This thread is being posted to confirm that I am entering this competition.

The program that I will likely enter is called piTrain, a project I worked on around the fourteenth of March, but was never really finished. Since I have more knowledge of TI-BASIC now, I thought I would enter in my first Cemetech competition.

piTrain is a rather simple program that teaches you the digits of pi five at a time, all the way up until 255. Then, in the challenge mode, you enter in as many digits as you can without a mistake. Finally, in the leader boards, it just displays the top few scores of the challenge mode.

I thought that for this contest I would spruce up this not-too-old project to meet with my current better idea of how to function a calculator. I had actually worked with jonbush on a lot of this project, but I think in the process of making this project, I will rewrite the entire program from scratch.

For an extra challenge, I will be doing all of the programming for this game on the calculator, as I am more used to that than using the (superior) SourceCoder development environment.

Day 2 Progress:

Made the menu look nice, instead of the cruddy menu command. Changed some of trainer mode.

I won't be able to work on it tomorrow, as July 2 is my birthday.

Sounds cool, and happy birthday! I have been looking for a good pi program and have not found many I liked. Will there be anything else train-themed in the game besides the name?

Yes, there will be, but I'm keeping that a secret for now.

Hint: I figured out how to make quick time events using For( loops for getKey, so you have a limited window to use it.

Also, I might not have enough time to work on the project! It might not be entered, but I don't want to be certain yet.

I just had a great idea. When my new CE comes in the mail, my project could be porting the forever-unfinished piTrain to the CE! It would be a lot easier than what I have in mind right now anyways, and my only problem might be that my CE might not come in the mail in time for the contest.

Well let's hope it does, I have a CE and I'm really interested in Pi Train! Kinda felt my heart drop when you mentioned "cruddy menu command" because...I'm kinda working on a game relying heavily on Menu( ^^'

Haha. Actually, I've made a really nice looking menu that you can use for anything, really. The first program I made, it's just a simple thing where you move the little cursor (a plot square) over the six menu options, with a title over it. It looks a lot better than the normal Menu( command. Then, I changed it for a different menu where there's three icons, and the left and right arrow keys move a box for your selection. I'll probably use that for this new project, after learning to work more with the larger window.

Mini-update: The CE is coming by 8pm EST tomorrow, but hopefully before that. The postal service is garbage and always works out of my favor.

Here's the logo for piTrainCE:

I think it turned out quite nicely.
It looks a little bit better on the calculator itself.

Just for comparison purposes, this is the original image:

Looking pretty nice! Did you make that logo yourself? You may want to make the windows bluer though.

I did make the logo myself! Took me about 3 hours. The train was adapted from a stock image.
I don't mind the windows, really. I think it looks fine.

That looks very cool. Good job.

I'm trying to decide on a graphic for the selection in the main menu. The menu is already written. It looks similar to the menu in PuzzPack, with four boxes showing the different parts of the program. Since I have access to color, I thought that I would have the options that weren't selected in black and white, and the option that is selected in color.

My question is: is there an efficient way to fill in a closed shape with color, even if that were a complex shape?

Sure. You have two options: not fill it in, and just draw over that graphic with its "selected" version; or you could use a mask to control how a color is blitted onto that graphic. The nice thing about using a mask is that the alpha can be an 8-bit bitmap which is a nice format to put in VRAM.

The first option seems wasteful; I assume you're talking about using picture variables to draw it in its "selected" state, but then hat would require 5 picture variables just for the menu.

The second option confuses me. Is using sprites and masks possible in pure BASIC?

Sadly, there is not an easy and efficient way to fill shapes in TI-BASIC, though Im not 100% sure. You're best option might be to just make an image for the menu. If the shape isn't too complex, you could potentially use loops, lists, and matrices to draw stuff.

EDIT: for future reference, this is a TI-BASIC project.

Take a look at this post.

Alright, turns out a flood fill algorithm would be rather abysmally slow. So, I just went with my original plan: boxes around the words.

Oh, I didn't see that the project was in TI-BASIC. Filling shapes will be too expensive. Actually, I'm not quite sure what isn't too expensive aside from simple calculations.

Hm, I wonder: What's the RGB/HSV (or similar method of defining colors) for the fifteen colors on the CE? It would help me as I could control exactly which colors show up when translating a PNG image to an 8CI image.