Pokemon TI

[ztrumpet]

Wow, looks great!
Is it possible to speed it up slightly, so that there is no white screen (caused by the speed reduction, therefore lack of greyscale)?

[FinaleTI]

The white screen is actually the real(0 command at work because without clearing the screen, it hangs at the last layer for a second, and I felt the temporary clear looked better, but I'll keep trying to find a different method of doing this.

[GloryMXE7]

use real(0,0 instead it still clears the screen but does not update the screen.

[FinaleTI]

real(0,0 still causes it to hang at black and white temporarily, leaving me with the same problem I had before. Not updating the screen makes it the same as if I hadn't used the command at all because at the beginning of the loop, it uses the overwrite sprite function without updating the screen to update the tile outlines.
So it looks like I may have to redesign my program layout in order to get it to function the way I want.
If anyone has a suggestion on how I would lay out my program, please let me know. I have an idea, but I'm not sure how well it would work.

[DarkerLine]

You could do roughly the following: say the two layers are stored in Pic1 and Pic2. When going to a new screen, you currently probably do something along the lines of the following: clear screen, draw first layer without updating, store to Pic1, draw second layer without updating, store to Pic2. Instead, you could do the following:

For each tile
draw first layer of tile without updating
store to Pic3
cycle the greyscale for a bit
restore Pic3 without updating
End

and the same for the second layer in Pic4. Then copy Pic3 and Pic4 to Pic1 and Pic2 and proceed normally.

Also, since drawing a new screen seems to be expensive, you could have separate screens to walk around on instead of having the screen be centered on the character.

[FinaleTI]

I've been playing with my code and I have scrolling without a character working near flawlessly.
The screen no longer temporarily clears and scrolling is fast and smooth, but when I try to have it include the character at the center, when you move it hangs at the last frame for a second, so I have to look at a different way of doing it again.

@Darkerline: Actually in past attempts, I've tried mapping routines in which I draw the map, store to a pic and repeat, then loop through the pics, but it would lag, however by just looping through the map command, it is much quicker and doesn't require excess pictures.

[ztrumpet]

Awesome! Good luck!

[Art_of_camelot]

I gave the "pallet map" program provided on the previous page a try, here's my feedback:
Grayscale looks really nice. The screen flickers when you move, but in a previous comment it says you fixed that? Speed is also great (I tried it in Wabbit on my TI-83+SE)
I tried to send it to my calc to test on acutal hardware, but TI Conncet seems to hate hacked pictures, and thus won't send them. I know grouping files has previously been an issue, but that did not seem to be a problem for me.
[attachment=3079:Pallet_map.gif]
*edit* Added a less flickery screenie.

[AMkiller]

looks good! nice job!
you could use masked sprites to aviod the white border around the character

[ztrumpet]

Excellent! I had forgotten how incredible this looks. Great job! The only thing I'd reccomend is using masked sprites: http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com/xlib:masked-sprites
It looks awesome!

[FinaleTI]

@ztrumpet and AMKiller - The reason I don't use masked sprites is because I update the screen so many times, it would most likely slow it down or require each screen be stored to a pic. Also, in order to keep the character's gray synced with the map, I actually store the character to the map and restore the map whenever you move. Even with my new method, it would still be hard to implement masked sprites.

@Art_of_camelot - Scrolling now no longer clears the screen, but I have yet to successfully reimplement character movement. And thanks for the less flickery screenie. It makes appear like it does on hardware.

[ztrumpet]

[FinaleTI]

I thought of that at one point, but the problem is that Celtic's matrix mapping command only works with up to three pictures and I was barely able to squish all the Pallet Town tiles into those three pics. By three pics, I mean 3 pics per layer, so there are currently about 9-12 pics just for the Pallet Town tiles. If Iambian could change this or stringtile allows for more than three, it might be possible, but for now it isn't. In addition, it would make movement slower because the character sprite it updated with would not only have to be checked for direction, but also what tile the character is on. I probably will be playing with stringtile regardless of whether or not it supports more pics, just so I'm not dependent on memory heavy matrices for mapping. Either that or I'd have to find a working version of strtoMat because the version in the Omnimaga downloads section crashes whenever I try to use it.

[Iambian]

[kinkoa]

looks nice keep at it and it could be a great game also your link doesnt work for your screenshot

[tr1p1ea]

[FinaleTI]

After doubling checking with a monochrome map, tiles after the third pic only seemed to glitch because they were missing a layer it seems.
The routine does extend past three pics, the tiles just appeared to glitch because they were one layer ahead of what they should have been.

[ztrumpet]

[FinaleTI]

I will definitely consider your idea now, especially since the glitch was found and my mapping engine is almost reworked.

[tr1p1ea]

Just wondering if you were going to be able to incorporate a walking animation? Also do you have an updated screenshot? .