Commander X16

Hi all,

One step forward, two steps back. It seems very much that This Is The Way for software development. Either that or I'm just inept ?

I got the save / load bank feature working, and added a creation tool so I can make maps within the software itself rather than handcoding with a hex-editor (which would be UGH!)

BUT, having started to draw the first map, a bug has manifested itself in the code that draws the layer 1 16x16 graphics over the hex backgrounds so now I've gotta go fix that before I can carry on.

*Sigh*  at least the map creation tool works!

Onwards and upwards...

How do you consistently wrote out Capitalized and non capitalized text to the screen? That looks so nice and readable!



Also - how do you manage and store what I imagine to be a lot of descriptive text? Would love to know this, as my games are mostly text heavy and, as you can see - I'm running into some "problems of scale".



As for the game - that looks great. I imagine it's going to get complicated, so maybe eliminate some labels and prompts for a Help Screen?  You can also fit either more text or more skill stats into the block below the backpack.



Definitely looking forward to seeing how this ends up.

7 hours ago, Starsickle said:

How do you consistently wrote out Capitalized and non capitalized text to the screen? That looks so nice and readable!



Also - how do you manage and store what I imagine to be a lot of descriptive text? Would love to know this, as my games are mostly text heavy and, as you can see - I'm running into some "problems of scale".



As for the game - that looks great. I imagine it's going to get complicated, so maybe eliminate some labels and prompts for a Help Screen?  You can also fit either more text or more skill stats into the block below the backpack.



Definitely looking forward to seeing how this ends up.

You can switch the charset to one, that has upper and lower cases in a single set. And then you can do that. 

Regarding the amount of text ... we have 512k of memory for that ... quite a huge amount of text. Paired with loading from disk you can have even more text. ..

But in reality ... look at what Elite did ... They generated the text from some phrases and put it together to look unique for each Planet etc. pp. so that is then generated text with pseudo random generators.

17 hours ago, Starsickle said:

How do you consistently wrote out Capitalized and non capitalized text to the screen? That looks so nice and readable!



Also - how do you manage and store what I imagine to be a lot of descriptive text? Would love to know this, as my games are mostly text heavy and, as you can see - I'm running into some "problems of scale".



As for the game - that looks great. I imagine it's going to get complicated, so maybe eliminate some labels and prompts for a Help Screen?  You can also fit either more text or more skill stats into the block below the backpack.



Definitely looking forward to seeing how this ends up.

Thanks. For my game in particular, I'm using a mixture of basic and assembly as a learning exercise to teach myself assembly. I'm using the CBM Prg Studio development environment which was designed for the C64/C128, but it works well enough for the majority of the time for the CX16. I'm putting my text into RAM banks.  I create each bank from within CBM Prg as an assembly page and then compile them individually as a .prg binary to be loaded into the game as and when needed.  CBM Prg is especially good at handling text in this way, as the CX16 uses identical PETSCII screencodes to the C64/128, so as long as I mark text as "text" type in the assembler, then the upper/lower case characters get transferred to binary with the correct petscii screencodes for the CX16, so I can just type exactly what I want to appear on screen into the assembler. If that makes sense?!?!  I'm on a learning curve on this one too, and it took me AGES to get my head round why my mixed upper/lower case text wasn't transferring correctly.  I've not written a word-wrap routine, I know how wide my text display window is, so I just manually wrap the text as I'm writing it in the assembler, screenshot below from CBM Prg studio, showing an assembly tab for one of the RAM banks:

I love your texts, they are very well written and really bring the right atmosphere : ).