That's still awesome!  SAD'll be great.

Btw are you planning to integrate some sort of smaller version of your space map inside the game, like, a 192x128 version where you can scroll around?

Something like that.  At the very least, there will be a mini-map which one cannot scroll around in.  I have to test the game and see if it's worth having something that a person can scroll.  Starcraft and other RTS games would not have been popular if the minimap showed so much detail that people had to scroll to execute commands on the minimap--and not be able to see the whole map at once

Cool to hear ^^, and yeah I agree about SC. I'm glad the minimal is rather small. of course on the calc the major issue would be that there are no color, though, so that's something to think about when designing the mini-map.

Collidable tiles will be a black pixel, and normal tiles will be a white pixel.  Buildings will appear as black pixels as well.  I was thinking about grayscale minimaps, but I don't think there will be enough memory for that.  Besides, I figure that people playing this game will be able to use context to discover what the buildings and/or collidable tiles are.

Aaah ok I see. I was more concerned about color difference between you and your opponent. Grayascale shouldn't be a priority I think, as it can make the game more difficult to program, due to speed. You would have to reduce framerate when scrolling so the GS doesn't look ugly.

The color differences between opponents does make sense.  Unfortunately, we can't make a typical RTS game for a non-typical device.

Here's the new screenie!  I hope to have another one very soon, but I didn't know if I would finish by tonight.  By the way, I haven't forgotten my promise to release builds to the public, but I want the next build I release to have ships and hotkeys--we're looking at about 2-4 weeks.

This screenshot shows an updated engine, as well as incorporating build time.  But, I still have to work on the build time aspect so that some of these stuctures won't complete so quickly

Here's what I modified in the engine, making the time I spent worth it:

1. Buildings are part of the tilemap.  This makes everything much faster.  Also, collision will be much easier to program, and I can leave wreckage on the tilemap to represent a destroyed building.  (Note that you can build on wreckage)
2. I made the mistake of having a seperate key-pressing routine for menus.  Now, all key routines are combined into one.
3. In the previous build, all buildings were scanned on a consistent basis for collision.  With the new building-as-part-of-tilemap policy, there's no need for that.  So, as for right now, only buildings being built are scanned, and that's only for timing and adding HP.

The next screenie will allow you to see the HP rising as the building is constructing.  The HP is technically rising in this build, but because I updated the engine, I need to update the text that displays when you highlight a building.

Each player can have up to 50 buildings.  Unless by per chance there is 100 buildings constructing at once (Starcraft you could do this, but it's much harder to do in S.A.D.), I don't think there's a chance of becoming slow enough to be unplayable.  Currently, about 18300 bytes of RAM is being used.  My goal is to have at least 2 KB for the user (and the memory will be available when the game exits), but it is a big game.

Looks nice, raising HP barswill definitively be a must, though, else if you build a lot of buildings besides each others it will be hard to make the difference between each others since they all have the same icon while building.