:Then blocks so there's less code to sift through, and (2) Many tiles have very similar actions/effects (like items, or doors, etc...) so certain things were being calculated as a function of tile number, but now, with the new system, everything is hard-coded.

I tried Celtic III's det(23 and det(24 commands and, except for a couple little bugs, there was an even larger speed increase.  det(24 doesn't strip the newline so very quickly my program got filled with tons of newlines _{hint hint}

These improvements have come at a cost of nearly doubling the size of movement code; what once took 583 bytes now takes 1115 bytes.  By rearranging certain commands common to all tiles (like the return value stating whether walkable or not) I should be able to cut out 2*48=96 bytes, but it's still much larger than what it was (but the program can be in the archive so it's not taking a chunk out of RAM).

[edit] Oh, and I've also finished with inverting the HUD and the modification to sprite display.