Chip's Challenge

[simplethinker]

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).

I've also finished inverting the HUD and adjusting the sprite display.

[simplethinker]

If anyone's interested, here's 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.

[darkstone knight]

looking good :)

you should erase the run indicator, unless it is loading something that takes longer than 5 seconds

[simplethinker]

[kalan_vod]

General rule: Keep the run indicator on while developing, take out for the end product ..

I worked on a couple Asm projects, and I keep the run indicator on normally. And people are amazed to see "basic" run that fast haha..

[simplethinker]

[darkstone knight]

[simplethinker]

[darkstone knight]

upload it to your host (wikidot is good, 300 mb, unlimited bandwidth, no ads)

be warned, though, it fills up hour host FAST

[Iambian]

[simplethinker]

Thanks