[PP] Progress '11

[Xeda112358]

Oh, so it does actually use the two byte tokens though, right?

[tifreak8x]

I suppose. lol, I don't really remember much on all that, I just use whatever is in that group of characters in the program I linked.

One of these days I am going to sit down and force myself to learn asm :/

[Xeda112358]

Yeah, if it is stuff you can use in BASIC it is a token. If you had a program to output ASCII then each char would use 1 byte instead of 1 or 2. With that said I might be able to come up with a small program that can output ASCII data... actually, I have something like that on TICalc I think, but I just had an idea for a better version...

What if I made a program that could display a portion of, say, a 24x32 char map? Like you just pass the arguments of where in the tilemap to display and it will display an 8x16 portion of it... If I do this the way I am thinking of it... I could make it up to 768 bytes per map (24x32=768)...

Sorry, again I am just getting ideas from this for my own purposes >_>

[tifreak8x]

lol It's fine. Nothing wrong with bouncing ideas around.

As to my using it.. I probably wouldn't. I've rewritten the game at least 3 times now from scratch, mainly because I find a better way to make things work. I finally figured out sometime last summer how to make the NPCs move around the map, which was quite the feat with a string based map system, and they are part of the map.

I still have so much to do to get this game working to be considered an actual game. x.x

[Xeda112358]

Yeah, I understand. It was like when I was just starting out with assembly. I program directly on the calc, so when I was working on my second library, I started using calls... to give you an idea, every time I added data to the program, I had to update every reference to every call after the insertion or deletion of bytes. Now imagine what happens as you get more experienced and you learn better techniques... Yeah, that is a pain. And if you don't spot a call that needs to be updated... CRASH! So yeah, I know what you mean. It would be incredibly tedious for you to go through and edit everything :D

So yeah, thanks for the idea!

[tifreak8x]

Yeah :P

And no problem, I like being helpful :]

As to pokemon, I started working on the attack data lists. 165 attacks over 76 attack groupings on 10 pages of paper. Took about half an hour to do 22 or so :/

Progress continues~

[Xeda112358]

That is great to hear! So are you going to store it as an actual list on the calc?

[tifreak8x]

No, these will be 5 element lists, stored 1 per line in a program that I will then convert to an appvar (thanks to KermMartian for a program that does that, just changes something in the program header to make it an appvar or something, I don't specifically remember) And then I use celtic 2 to read from it based on the attack's corresponding number, it goes to that line and pulls the attack's stats. This isn't for the actual in battle stuff, this just sets up the stats for the pokemon so they know what attacks they have. I have dumped numerous data programs into the appvars to keep them hidden and clean up the program menu a bit. I just wish I could come up with a clean way of doing that for the maps. :<

[Xeda112358]

Yeah, a program is either var type 05h (regular program) or 06h (locked program) so if you change this to, say, 15h it will be an appvar . So what do you mean about the maps? The maps are stored as strings, right?

[tifreak8x]

Yes, but the problems stem from how I would recall the data. It wouldn't be a problem having the strings in the appvars, more so the problem of having all those If statements to determine which line the needed map was on in an appvar.

[Xeda112358]

Ah, well I have an idea, I think. When I make games that store maps based on lines, I usually store the maps like a giant tilemap. So line 1 contains the first map (upper left), line 2 contains the next map (I usually go right) et cetera. So if you decide to have 10 maps per row, then to access row 1, column 0, just do 10*1+0=10, add 1 and you have the line number with the map data. If you have no map data, just have an empty line so you will only use 1 byte. This will save speed and memory by removing all the If statements and replacing them with an equation. Plus, for some sets of data I have been known to come up with crazy equations that happen to match the data by plugging in a value. I cannot always do this, but I have fun trying! For example: sub("ROCKPAPERSCISSORS",5 nCr Ans,Ans²+4

[tifreak8x]

I really wish that would work. I could probably come up with something, but one way or another, it would require If statements, simply because of the way Pokemon is set up, map wise.

[Xeda112358]

Okay, well I hope you figure it out! I cannot wait! Well, I guess I kinda have to, but... Have fun?!

[tifreak8x]

lol Thanks XD

Things will move along fairly well, so long as I don't get overly distracted.

[tifreak8x]

Alright, some news.

I got all the lists dropped into a program, all the data verified and the program converted into an application.

I realized upon testing that I had put the L_EPRTY(7 in backwards, so I have that changed in my notes as well. It is now in a sprite.name format.

The stats for health isn't generated, not sure why yet. I might not have included that in the equations. Something for me to go through digging. At this point, it is causing issues with debugging since it throws up a divide by 0 error when it tries to display the hp bar.

[tifreak8x]

So, I managed to locate some decent information on the generation of stats themselves, and now I have to figure out how to add it to my equations program. Sadly, looking at it.. I think I broke it.

What I need to do at this point is refigure out what all is actually on there and rewrite the code to make sense. Because at this point I think a part of it might be getting skipped. :/

[tifreak8x]

I've sadly made little head way with the list creation over the past couple of weeks. I've been quite busy with work, life and just generally stressed out over problems that go beyond my control. I have, however, made SOME progress with it, so there is that. Just trying to make this as efficient as possible while not really caring about super optimizing, if that makes any sense lol

[tifreak8x]

Made some progress. Got the code put in for the equations program. Sadly, it seems I didn't add enough error checking for empty attack slots. This is for new, low level pokemon that know <4 moves, so at least one of the slots will be empty. Once I can get it to stop erroring out, then I can see if the rest of it works. So far, everything else seems happy enough.

[Xeda112358]

Awesome! Also, maybe if you need to, you can fill it with an empty move? Maybe a move with just a space as the name and then if the user tries to select it, it skips over it?

[tifreak8x]

Thankfully, the fix was far easier than needing to add all that. I would have had to add another line in the appvar for the data, name, etc and use 166 for such a thing. What I did was add a conditional before the code block that recalls the attack's data list, a simple If L6(D)>0:Then made that part work correctly. Now I have a problem with the displaying routines that I need to figure out.