New map generation is much much much faster now. From the above screenshots those were 20x10 maps; it now takes ~2 seconds to make a 20x10 map at 15mhz, ~5 seconds to make a 50x50 map, and ~12 seconds to make a 80x80 map; however this is untested at 6mhz. This is from creating a new, completely blank map though. As for saving and loading, I still need to work on faster methods for those, as they're still very lengthy. Maybe I could do multi-processing on the lists.. hmm.. (and by that I mean going through 4 elements in the list at once! scary..)
One thing I need to fix (and will help me a LOT in the future) is my multi-string method that I'm undoubtfully not the first to do. If you've ever tried to make a 4-way scroller before but experienced a problem with scrolling being REALLY slow the further you got into the string, why not break the string into smaller strings?
With some smart coding you could make it check the position and if you go past a string's limit, just stop at a point and continue displaying with the other string. This could probably done pretty easily with 4 blocks of similar code, maybe even more complicated and faster optimized code could do it.
Some plans for the editor:
-"Exploration" mode, where you can walk around in the map with a virtual character, no events or map changing included however, as those might end up being hard-coded things.
-Kinda iffy on whether I'll do this or not, but maybe a solid/non solid editor where you can change what you can walk over and what you can't. I might have it hardcoded anyways though. Even if I didn't it'd probably be a global setting so it'd affect all maps. In any case the default I might discuss with you guys on a mass listing of all the tiles.
-Another iffy but more likely: window size modifier so if you wanted the editor to scroll faster at the loss of the viewspace, you could do so.
-Before getting straight into the editor you'd be at a screen where you can change the number of the map you'll be editing and whether you're loading or creating a new one.
-Floodfill for the entire map, if you wanted to make the entire map one tile you could do it with this press of a button. Once you press the button it'll ask if you wish to continue with the action, and if you press Y for Yes, it will. Good when you want to start the map over, fill it with land, or fill it with water, etc.
-And uhh other stuff that I forgot ...
Now if anyone knows of better ways to do this stuff, I'd love to hear some tips!
Oh yeah let's answer some questions and stuff!
katmaster: I don't really understand what you're asking..
spengo: Erm, symbols? You mean the odd characters that represent mathematical stuff? Well, not necessarily.. it depends.
Jim: Thanks, I'll probably be working on this longer than I thought
Edit: The best I can get out of pure TI-BASIC is 174 different characters. The remaining 82 are reserved and cannot be used in BASIC unless you use asm. At least, from what I know.
Now as for what the accented letters could be used for.. on the calc Ä kinda looks like a chair, and Î *really* looks like a standing torch. Other ones are questionable..
To get the ASCII file I made that can be used without problems in pure TI-BASIC,
get it here (and rename to .8xp if it's .txt because my userspace is being really, really weird) so you can see what it looks like on-calc. Please give me recommendations on which ones I should use and which ones you think have no purpose.
