Escheron: Shadow over Ragnoth

[jsj795]

What do you mean by "going foreward"?
*Ztrumpet dosn't get simple termanology...

I think it means when you select something in inventory or something, the cursor is always at the top, but when you deselect (or leave the specific item menu), the cursor on the inventory menu is at the place where you were

i don't know if i confused even more o.O and iambian, correct me if im wrong^^

[DJ Omnimaga]

Final Fantasy games often had an option letting the user set the cursor to memory or fixed position. At fixed position the cursor would go back to first menu choice regardless of if you went forward or backwards in menus, while memory had its position remembered no matter what.

[Iambian]

Finished up with the equip menu. Also started working on the status menu. For your convenience, you can access the status menu right from the equip menu by using the DEL key as sort of a shortcut. Because you know... you want to see the immediate effect of what you equipped, right?

The empty space in the status menu is where a large portrait is going to be going. I haven't really put that stuff in yet.

On another note, the app has 5.6KB collectively remaining in its 4 pages. I may actually have to expand the app to 80KB to get myself another 16KB.

[Hot_Dog]

This is turning out better and better all the time!

[ztrumpet]

This looks very nice! Great job!

[Art_of_camelot]

This looks really nice. I'm a bit surprised that you're running that low on space already, but another 16kb isn't really that much of a concern as far as size goes. It is an RPG after all. =D

[DJ Omnimaga]

Wow nice so far , and I don't mind 80 KB app, or even 96 for that matter. With everything included in the game it will be worth the space it takes IMHO.

Because you know... you want to see the immediate effect of what you equipped, right?

Yup, I really hated how FFIV didn't do that. It was trial and error to equip anything in this game. Same to buy stuff, you would get ripped at many shops because of idiot sellers selling weaker equipment than previous shop for more. I got more frustrated at buying stuff than fighting hard bosses in this game.

[ztrumpet]

Oh, I forgot to mention what I thought about size; It's fine in my opinion to have more space.  You're doing a great job with it, so why not use more.

Plus, it's going to be a huge game already.  At this point it's just big and would be looked at as the same size weather it's 4 pages or 5, in my opinion (Which if anyone thinks is wrong, I'm sorry).

[simplethinker]

Very nice

Do you have all of the data in the app yet? (I think you said you had a while ago)

[Iambian]

Not all of the data that can be included in the app actually *is* in the app. The data that remains is the character/NPC dialog data, treasure chest data, enemy statistical data, large character portraits, event data, and a few other goodies that needs to go in, like game ending sequences and your ubiquitous world map.

Not to mention all the code that drives all of it. But on the bright side, much of the dialog data will be compressed so many kilobytes of text will condense to something much smaller. ty, pucrunch

The robot side story (Full Metal mode) might drive it to a 96KB app, but it probably won't since it will use so many of the same assets from the main story.

EDIT: The pause menu system is finally in. The merits are now calculated and the app's really, REALLY quickly running out of space. A few bytes under 5KB remains. Gotta go ahead and expand the app.

EDIT 2: Okay. The expansion was made. A few definitions were changed. I reduced the dependency on the age-old ti83plus.inc and made a minimalistic file that retains just four lines copied from the same thousand-line include file. The app compiles far faster. Thus, developing with my compile-happy finger will be that much faster. Oh, how I could go on and on, but yeah.

EDIT 3 : Alright. The file's a fair bit more than 4 lines now, but only because I wanted to have everything I'll ever need in that one file. The app uses 11 romcalls (2 are numerically defined) and one "bjump" (JForceCmdNoChar). "contrast" is used only during initialization. "appbackupscreen" and "plotsscreen" are referenced all over the place in the app. Then there's the whole "#define equ .equ" and "#define EQU .equ". Nothing else. All romcalls are made when the app is starting up and shutting down.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Lol you should have double posted these updates, in case suddently Omnimaga had a major activity outburst

Unfortunately I doN,t understand most of that stuff since I don't know ASM tho

I don't mind large apps, as long as it remains maybe under 200 KB, because I have trouble sending larger apps it seems (I have the black link cable)

[ztrumpet]

Sounds nice!
I like the little include idea.  That's pretty neat.

[Iambian]

Sounds nice!
I like the little include idea.  That's pretty neat.

It is, but such an idea only really works when you've figured out conclusively that the stuff you want out of it is *all* that you will ever need. It becomes a pain (at least on my end) to have to update the small include file if you want to put in another romcall or some other reference from ti83plus.inc

A little more on topic, I spent a few more minutes up at my college's math lab (not for math. For a guy who works there that is interested in the game) debugging a few things so that the app will initialize. The problem involved not updating the pages correctly in the one file I thought I updated. It now works. Still, I've gotta start moving a few files around and update the project to make use of the newly-created page.

EDIT: Just posting the black box that involves the compile process. It takes just slightly over a second to work. A little less if the system's been "warmed up". You can see where I put in that extra page.

OFF TOPIC EDIT: I love the thumbnailing feature that this forum seems to provide. Very friendly on people that run dial-up or at dial-up speeds (school WiFi)

[DJ Omnimaga]

Nice. I still remember when TASM would take 3 seconds to compile Hello World on my 350 MHz Pentium 2...

[simplethinker]

Nice. I still remember when TASM would take 3 seconds to compile Hello World on my 350 MHz Pentium 2...

On my (supposedly) 2 GHz Sempron 3400+ TASM *still* takes 4-5 seconds to compile a Hello World program.  SPASM takes less than a second to compile a 4 KB program.