Blaster Master!

[Ranman]

My only single piece of criticism is that I think when you are in the air, the wheels should move down instead of the hull moving up.  Other than that however, this is looking undeniably epic!  *Especially* the sprites

/\true, true. i'll have to change that when i redo the sprites

I don't think you would have to redo the sprites to do what Builderboy is asking... simply draw the current sprite with the y position incremented by 1.

Looks absolutely outstanding schmibs!

[Builderboy]

It might be tricky if the wheels are already at the bottom of the sprite though

[Ranman]

It might be tricky if the wheels are already at the bottom of the sprite though

Well... it would be a special case. Just have a flag called "in_air" (or something like that). If the car is in the air, set the flag to true. Then, when drawing the screen, if the flag is true simply add 1 to the y position.

[Builderboy]

yeah.  Or if he wanted, he could change the on-ground sprite to have the wheels one pixel in the air, and then go and change the bounding box, but that sounds a bit excessive

[Ranman]

yeah.  Or if he wanted, he could change the on-ground sprite to have the wheels one pixel in the air, and then go and change the bounding box, but that sounds a bit excessive

I was trying to think of a way he would not have to change the sprites. However... if modifying the sprites is trivial, then that may be the all-around best way to go.

[shmibs]

modifying the sprites is anything but trivial(as i explained in my first post )
however, i'm going to be revising them as it is, so i may as well go ahead and hard code (err... hard-draw?) the difference instead of adding another special case and bogging down the engine.
thanks for the encouragement, ranman!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Woah that's incredible! I love the look so far and I'm glad to see yet one more classic ported to calculators. I hope to see this finished. WIll it use the same levels as on the NES or will it be a new game?

[shmibs]

the level sets, gameplay, etc will be similar to the original game but not exactly the same, as some things just wouldn't be practical.
the jet fuel not being refilled by items dropped by enemies, for instance, and the map's being in smaller room chunks instead of the massive, contiguous maps of the original. i still intend to add in the overhead map portions and the bosses that need to be defeated in order to upgrade the tank, though. oh, and there will be fewer maps than are in the original game, because the sizes i'll be working with are massive enough as it is. probably just the first three (forest-y place, castle, and futuristic space station).
at the moment(after seeing squidget's sandland tilemapper), though, it's obvious that i still have some optimising to do.

[shmibs]

ok, a quick update. last night i managed to shave another 170 bytes off of the engine and then started testing out some variable length list things which will be used for projectiles and enemies. i'm pretty sure i can get this to work eventually, but i know this type of thing has been done before so i was wondering:
can anyone refer me to an open source project with examples of this? i know i'm just being lazy, but if it isn't too much trouble...

[squidgetx]

Sounds cool. Good luck. Unfortunately, I don't really have too much experience with variable length arrays. Didn't your dust toy use one though?

[agent84]

whoa.  cool looking project dude, keep it up!

[shmibs]

in the dust toy i cheated and used a fixed length array into which particles were inserted at random (if the space wasn't already occupied, that is). i actually like the way that turned out, though, as it made the particle movements less uniform and more realistic.
however, after a bit of work, i think i now have a system for dealing with bullets:

there definitely won't be this many bullets on the screen at a time, but i figured: why not?

now on to the hard part: scripting enemy movements and determining when they have been struck in order to inflict damage and make bullets disappear simultaneously 

[ztrumpet]

Looking good, shmibs.
I like the player's sprite in that!

[DJ Omnimaga]

That looks great. I like the bullets too.

[Runer112]

I don't know if you did this for debugging purposes or just for the effect, but you may not want to store the bullet data in L₆. I can see it at the top of the screen.

But it looks good!