wow nice, interesting programs that could become handy because hacked pics are one thing that is hard to transfer from calcs to calcs and i always hated how there were no way to duplicate a pic without displaying it first.

I will add it to the download section when I get some time. Keep up the good work on your projects and Chips

Thanks guys   I wrote COPYPIC to help cut down the number of pics needed for CC (saved 1534 bytes of RAM ) and the other two just splintered off as random thoughts.

I have this idea in my head for SETPICS/EXPICS so that you can enter a list of numbers instead of one (so you only need one call), and that will also create the extraction program for you, but I'll get to that later.

...and i always hated how there were no way to duplicate a pic without displaying it first.

That always bothered me too.  The funny thing is that Pic->Pic is just as simple as Pic->Graphscreen

When are you releasing this project thingie?

Wow that's great anytime you can cut down on some bytes is a good thing. Keep it up! So I take it CC is a basic hybrid? I tend to just skim over things, so my bad if it is stated earlier!

I think I posted somewhere in this thread what I'm using, but there were a lot of "maybe"s and "possibly"s, so I'll summarize.  It's a BASIC/Asm hybrid.  I'm using xLIB for graphics (sprites + tilemapping) and I'm also using its 'execute archived program' for loading the level data (each level is it's own program that sets the map, starting location, number of chips, time, and other miscellaneous information).  COPYPIC (from my previous post) is being used to eliminate the need for two sets of sprite pics (for the toggle walls).  I'm currently working on a utility to make loading level maps less RAM intensive (see one of my posts on the previous page).  Everything else is in BASIC.

When are you releasing this project thingie?

Honestly, I have no idea   I've never worked on a project this large before, so I have absolutely no grasp on the potential timeline.

Also, I think most of the horribly embarrassing code has been replaced, so I'm thinking of releasing a small demo.  That would probably be a bit more telling than just screenies, and on top of that I could get some feedback/suggestions/complaints.

Couldn't you use the "execute archived program" feature directly from xLIB? It has one (XTEMP000, XTEMP001, etc)

I'm using xLIB's real(10 function to execute the level-loading programs.  The "utility to make loading level maps less RAM intensive" is needed because for the larger maps (up to 32x32) the matrix is over 9kb, so just doing "(some matrix)→[A]" would cause the Ans variable to take up another 9kb of RAM, even if it's only for a second.

I was working on it but it's still too slow, and it's been taking up a lot of time trying to speed it up.  I'll get back to it later, but for now I'm moving on to other parts of CC.

aah ok, how much time did it took to load maps?

Using the method in this post (purely BASIC) there's a 2-3 second pause but there are even more commas and brackets than the usual [[][]] format for matrices.

With the current version of the String->Matrix program I am (was/will be) working on there's a noticeable delay for a 5x5 matrix, which means for larger matrices it will be even longer (I was too lazy to convert a whole 32x32 map to the string format though so I haven't actually tested a full map).  If I get it working, each 32x32 map will be exactly 2052 tokens compared to the minimum of 3106 with the other (non-Asm) method, which will greatly reduce the size of the game and the number of programs needed

YYYYIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm done with that String->Matrix program.  After waking up at 1am this morning with an idea of exactly how to do it efficiently, I wrote it up and, unluckily, wound up with the same "anything less than 10 makes it explode" problem as the original (see my posts on UTI here).  Now, after it turned out to be the largest brain-fart of my life (that I can recall), I have a String->Matrix program that can create a 32x32 (1024 element) matrix in a little longer than a split second.

I've attached the program and instructions.

[edit]I'm starting to wonder if I should submit these (those Pic programs too) to ticalc, since I haven't seen anything like them there.

[another edit] I stuck these in the archives here, since digging through this topic might get a bit annoying.