Firstly would like to apologize to Thomas and Geoff for not getting back to
this, ended up going out on p*ss other day and completely forgot I'd posted on
here, hehe (been gonna ask so many times over past year :) )...
anyways, Yahoo won't let me reply to your emails for some reason, so I'll just
have to post here.
Yeah Thomas, as Geoff said about calculating the value's of pixels myself, and
as you've found out, way to slow, I actually tried the same thing last year
with variables, i.e. just storing values in RAM myself and updating and seeking
them from their locations instead of using variables, thinking it would cut out
looking up the variables, but that too ended up slower :( Really am trying
every trick I can to make Basic be capable of the things I want, and must say
that the amount of months I spend polishing and speeding things up with tricks
It'd be quicker to learn MC, but as I've said I honestly wouldn't enjoy coding
then ;)
The thing you said about keeping a copy of the screen and having pixels to
check for what happens to the ball is a very good idea, already doing that with
a Screen 3 (as 1 and 2 are used for screen flipping), so that when there are
sprites on screen, I can still check for background colour and have movement
correct...
Did think about using a 4th say, as you suggest to perhaps make finding of the
pills a bit easier, but that would mean doing yet more more POINT test, and I
really need to be doing all the others anyway (L,R,T,B,B2,B3,B0,BR and C) as
basically the game is one big collision detection engine, everything from the
movement, background, enemy collision and pill finding is done using those 9
variables, and they all need to be done every frame :( , which leads me on to
what
geoff discussed.
Geoff, it's a crying shame that SAM or Masterbasic hadn't offered integers,
being a lamer, hehe, I wouldn't know how much time it would save, but anything
counts right :) I made sure with calculations to try and use integer only for
this game (apart from Y variable which sometimes isn't)...
Couldn't understand the MC you posted but I get what you mean about only
finding address of coordinate and then using offsets to speed up routine, I
notice there was very little code, were those few lines all it takes to find
the value's and move on to next point to check etc? ... I always imagine that
for any 1 command in basic it'll take perhaps 10-30 lines (or more) in MC to
accomplish the same thing.
The way it works at moment it can't just always check say the pixels to the
left if the ball is heading that way, as the way levels are drawn you might be
jumping down a curved passage way, so that each frame the ball is getting
projected out and away from anything it comes into contact with, and sometimes
that might be from all around the ball. I finally got it so that even though
you can get very close, the ball never lets you squeeze into the scenery, so
that makes it look nicer.
anyways, I don't really know what to do at the moment, but will try and post a
couple of vids up later so it can be seen how much it's slowed down with more
point checks... ;)
Thanks again lads, without being able to talk about coding I'd probs still be
across the road getting pi**ed EVERYday with 10 pissheads instead of enjoying
the SAM, lol *_+
Cal...
