I feel pretty stupid because i cant even write a decent tilemapper in axe at the moment, so bitmap() will help. My problem is that i'm starting out too advanced. Im trying to make a tilemap with nibbles instead of bytes. Something always goes wrong.

I use nib{}. what's the division/modulus trick?

[A3]->GDB1
{GDB1}/256 == A or 3?
{GDB1}^256 == 3 or A?


Code: [Select]

[A3]->GDB1
{GDB1}/256 == A or 3?
{GDB1}^256 == 3 or A?


Wouldn't you want to divide by 16 instead of 256 ?
Personally I never use those but I think it is 16.

uh, what does the question mark do?

Thanks for your help!

lol

A tilemapper is basically a program that lets you edit data in such a way that it makes levels for games really easy to make. I think there's some tilemapping tutorials around...

I just use 2 for loops for my tilemapper

Two things:

First of all, I have been very busy recently so I've had much less time to work on this than in the past.  But the good news is I'm about to have a week off before finals so I'm going to make a promise to release "what I have" by then.  I've fixed almost every bug reported so far and added some new features, both requested, and some I think everyone will find useful.  So expect either 1.1 or 1.0.6 by no later than Dec. 9 depending on how many more things I add.

Second, I've always wanted to include a tilemapper in the language, at least for rendering and collision detection.  Unfortunately, the reason I haven't added this yet is because tilemapping is so specific to games it would be impossible to find one 'universal' solution for everyone's application.  With every extra 'feature' added to a tilemapper, it just makes it larger and slower which you might not want if you just need something simple and fast.

But now I've decided, why not just ask?  What I want to know is how useful some commands for this would be if you had to have just one routine.   Would you actually use it or would you be required to write one yourself because you need something faster or with more features?  So I'm going to compile a list of features in order from smallest/fastest to biggest/slowest.  I want to know what you use in your current games right now, and what you would plan on using in the future.  Let me know the name/names of your Axe games or even assembly game if you happen to be an asm programmer because the same principals apply.

Tiles:
 Byte tiles (256 tiles per set, 1 byte per tile)
 Nibble tiles (16 tiles per set, .5 bytes per tile)
 Compressed tiles (Some type of RLE or something)

Scrolling:
 Static (no scrolling)
 Block (scroll one tile at a time)
 Smooth (scroll one pixel at a time)

Buffer:
 Restrict to buffer (~760 bytes max)
 Any RAM location (~4000 bytes max realistically)
 Any File location (~24000 bytes max)

Color:
 Monochrome (1 buffer)
 3-Color grayscale (2 buffers)
 4-Color grayscale (2 buffers)

Sprite Size:
 8x8 (fixed)
 4x4 (fixed)
 Custom (specifiable)

Obviously I can't just make a compressed 4 color grayscale smooth scrolling tilemapper with custom sized sprites read from archive because it would be very slow, a pain to initialize, huge, and take forever to code.  There are some compromises I can make however, such as Monochrome drawing to a specifiable buffer, meaning you can have 2 tile sets and draw them once to each buffer if you need grayscale, but this is a slightly inconvenient representation for sprites because you have to separate the gray layers into different data sections.  So anyway, lets just say if you had to choose some even distribution of features, what would they be?  And would/could you use this configuration in your current games?

Another thing to keep in mind is that because a majority of the time spent rendering a tilemap is sprite drawing and not the tilemapping itself, any speed increase from this routine will be very tiny compared to if you wrote it in native Axe.  Most of the advantage will come from reduced size of code and simplicity of the programming.

My personal preferences are:
Nibbles, Smooth, RAM, Monochrome, 8x8

Custom sprite size? Could come in handy for my cemetech contest entry...
EDIT: Owait... I did not read the whole post
My preferences are:
Bytes, smooth, RAM, monochrome, 5*5/8*8/16*16 (depends on the type of game)

EDIT2:
But eh, couldn't you also create a routine for accessing arrays? such as size([10][12])->str1 for defining the size then using str1[1][6] to access the array? That would be much less hassle to code.