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A solution to the archive/unarchive battery bill issue

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DJ Omnimaga:
I just thought about a solution for the battery bill issue:

Since Axe Parser now supports the storage of data inside appvars and sub-programs, this means if someone created a map editor in Axe to store the map data into an appvar one map after each other, he could simply store his map data inside such program file. Since archiving over and over can lead to fragmented Flash memory (and possibly a lot of annoying Garbage Collects), why not do the same thing TI-BASIC programmers do with ASM libs? Simply make an hybrid Axe Parser game that abuses some TI-BASIC as well as Iambian's XCOPY program to grant yourself the ability to copy archived programs into temporary RAM programs:

http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=downfile&id=522

Basically, split your Axe game into multiple archived sub-programs, and make your game launcher a TI-BASIC program where the ASM lib by Iambian is used to copy those sub-programs in RAM only when needed. This might save Quigibo some time and he said implementing this directly in axe may actually increase the size considerably, not to mention the speed loss wouldn't be that bad considering the loading would occur during parts of the game where it doesn't need speed.

The only two issues I can see is that idk if such program would have to be uploaded in TI-83 Plus Assembly games or BASIC games and your game would no longer be pure-Axe (and disqualify it from a possible eventual Axe Parser contest)

jsj795:
I foresee a big huge RPG made using this method. (May be Illusiat 13 clone with better graphic? :P )

DJ Omnimaga:
D:

Quigibo:
I think this is something I'll worry about when the time comes.  I don't think anyone is currently making any massive RPGs of this nature (but correct me if I'm wrong).

DJ Omnimaga:
not yet. Neither Metroid-type games. It isn't really a big hurry right now as you say, altough it might come handy in the future.

As example of how big games using xLIB can get, here's Metroid II Evolution map:

http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=1726.0;attach=908 (warning: huge image!)

The data would be considerably smaller in compiled Axe code, though, because in BASIC each tiles takes 2 or 3 bytes, plus the [ and ] all accross the matrices. In Axe, each tile would take 1 byte unless the maps were all modified in a way that they only use 16 tiles at once each and use compression.

Metroid BASIC map data is 95 KB, actually.

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