Final Conflict

[Ben Trettel]

Final Conflict will be a RPG for the TI-83 Plus in TI-BASIC. It should have about 425 screens, yes that is larger than Links Awakening, but only if everything I planned goes right. Each screen is 12x8 with 8x8 sprites. I already have most of the regular engine done, except for the battles, where right now all you can do is run and the items managment stuff. The speed of this is pretty fast, especially for basic. I've already written the story, and the best way to describe it without spoiling it is that it's sorta a mix between Lord of the Rings and Stargate. I request a forum here, too.
Edit: Due to space problems, I have decided to decrease the amount of screens to 265, not 256, because I have 4 64 screen "sectors" and a 9 screen "sector". I have also decided to change my engine so that all the speech for each "sector" is in it's own program file, so I could have more speech, maybe a minigame and some other stuff.

[Arcane Wizard]

Why would you need a forum if it's a solo project?

[Ben Trettel]

Ok then, delete this topic or lock it.

[Pascal]

Sounds good. I cant wait to play your game.

[Ben Trettel]

Really? Well thanks.
Once I'm done, I will release the game's engine for people to study, because I simplified nearly everything for speed, and some people who don't know asm may like it anyway. I designed it to be the largest TI RPG ever, at least one that will fit the entier thing on your calc. I've got 4 of the 425 screens done now, and I feel good. I'm just thinking now, only 421 more to go.

[Ben Trettel]

Here are some quick pics I was able to get of Final Conflict so far.

In Balin's house. Balin is a helpful old guy. You can't beat the game without him.

Talking to Balin. In the actual game, he doesn't have the key to unlock the door, because he lost it. I was testing something when I made that. I also don't know how to make apostrophes.

Outside of Balin's house.

This one is pretty blurry. Reading the sign outside of Balin's house.

My extremely beta battle engine. Random battles do work perfectly, and does not slow down your walking at all. However, they are a little less random this way, because there are some spots that you can never go into a battle at. The 3 enemies are randomly generated, but it chooses one of any of the sprites.

Does this look good?

[Arcane Wizard]

Sweeet.

One question: How do you handle the world (map) data?

[Ben Trettel]

That took me months to do completely, because it originally ran off of matrixes, but I couldn't have even got close to having 100 screens on my 83+, so it's all stored in strings. It's fast, and about 4 times smaller than matrixes. Plus I can embed variables in it, which is how I did the keys and locks and things that change. And I can easility add what I call skip numbers into it, which improve load time of the screen by skipping unnecessary parts. They also skip the battle spots, which are added before the screen is loaded because it makes movement a lot faster than counting spaces and stuff like that.

[Ben Trettel]

Let me explain how this works a bit better. Lets say that the screens are 4 sprites by 4 sprites. Each sprite has a number, and you can change the sprites by changing their number. Sprite number 0 is a blank spot. The map in a matrix looks like this:
1 1 1 1
1 0 0 1
1 0 0 1
1 1 1 1
Lets say you have a total of 30 sprites, and you are gonna use at least one of them in the map at one point. So, each sprite is gonna take up 2 bytes in the map file as a string. You add 10 to each sprite number and stuff them into a string like this(I have a program to do this):
"11111111111010111110101111111111->Str1
A program reads that from left to right and subtracts 10 from each sprite number and displays it on the screen at the position it should be at.
That is different from what I do because my level files have skip stuff in them and my screens are 12 by 8. The skip stuff skips unnessesary blank spots speeding up loading.
Now, once you have made all of your maps, you put them together sorta like how I put the map together, from left to right. You then make a routine that uses the sub( function to chop off the right screen from you corridinates.
I know that is pretty complicated, but it's what I use and it works great.

[Arcane Wizard]

I'm asked because I'm kind of stuck with map data for my rpg, I was hoping you had used a list.

[Ben Trettel]

Lists are too large for how big I want to make my RPG. Sorry.

[Arcane Wizard]

Yeah, same here, but I don't want to use strings either.

I'm just going to use a 225 screen random map generator until I think of something.

[Ben Trettel]

You could do something similar to what I am doing by storing all the same stuff in a list. Like you could store the same screen as before like this:
1
1
1
1
1
0
0
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1

[Toksyuryel]

apodtrophe's can be gotten easily. They are under the angle menu. Can't miss 'em.

[Ben Trettel]

Thanks.

[Darth Android]

how long does it take to draw a screen?

[Ben Trettel]

With the skipping and having screened designed to load with skipping, most screens will load in about 8 flat if not less.

[Darth Android]

arcane, why do you seem to have to use lists?

[Arcane Wizard]

1) Only 10 strings

2) 999->Dim(L1 = 9000 bytes each element holds 7 2-digit numbers, so a string would have to have 14*999 (13986) characters and a string can only hold 4797 characters.

3) Matrices suck.

4) If I used strings I wouldn't have any more excuses left to keep from having to finish my decent games (I'm lazy).

[Tyler]

Is it possible to sub( a number? I'm not good at these things, but it would be possible if a program were made to sub( a number... for now I'm going to stick with strings too i guess....