For the past almost 2 years, I have been trying to create a game in TI-BASIC. A space simulator of sorts. You explore, trade, and combat enemies in an infinite procedurally generated world. I have written, scrapped, completely from scratch for 6 times now, mostly due to dissatisfaction. However, I may have finally arrived at something I like, and have made a decision to stick to what I have and quit rewriting from scratch.

Allow me to introduce Myriadas, A fully 3D game written purely in TI-BASIC without any libraries for the TI-84 Plus CE. Explore an infinite space filled with planets and danger, trade with allies, reach the highest rank and become a respected commander!

Yes, I have big plans for this game. I do plan to deliver on what I said above, as I have been trying again and again for a little less than two years at this point, but please do not blame me if I do not succeed. If I do indeed succeed in finishing this, then I'll be very proud of this project, considering what it is.

Right now, I can say that I have finished: player movement, planet rendering, visual star-field (for a visual cue on movement), radar rendering, and he ability to crash into a planet, with infrastructure to add enemies and sector navigation. It runs at a fairly playable speed actually but I must push it even more in order to add important features that may slow the main loop down.

I don't know when the next update post will be, unfortunately. I may occasionally send a screenshot or video either on #cemetech or #ti-basic on the Cemetech Discord server, as I have before.

Yes, I know it's April Fools today, but no, this is actually a real thing I'm working on. This is not a satire.

Excited to see it!

A little bit of screenshots :)

I cant see the pictures...

My god... is this something in the spirit of ELITE? 'Cause it's really cool...
Nice seeing this, especially in Ti-Basic!

Thanks! And yes, some things are indeed inspired by Elite (ship movement control scheme for example, and general graphics direction)

However, I have not played much Elite, and much of the inspiration for the game mechanics comes from another game, Vendetta Online, like navigation system, market model, and other stuff.

I just want to note now that development on this project will be very slow. I will try to update this thread with screenshots and content updates every now and then but it may be a long while until I can actually release something in a playable state, but I am trying to do my best with this game, as I have been trying since I began this project. I hope you understand.

You can now dock your ship on a planet by meeting specific conditions in order to not crash, and an interface when you land. I will try to provide some screenshots in a few hours. (EDIT: no, in a few days. Busy school week.)

I also revamped the title screen, with the title logo being a bitmap sprite now rather than standard text

My question is, how are you not dying coding this in TiBasic? Id imagine that variables would be a problem since if I recall correctly you only get 26 (every letter of the alphabet) among other things...

That's because a lot of data (player position, ship data, universe data) is actually in lists, while only temporary intermediate numbers for a specific thing are given a variable (e.g. ship distance to planet, rotation delta, etc)

Yes, coding this in BASIC is still painful, but I like it :)

This looks really cool!

EYE CANDY!!! Vα.2

I would love to see a published beta release :)

Maybe it can be 'welcome to... planet!' instead of plain 'welcome!'. Or is that not a priority now?

That will be when I add the name generator :)

Possibly the hosting site is blocked on your network. Are you at a school or workplace?

Should i share early builds of Myriadas or only do it later on or only make it public on full release? I am looking for opinions on both this question, and the actual game when it is in a testable state and (if) I decide to release an early version. Thank you for your responses in advance.

It depends on if there are people interested in going through the Ti-BASIC code and giving feedback. This is my first time seeing this, and it looks really good for BASIC! I'm always thrilled to see people working within TI-BASIC to code complex graphical games.

You should really release this in beta. That way, the entire community can bug test for you! Its very cool, also.

Alrighty then! A github repository now exists at https://github.com/MostafaMortada/myriadas .
Of course, still in alpha release, it'll be a while until I can label it beta, so be warned, very incomplete (obviously)

EDIT: Apparently I uploaded the wrong ZMYRDS00.8xp file to the repo. It's fixed now. If you downloaded the repo before this edit, please do so again.