Omnimaga

General Discussion => Introduce Yourself! => Topic started by: FinaleTI on June 03, 2010, 06:49:57 pm

Title: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 03, 2010, 06:49:57 pm
Hey everyone!

Some of you might know me from UTI, but in case you don't, here goes.
I'm a fair basic programmer and I'm working on Pokemon TI (a 4-level greyscale clone of Pokemon Red and Blue using Celtic III). Progress is pretty slow right now though.

I've also been playing with Axe Parser and plan on entering the contest as well. I can't say much about my project yet though.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 03, 2010, 06:59:35 pm
Hi and welcome here!

I saw your project on UTI altough I only saw one screenshot someone posted elsewhere (imageshack I think), since UTI won't let me view attachments and I cannot login x.x, it seemed nice. I hope it eventually progresses more.

Glad you are entering the competition. Note that the rules changed a bit, though. Now you are allowed to announce your contest entry progress (and screenshots) to public, just as long as you do not post any download copy and that you do not enter an Axe project you were already working on before the contest was announced (altough code can be used) :)
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 03, 2010, 07:01:37 pm
Yeah, I saw that. I been looking at the forums for the past couple of days, especially the Axe Parser sub-forum.

I just can't say much until I finalize a bit more info.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 03, 2010, 07:07:38 pm
yeah true. Altough over here we are generally more open towards any kind of projects, I still recommend programmers to wait until they have enough stuff done before announcing a project. Else in the past people gave false hopes to other people by being ambitious and then giving up and today, people tend to not take projects that are into very early stages as seriously :( (I remember when Axe itself was still in version 0.0.1, I admit when Quigibo told me about it on chat, I was rather skeptical, so I recommended him to not start too large and wait a lil bit before announcing anything. Finally it slowly grew and now Axe sub-forum is almost 10% of the whole Omnimaga post count :P)
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: calcdude84se on June 03, 2010, 09:17:35 pm
Hello, nice to see you here. One more UTI person joins omnimaga.
DJ: yeah, Axe really took off. I guess we'd finally reached the limits of BASIC (though I think that happened quite a while ago, anyway). Nice to see a successful project.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: cooliojazz on June 03, 2010, 10:21:25 pm
Since your name is FinaleTI, are you ever going to make Finale for the TI? *Hides* But welcome and have fun here!  :D
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 03, 2010, 10:30:35 pm
Hello, nice to see you here. One more UTI person joins omnimaga.
DJ: yeah, Axe really took off. I guess we'd finally reached the limits of BASIC (though I think that happened quite a while ago, anyway).
I wouldn't say so, with the cool projects that are coming along (especially the dual-layer ASCII stuff), and if we include ASM libs, there are still things to be achieved, like a full 4 level grayscale RPG with xLIB or even a RPG maker :P (both would be possible, they would just take a lot of work)

However Axe is what many BASIC programmers have been dreaming off: a language using BASIC tokens and similar syntax, but compiled and running at ASM speed (or close) and programmable on-calc. This is why it took off this much.

Activity-wise, I think the Nspire cracking combined with having the gbc emulator sub-forum here had a huge impact too, though. All the Nspire-related news on the site seems to have boosted our Nspire keywords Google rankings
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: TIfanx1999 on June 03, 2010, 10:46:47 pm
Hello, and welcome! It's nice to see that you made your way over here! I'm also glad that we have yet another participant in the Axe contest. Good luck! Can't wait to see what you come up with! =)
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: meishe91 on June 04, 2010, 12:26:01 am
Welcome here and I'm appalled that no one has given you peanuts yet :P

I saw your project a while ago and thought it looked really nice. I hope work continues :)

Since your name is FinaleTI, are you ever going to make Finale for the TI? *Hides* But welcome and have fun here!  :D

That would be so hard to do O.O Yet so epic if accomplished :P

Hello, nice to see you here. One more UTI person joins omnimaga.
DJ: yeah, Axe really took off. I guess we'd finally reached the limits of BASIC (though I think that happened quite a while ago, anyway).
I wouldn't say so, with the cool projects that are coming along (especially the dual-layer ASCII stuff), and if we include ASM libs, there are still things to be achieved, like a full 4 level grayscale RPG with xLIB or even a RPG maker :P (both would be possible, they would just take a lot of work)

However Axe is what many BASIC programmers have been dreaming off: a language using BASIC tokens and similar syntax, but compiled and running at ASM speed (or close) and programmable on-calc. This is why it took off this much.

Activity-wise, I think the Nspire cracking combined with having the gbc emulator sub-forum here had a huge impact too, though. All the Nspire-related news on the site seems to have boosted our Nspire keywords Google rankings

Aren't the Reuben Quests already 4-level grayscale RPGs?
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 04, 2010, 12:34:10 am
They're 3 level grayscale, using an outdated method.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: meishe91 on June 04, 2010, 12:59:46 am
Oh, I thought they were four ??? Oh well, they are still awesome :)
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 04, 2010, 01:33:00 am
Lol thanks :D
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: Galandros on June 04, 2010, 09:23:18 am
Welcome.

Have fun with Axe Parser and I hope you bring an interesting entry to the contest.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 04, 2010, 09:47:26 am
Thanks everyone!

Hopefully I'll have some screenies or mock-ups soon so I can reveal my project.


Edit:
Also, how does one increase their post count on these forums?
I've posted on several topics, but the only thing that increased my post count was the creation of this topic.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: calcdude84se on June 04, 2010, 01:16:56 pm
Yeah, I noticed that too... better wait for DJ...
I mean, posts to randomness don't count, but you've posted multiple times to this topic, which isn't there... hm...
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 04, 2010, 01:24:04 pm
Oddly enough, I just posted on the Bug Reports topic in the Axe Parser sub-forum and my post count increased.  ???
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: calcdude84se on June 04, 2010, 01:30:49 pm
What? ??? DJ, please explain this... This is very weird...
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: Quigibo on June 04, 2010, 01:37:17 pm
I think this subforum and randomness don't increase post counts but the other ones do.

Welcome here!
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: calcdude84se on June 04, 2010, 01:52:01 pm
this one doesn't either? hmm...
Edit: So it doesn't. Problem solved!
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 04, 2010, 02:03:48 pm
OK. Thanks for the clarification.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: ztrumpet on June 04, 2010, 05:20:09 pm
I think this subforum and randomness don't increase post counts but the other ones do.

Welcome here!
That's correct. :)

Welcome here FinaleTI!  How's progress on Pokemon TI comming? :D
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 04, 2010, 05:25:52 pm
Normally the intro section doesn't have post count disabled, but sometimes, people starts abusing the intro forum with full of spam to bypass the randomness forum disabled post counting and when that happens, I disable post counting in the intro section as well to discourage it.

In the randomness forum, post rating (kinda like the old Youtube comment system) used to be disabled too, but certain people abused this and broke other board rules in the randomness forum on purpose, such as offensive remarks, then we decided to enable rating there, too.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 04, 2010, 06:09:53 pm
@Ztrumpet: It's coming along slowly.
Right now I'm trying to see if there is a less memory intensive way of storing the text than I already am. Right now the text is compressed as either a hex or binary sprite, which is then OR'ed over the text box when the screen is displayed. Only problem is that it's ridiculously memory intensive compared to just storing the text in a string. Yet, if I use the TI-OS's Text( routine or even Celtic III's identity(10 routine, it's slower to display than what I would like. So I'm not sure what to do.

Maybe I should write an Axe program?
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 04, 2010, 07:10:55 pm
mhmm unfortunately I wouldn,t be able to help with text compression because I never tried any before XD. I understand text can take a lot of memory, though. In Illusiat 13, the NPC convos and events text must be about 30-40 KB total x.x
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 05, 2010, 11:11:20 am
Well, I guess I can reveal my Axe Parser contest entry....

Nostalgia!
Nostalgia is going to be a puzzle RPG in which you have to swap between two dimensions to solve puzzles to progress through the dungeons.
The main reason that the game is called Nostalgia is because one of the dimensions uses ASCII graphics, while the other uses 8x8 graphical tiles.
I've attached a screenie of the current progress on the ASCII scrolling map engine.

(http://i893.photobucket.com/albums/ac139/FinaleTI/th_output.jpg) (http://s893.photobucket.com/albums/ac139/FinaleTI/?action=view&current=output.flv)

It's an avi. Sorry if that causes any problems for anyone, but photobucket was being stupid and wouldn't let me upload the gif.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: _player1537 on June 05, 2010, 11:27:20 am
wow sounds cool can't wait to see it finished.  If you need any help you can ask me (if DJ allows)

Edit:  actually...I won't be here for a week to two weeks
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: Hot_Dog on June 05, 2010, 11:47:02 am
Awesome screenie!  I'm glad to know I'm not the only person revealing screenshots/etc. on my project
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 05, 2010, 12:24:10 pm
Oooh nice. I like the old skoolness. Btw feel free to start a new topic for your project if you want to announce progress and updates, since it might get more attention than in the intro section (people will think it's just another reply to an intro post :P)
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: ztrumpet on June 06, 2010, 12:26:14 pm
Wow, that's really cool!  Good luck with it. ;D
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: Quigibo on June 06, 2010, 01:36:29 pm
Right now I'm trying to see if there is a less memory intensive way of storing the text than I already am. Right now the text is compressed as either a hex or binary sprite, which is then OR'ed over the text box when the screen is displayed. Only problem is that it's ridiculously memory intensive compared to just storing the text in a string. Yet, if I use the TI-OS's Text( routine or even Celtic III's identity(10 routine, it's slower to display than what I would like. So I'm not sure what to do.

If you set the buffer flag when displaying text, the text is drawn to the buffer instead of the screen which is much much faster.  And then, when the screen is updated, it displays it all at once instead of that scrolling effect.  You can write an external assembly program (or even an Axe program) that toggles the flag for you.  You would only need to call it once in the beginning and then once at the end to set it back to normal.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 06, 2010, 02:17:25 pm
Keep in mind buffer flag only affects graph screen text, though, not home screen (the reason why I usually don't recommend using home screen text in axe games)
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: FinaleTI on June 06, 2010, 04:25:31 pm
OK thanks, cause I think that you can do that with Celtic's identity(10, so I'll have to try that sometime.
Title: Re: Hi from FinaleTI
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 06, 2010, 04:36:41 pm
Oh right I remember that.

Had I ever still got into calc RPG coding, such feature would have been handy for games like ROL4 menu engine. The text display in it is slow but everything else displays almost instantly

The least amount of time the display is updated, the faster the program