May I take the opportunity to wish everyone on this list a Merry Christmas.
I have been trying to write what I thought would be a simple point and shoot game in BASIC using Easyptr. The mouse controls a pointer which shoots at the moving target using a routine similar to the much simplifed code below which I hope will adequately explain what I am trying and failing to achieve OUTLN #0 REPeat loop RDPT #0, tvec%,xpos%,ypos%,time% IF mouse button down and pointer position is same as target hit routine, score etc END IF move target position (simple animation only) END REP loop Don’t worry about the undefined variables in the RDPT command, I just omitted them to keep the skeleton program short. tvec% is just the termination vector, xpos% and ypos% are pointer position set and return values and time% is a timeout (0 or other low value). The problem is unexpected, but I think I see why it’s happening and I need to find a different way of writing this. The pointer appears during the RDPT command (which reads the keyboard with either zero timeout or very short timeout as a simple speed control mechanism) and disappears between the RDPT command and the end of the loop, so the pointer flashes a lot. In fact with a timeout of zero or close to zero the pointer doesn’t appear at all (presumably loop iteration is faster on QPC2 than the screen refresh can keep up with). The pointer arrow is seen on screen far less than it is invisible. What I need to achieve of course is a steady pointer which doesn’t flash on and off so irritatingly. I have considered and tried: 1. A pointer of 0x0 pixels in size 2. A transparent pointer and in both cases keep reading pointer position and draw my own little cross-hair pointer at that position in place of the system pointer. In all cases it either fails completely with no error message or even drawing my own pointer is very jerky and doesn’t really keep up with pointer movement which as you can imagine in a game like this can be pretty quick at times. Anyone got any more ideas as to how I might go about this in a different way perhaps? Or what I might be doing wrong? The game itself is basically a set of jack-in-the-boxes popping up in random places which you have to “splat” with the pointer to hit as many as you can in half a minute. Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
