From ages long past, I created 2 little kits meant to help BASIC programmers work with moving a character around a screen between map segments, and then one to show off how to make a scrolling map style of game. These can be found here (Surprisingly not on Cemetech, will have to fix that at some point):

https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/364/36409.html (Loads map screen by screen)

https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/403/40345.html (Loads a large map, map scrolls around character like Pokemon Red/Blue)

I realized with the newer calculators, these projects don't really fit, due to the much wider screen size that our newer tech has. So my intentions (read: as I have the time and energy) are to see about making these work on the CE, either via full screen or partial screen. Mostly out of idle curiosity to see how it will work and look, but also to get myself back to programming something that I should be mildly confident in building.

This is a great idea tifreak! How long do you think it will take to get some things ported over?

I think the biggest obstacle is creating maps to take advantage of the larger screen. The scrolling screen of RPGSK2 pads the sides a bit so it doesn't error out, so I might try to simply redo the map display a bit so it only takes up a portion of the screen space first. Otherwise, it will drastically increase the map data, as we are going from an 8x16 screen to a 10x26. From there, it shouldn't be too hard to handle hit detection/walking, depending if I create new map data or just use the older data. Plenty of ways one can take this

I think the windowed map makes a lot of sense here. With the bigger screen, people will likely want to use a portion of it for UI stuff, so showing right away how to handle windowing would be useful--and full-screen is just a special case of windowed anyway.

Indeed, UI stuff was a consideration as well. And with the CE's processor being faster, it might not have too much lag of display with splitting up the string data to show in a smaller area That's what I'm hoping to test out, see what does better!

https://x.com/tifreak8x/status/1902756059292258382

Sadly don't have easy access to my server space to upload pictures, I need to find a good source that can just post pictures from..

Anyways, down time at work, giving me some time to play with making the more static map/engine. I realized after posting I put marks where there shouldn't be. Fixed now. Using a spreadsheet with column widths of .17" seems to work decently well as a replacement of grid paper to map out.. Maps.

Another update, we had some big down time at work today, decided to get some solid progress going for this project.

Added in 4 panels of map data
Added in basic walking mechanics around the screen

Still needs moving map panels
Still needs map object interactions

https://x.com/tifreak8x/status/1914418287280083135

Disappointingly, the animated screenshot I made doesn't show up on twitter properly, possibly because it's png? Will work on that this evening, if I remember.

Still haven't found a good image hosting site yet.

Hit another quiet patch at work, managed to re-write the code for movement and screen shift transition. I toyed with the idea of having the screens slide, but that seems like a lot of un-needed work out of a BASIC template project.

Things remaining:

"Replace" the bridge behind character as it moves.
Add interactions to the map.