This is the new Event engine, it uses lists to tell the NPC and Char where to go. I could totally make the game out of just this... just let the players suffer through it playing all by itself... BWHAHAHAhahaha... *cough-hack*

Anyways..

These show that you can enter either of the two * and still make it to the door. I still have a couple things to add. Like 1, make it so that you don't force Prof. Oak up the front of his lab, and 2, see about adding in the door/stair detection at the end of the loop, so that it actually will see it.

excellent work tifreak!!!!

Ok, I updated the engine slightly. It now will no longer flash if the list element is 0 that it is reading, like it did before hand. The reason for this is I was wanting it to skip that loop through, and just walk to the next, but it was refreshing the screen when it did that. Now it sees if W=0, then increases to the next list element and restores to W, and checks that.

Also, you will no longer push Oak up the front of his lab. I fixed this by adding a bit to the display of the NPC output(. It now checks to see if Q is 1, if it is, it will display the NPC, if it is not, it won't. Setting W to 25 causes the NPC to no longer display. I am not sure, at this point, if I will need to add W=26 and make it redisplay the NPC. I might though... We shall see.

I don't think I need a new screenshot up yet, not until I make it so you can enter the buildings and such.

This shows some of the fixes I have employed.

1) It no longer flashes and sits there, when it sees a list element is 0, it now just goes right to the next list element.
2) Prof Oak is no longer pushed up the front of his lab
3) It now recognizes going into doors.

I am not happy that it automatically kicks you up 1 space above the door from where you should start. I am working on a way to make it work correctly, but as of this moment, I do not have a solution. I also do not like the fact that Gary walks in, as he is supposed to be there when you show up, however... I don't want to make separate maps for the lab...

As always, very cool. I'm so glad to see that this is still going strong.

I'm wondering, though, why didn't you use the new ASM sprite drawing program to draw the Prof. Oak image?
Also, (sorry if this may have been asked before) will we be able to use omnicalc fonts with the final PP to give those text based graphics the authentic pokemon look?

Finally, is the 9% complete description of PP in your signature still accurate? The game seems pretty well along to me...

Well, the ASM program assumes 2 things with the sprites.

1) It is going to encounter the character 'G' to kick it down a row, and reset the column.

2) If it does not see 'G', it will know the sprite is 32 pixels wide

Since the NPC sprites are 16x16, they would not work. I am not really worried about it, as they don't take long to jump up there, and I still get to use a basic sprite displayer that a bit of time went into making.

As to omnicalc... I honestly don't know. I really, really don't. I guess if someone wanted to take the time and replace each one of them with the graphics and sent them to me, I would consider it. I just had bad experiences with such applications personally, so I don't use them on my project calcs. Too much of a chance of loosing progress, and killing projects. (Just look at Age of Darkness Revenge)

As to % complete, it is close, might be 10% now. There is still a massive amount of data that needs to be put in, and many routines that needs to be created.

And thanks for watchin my project and the kind words.

I wouldn't mind making the Omnicalc font, but I'll need to know what each character is used for.
I think that using Omnicalc is a very good idea, it will make the *future* pokemon game even more popular.

The only problem being is that it would be required to have omnicalc turn it off when you go to display text for battles and dialogue. I am unsure omnicalc can do that, since I have not used that function of it before.

Anyways, hoping to finish up at least the dialogue of Gary and Oak by tonight, and then try to make the necessary modifications to the engine and parts of the code to make you not able to go any further to a point... We shall see how that works...

Omnicalc can't do that, so you'll have to use characters for the map that aren't used in dialogs and texts...

doesn't Omnicalc only affect the large font anyway?

That's correct, it only affects the large font on the home screen. Large font on the graph screen is unaffected.

/me points at the latest screenshots

I have text on the homescreen too...

Not entirely sure how you would pull that off at that point...

Hmm... I'd also consider working on the font, provided I could be provided a list of all the characters used and what they are used for.

My idea for displaying text-text and graphic-text simultaneously on the homescreen involves using the mathematical tokens and characters for the graphics, leaving the actual text characters (26 uppercase and 26 lowercase, 10 digits, and a handful of punctuation) free for normal use.

*Goes to look up specifics*

Ok. Got it. Omnicalc fonts have space for 256 characters, 242 of which are normally used by Ti's default font. The characters that apply to letters and numbers seem to correspond to regular ascii indexes (eg. A = 65), and everything over 131 seems to be unnecessary for displaying normal text.

This seems to mean that it would be simple to replace uncommonly used characters with pokemon sprites and leave the alphanumeric characters unaffected.

So, tifreak, how difficult would it be to change out all the graphic-text you have now to correspond with different, replaceable characters? (That is, if I (or someone else) created a new font that used the upper character space for the replacements.)

You would have to go through each and every map segment and change the characters one by one, and the maps are quite huge.

Ugh. You mean you don't store each map tile as a number (1 for empty, 2 for grass, 3 for wall, etc), you store the character directly?

That makes things a little more complicated... But I guess it gives a boost in speed when drawing the map.

Ok, what about using sourcecoder or Ti Connect to edit the map files on a computer so you can use find and replace copy paste?
Could you send me a sample of one of those map files so I could see how difficult or easy it would be? (Sourcecoder has problems with certain tokens, for example, and it would be interesting to see how well this could be avoided.)

Yeah, they are strings. As to having anything you could view them in, you would have to do it on calc, as there is no program, on internet or PC, to view the correct characters.

AS to map files:

http://tifreakware.net/tifreak8x/pokemon/files/pokepur0.1.6.zip

just look in the files called ZMA#

(Once again) Ugh. You're right. Neither graph link nor sourcecoder works. I haven't completely run out of ideas yet, though. I think I might try identifying the tokens for the characters I need in a hex editor, and then replacing the tokens I want to replace with those directly.

I have, however, produced at least a portion of the sprites as an omnicalc font, so I'm definitely not giving up after doing all that work. I hope you haven't created more map files than the two that you posted, because I might just resort to going through it all manually.

This begs the question, however: Do you do all the coding directly on calc? (this has probably been asked before...)

Yes, all coding is done on calc, so I can test immediately. And because a lot of those tokens are not available otherwise.

Also, those are not the only maps... These are the only ones I have made thus far. I think prgm ZIA stores the interior maps... I have not looked in to those for a while so I am not sure on that. So, basically what you have is mappage from Pallet to Veridian forest, but not the forest.

The reason I asked is because if I had to make one or two map files over again to get you to use them, and then get you to continue to using the new characters for all the maps you make in the future, that wouldn't be nearly as bad as regenerating all the maps by hand with the new characters.

Of course, the fact that it can't all be done automatically, as I had hoped, means that you probably don't want to use it at all, to avoid your program being dependent on omnicalc and a font file to look nice.

Since my work on getting my two-byte token extended characters to replace your single-byte alphanumeric characters is going nowhere fast (hex editor didn't work because of the byte amount difference), I'm considering using single-byte token characters, which are normally accessible enough to be present in sourcecoder or graph link.
If this works, it will save the entire idea, because it means all your maps can easily be converted to use the new font, and you won't ever even have to worry about changing the way you code anything. (Anyone who wants the omnicalc version can just download the converted maps, or convert them themselves.)

For this to be successful, however, I need to know which key-press accessible characters you never plan on using in-text.
Right now, I have 15 new sprites, and I figure there may be as many as twice that much necessary to complete the set. A few of those, however, correspond to characters that won't have to be changed anyway, like the accented 'I' that is Ash, or the pi s that are everyone else. Therefore, I can probably finish this out with 20 or so characters reserved for sprite use.

So, how about that list?
To start, can I use:
1. =
2. !=
3. >
4. >=
5. <
6. <=
7. degree sign
8. radian sign
9. [
10. ]
11. {
12. }
13. +
14. - (either of the minus signs; I figure you only need one to represent dashes in text)
15. *
16. ^

And of course the three accented 'I's for Ash, and the pi for everyone else.

That makes twenty easily accessible characters that I should be able to use with sourcecoder or graph link, and that shouldn't conflict with the normal game text.*

*Can you confirm that last part?

Well, the = is ledges.. and the * is grass... and they don't get used in text.

The only thing with Ash is that the one accented I is used both for up and down movement. Not sure how one would go about working with that.

And if you were to get this to be workable, I would not utilize it immediately. It would be its own separate version. I have too much work invested into this to have an app appear on my calc, and then I start running into random RAM clears again losing progress. At the moment, I am most concerned with getting functional things going, then after wards, getting things prettied up.