I'm finally returning to TI-BASIC!

Absolute Madness is roughly a sequel to Absolute Insanity, but completely rewritten and with lots of new features. It's a puzzle/action platformer in pure TI-BASIC, and it's my entry for yAronet's zContest 2011.

Here's half a level running on a TI-84 Plus:



I'm coding this on a TI-83 Plus, so I'm trying to keep it as playable as possible at 6 MHz.

O_O Wow. This is epic. How'd you do sprites? Pt-On?

A combination of lines, characters, and horizontal text sprites.

I like it! However, I noticed some obvious flashing in the re-rendering of multiple objects on screen. I'm assuming you're rendering them every frame? Perhaps only re-render what's actually moving, like the 'X' of doom, or the mushroom guy when you press movement keys?

The X is rendered every frame (for obvious reasons), and so is the boulder to account for cases in which the X passes on it. Everything else is rendered only as needed.

The reason whatever block to the right of the character flashes whenever the character moves is because I use a text sprite for it. I may just change that to a pixel sprite instead to fix that problem.

EDIT: Working on the menu screen: https://img.ourl.ca/rfg/10-14-11.gif

Did ^ that. It's amazing how much faster pixel sprites are than text sprites. At least twice as fast when I tested it

Then I fixed some more bugs and finally made a complete level, with boulders, enemies, and dimension switches during jumps: https://img.ourl.ca/rfg/10-21-11.gif

Do you have an objection to using hybrid BASIC sprites? That might allow you to speed it up even more. Of course, it looks amazing as-is; very impressive work.

I've never done much with extended BASIC, and this is for the pure-BASIC portion of zContest 2011, so that unfortunately is out of the question :/ And thanks! Just remember that that's a TI-84 Plus screenshot. It runs about half that speed on an 83 Plus, but it's definitely playable.

Ah, that's fair. I was just thinking that one of the biggest pains with textsprites is having to redraw the sprite directly to the right of your sprite (and potentially above as well) even if you are just redrawing a single sprite.

I always use RecallPic to restore the game map every frame. That leaves me with much more flexibility in moving and displaying objects.

Ah, then there's another place that the xLIB commands in hybrid BASIC could give you a pretty significant speedup.

Yeah, that's true. I never really got into xLIB though -- started a single project with it, lost it, then gave up entirely. RecallPic isn't too bad though. It's probably one command I use in nearly every TI-BASIC game I make.

Well, I finished and submitted it. Here's my final screenshot:

This looks decent. Hope you end up high!