Turn Based RTS hybrid

[LolBbq]

No, I'm not trying to kill my own words. I want to make a game which has a simple concept yet provides near endless possibilities. It's a turn based war game where you are the supreme commander of your "pixel army". You build a base (which is all part of the turn based part of the game), raise armies, and create command trees (generals, brig. general, etc.). You don't actually see any of your soldiers in the turn based part, you only see yourself as a commander that goes around marauding. You then find enemies (still part of the turn based system), and once you engage battle, it becomes an RTS, where you can take individual control of your army. What inspired me to do this was the American Civil War section we learned in history class, and I loved the ingenious tactics that Grant and Lee used in many of the battles. So anyways, rate or hate my idea, and smack me up if I'm drifting away from reality and that programming this thing is near impossible on any TI calcs. :biggrin:

Edit: Also, I want to know some options for sprites. The soldiers are obviously pixels (using variations by adding the extra syntax at the end of the command pt-on(). The buildings and scenery are the things I'm having trouble with. I could store the coords for all the pts in a list and draw them from that, but that's slow since it requires the use of a For( loop. I've heard about these text sprites, I have a faint idea of how they work (are they formed when you overlap text that is shifted a tiny bit?). xLib is an obvious solution, but I want to stay away from it since it's a big asthetics issue when it comes to if the user actually has xLib installed or not. I don't think anyone likes the nasty argument error when you don't have xLib installed. I would also like some introduction on an RTS engine, mainly how to incorporate so many options into a single loop and not lose any speed. Meh, I don't know what I'm talking about.

[Sage Orator]

Sounds interesting and hopefully different than most games.

Are you willing to recall pics? Otherwise you could just hard code it. I think it's possible to do.

[LolBbq]

Hardcoding would be my option. It would be better than making the user load pics and cause confusion.

[Sage Orator]

I can't help you with text sprites but here is a tutorial from Axcho. Sprite tutorial

[LolBbq]

Ooo...I like the idea of Plot Sprites. It is PIXEL soldiers, right? So, any explanation on these plot sprites and how to use them (I know about PlotX(Scatter, etc..)?

[Sage Orator]

[LolBbq]

O cool, thanks. =D

[LolBbq]

Bump, I'm guessing I should use xLib for tilemapping (see Experimental Mapping in TI-BASIC forum). Does anyone wanna tell me how to use it, and yes, I have checked the ReadMe for xLib but no dice on understanding that. Could someone just comprehensibly explain it to me?