How should I proceed with Skyrim CE?
C Toolchain
 50%  [ 5 ]
Pure BASIC
 50%  [ 5 ]
Hybrid BASIC
 0%  [ 0 ]
Other (please post)
 0%  [ 0 ]
Total Votes : 10

Hey everyone. Been a minute, hasn't it? And what better time to revive this thread than the strangest time of all.

To cut to the chase, and avoid belaboring you with some poor justification of my lack of quarantine productivity: I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I need some community assistance in helping me out of it. Just a few days ago, TI announced they would remove custom ASM capabilities from all future CE OS's. A tragic though at least partly justified decision that would not seem to affect this BASIC project at all, until I considered the following: Skyrim CE is not very interesting.

I say this from the perspective of the average player; compared to plethora of games made via the C toolchain, a BASIC game with ASCII graphics and slow load times is a bore, with not much to show for itself other than the fact that it exists as all, as a sort of "proof of concept" of the capabilities of BASIC. With this in mind, I started learning the toolchain a few months back, with a year of university courses in C++ to help. It was pretty slow-going, but I was pretty confident that once I get familiar with gfx and the rest of the toolchain, production speed and quality will improve. That was, until...

...the news. Though I had made little progress on the C version, it was still a blow to the chest. Why make a game that, without an emulator or OS rollback, nobody can play? This drew me back to completing the game in BASIC, but there's still an issue: Skyrim CE uses ASM hex codes. In fact, it uses precisely two subprograms: one for archiving, and one for unarchiving custom lists used to store entity and region data. With the removal of ASM support (and the fact that Asm84CEPrgm is disabled on many calcs already), this makes Skyrim CE once again effectively dead in the water (as if it already wasn't...).

So, I have three options (really only two), and I'd love to get some input on them:

    C Toolchain: Adapt all of my progress thus far into C and proceed. The game will take much longer to finish as of now, but quality per hour should also be increased, not to mention additional features such as tilemaps and other graphical elements otherwise unthinkable in BASIC. The major downside is that its appeal to the average player will be significantly reduced due to the ASM removal.

    Pure BASIC: Remove the ASM hex codes from the game as it is, and replace them with (massive) look-up tables. I'll have to adapt and probably reduce the amount of data I can access and store, but the game will become entirely BASIC, and thus playable into the foreseeable future. The source code will also be fairly easy for novice programmers to read into and mess with on-calc, and a demonstration of what BASIC can accomplish (a minor benefit, but one I quite like).

    Hybrid BASIC: Just continue as is, with BASIC and hex codes. I'm hesitant to continue with this option, given how it falters in both quality and accessibility, but it's the least effort for me on the front end (not that my effort has been particularly impressive thus far anyway...).


None of them are ideal given the current circumstances, but I lean toward Option #2 at the moment. I'm a BASIC programmer foremost, and I think a quality product is still possible even without the toolchain. But, then again, I might be worrying about the ASM removal too much, and proceeding in C is just the obvious answer. I don't know. So, if you could, provide any feedback you've got or just answer the poll. I don't want Skyrim CE to die, but to be frank it's nearly on its last breath.
  
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