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Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => Topic started by: TheNlightenedOne on May 24, 2013, 03:15:52 pm

Title: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: TheNlightenedOne on May 24, 2013, 03:15:52 pm
I'm planning to make a top-down shooter game. However, in debating between platforms, namely 83+/84+ and 89/Ti. I feel the 89 would be better suited because of the better screen, but the z80 would have a larger player base. I'll set up a poll, please reply opinions
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on May 24, 2013, 03:23:53 pm
Yeah, I see where you are coming from. There aren't that many 89 gamers out there(or they're just quiet playing :P). I personally am not such a gamer, and to be honest these kind of games are nothing for me.
I think on TI-Planet though a lot of people still own a TI-89, making them able to play even though they don't program for it.

I'm not sure what you should choose.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: blue_bear_94 on May 24, 2013, 04:03:53 pm
I unsuccessfully attempted to write one for the 89. But I'd pick the 89.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Stefan Bauwens on May 24, 2013, 04:04:59 pm
Ofcourse you do have a lot more space on the TI-89.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: blue_bear_94 on May 24, 2013, 04:11:11 pm
But native-code programs can't be larger than 24K; that's a bummer.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: TIfanx1999 on May 25, 2013, 04:55:45 pm
Well, I'm going to say go ahead an make one for the TI-89. That platform hasn't seen near enough love recently. There are also quite a few shooters out for the TI-83/84 already. In addition, as you yourself mentioned, having a larger screen to work with is nice. ^^
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: tr1p1ea on May 25, 2013, 10:07:06 pm
I say make it cross platform!
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: JoeyBelgier on May 29, 2013, 05:22:17 pm
I voted 83/84+, basically for my own best interests. Honesty at its best. :P
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Hayleia on May 30, 2013, 01:07:47 am
I voted 89/Titanium even though I don't own any 68k because as Art_of_Camelot said, there are already enough shooters for the z80 series ;)
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: XiiDraco on May 30, 2013, 01:39:17 am
I voted, Ti-84 because I would assume that there are more Ti- 84 users than 89 right?
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Hayleia on May 30, 2013, 01:33:15 pm
I voted, Ti-84 because I would assume that there are more Ti- 84 users than 89 right?
Not really, in France 82 Stats.fr are majoritary, then 83+ (non SE) come, then Nspires, then 89T, then others. I only know 4 calcs in my class which termination have a "84" in here, and I own two of them. The other ones are a 84+ and a 84+SE.

And not to mention that shooters are also in big numbers in the z80 series ;)

I say make it cross platform!
Lol, ^this :P
Title: Re: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on May 30, 2013, 01:35:21 pm
If people here got TI-89 calcs, I would say go ahead with 68K, else go with Z80. I think the 89 just became like HP calcs in the way that they're popular only for math and science anymore, but the 89 still has a decent gaming userbase, just almost no coder.

Also if you use C, someone could port the game to the Nspire and PRIZM later.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: blue_bear_94 on May 30, 2013, 05:27:53 pm
I code for the 68k, though, but I doubt that many others would. Maybe a collaboration?
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: ben_g on May 31, 2013, 07:15:14 pm
I voted, Ti-84 because I would assume that there are more Ti- 84 users than 89 right?
Not really, in France 82 Stats.fr are majoritary, then 83+ (non SE) come, then Nspires, then 89T, then others. I only know 4 calcs in my class which termination have a "84" in here, and I own two of them. The other ones are a 84+ and a 84+SE.
It depents on your location. Here in Belgium, the 84+(BE) is the most used graphing calc. At the second place, there's the 83+. Any other kind of calculator is very rare.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: XiiDraco on May 31, 2013, 07:28:42 pm
In my school, all math classes combined have ~ 60-70 Ti 84's. But no one has ever seen even an 89.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: pimathbrainiac on May 31, 2013, 09:21:00 pm
The TI 89 has better everything except for user-base. That said, if you aim for POTY, TI 89 is a much easier category :P
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Sorunome on May 31, 2013, 09:39:29 pm
I would presonally do for the 89 as you have 1st a bigger display and 2nd a better prozessor and 3rd more people than you think have 'em
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Streetwalrus on June 01, 2013, 02:14:24 am
I'm planning to get an 89 personally. I know there's already a lot of games for it, but new ones would be cool. :)

BTW how did the 68k community die ? Lionel Debroux mentioned something about TIGCC maintenance that slowly stopped, and the lack of ASM coders because of C (which is an error IMHO, we z80 users did not abandon ASM because of Axe).
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: TIfanx1999 on June 01, 2013, 02:46:52 am
I think there were several reasons. Many engineers use these type of calcs, and from what i hear the hp is usually preferred. For most school courses the 83+/84+ is recommended. Ti hasn't actively promoted this calc in years either.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 01, 2013, 03:10:30 am
Also somebody in the French community ran the entire 68K community into the ground. All veteran developers left due to the drama and things never recovered since TI doesn't market that calc anymore. As for TIGCC it stopped being maintained, but GCC4TI is still alive.

Also the TI-89 is so overpriced compared to other calcs. Over here, a TI-89T costs $40-50 higher than a TI-Nspire CX and online $30 higher than the Nspire CX CAS.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Lionel Debroux on June 01, 2013, 03:13:23 am
Despite being more powerful, the TI-68k series has always been far less popular than the TI-Z80 series, due to the CAS, forbidden in many standardized tests worldwide, and the higher price tags (even before the Nspire existed). The TI-68k series got fairly popular in France, thanks to the lack of such silly bans on CAS.

Though there have been a number of interesting programs since then, the TI-68k native code programming community saw a massive, final plunge in 2006-2007. It was therefore unrelated to advent of the Nspire (at that time), which became programmable through native code for the general public only in late February 2010.
The dive of the TI-68k native code programming community can be attributed to a number of factors, let's mention at least four of them:
* as I wrote in another topic, evolution of the library and documentation were indeed low because the maintainer actively or passively refused many contributions that were deemed useful by users. Until 2008, there was still some work in other areas. GCC4TI picked up where TIGCC left, fixing bugs, processing some of that backlog of contributions (well, at least, those which were published - we know that some contributions have been lost forever), performing new optimizations in the library, and highly improving the maintainability and portability of the very badly-behaved build system inherited from TIGCC. Little gets done on GCC4TI nowadays, due to the extremely low number of users, but at least, GCC4TI can be built straight from Git, while building TIGCC is pretty hard;
* constant criticism against many projects that could have created more activity, and general disrespect, combined to overly lax moderation (or unfair moderation, when the main troublemaker was the so-called moderator), produced horrible mood on what used to be the main message boards of the TI-68k community, which took a toll on the community. The alternative languages for the TI-68k series, e.g. NewProg (which is close enough in spirit to Axe and predates it by years), or the GTC alternative toolchain, were constantly dissed, or even saw their progress actively hampered through non-technical matters, by the TIGCC maintainer;
* over the years, old-timers of the community moved on to other platforms / interests, until (though it was possibly rather 2008 than 2006-2007 ?) very few old-timers remained really productive;
* newcomers have rarefied due to technical advances, which helped paint calculators for the overpriced pieces of obsolete software / hardware that they are (calculators lost their "first programming platform in students' hands" aspect), and also due to changes in society (there has been a real drop in new graduates in scientific matters - after all, scientific matters are far less valued, though indispensable in the long run, to marketing and finance, so why would people choose lower-wages jobs ?). The Nspire's low programmability and general orientation towards consuming knowledge than producing code, reduces the number of persons which discover programming through the calculator.


In Nspire times (2010+), besides the aforementioned reasons, most of which have remained valid, the TI-68k community didn't pick back up because of TI actively pushing the Nspire instead, through insane price tags and completely dropping support for the TI-68k series (since 2003 for the 89 & 92+, 2005 for the V200 & 89T).


Also, I'd like to mention something about the ticalc.org POTY possibility, which was mentioned by pimathbrainiac above. It's true that it's easier to get a ticalc.org POTY nowadays, especially in that category, but it's not a good thing, or not necessarily because nothing else gets done.
ticalc.org has lost a lot of momentum over the years, due to a chicken-and-egg problem. Reduced newsing activity (despite the addition of a staff member), and upload + update forms that are not on par with those of other sites (I'm being lazy to upload TILP II 1.17 and associated programs due to exactly that...), produce fewer file uploads to ticalc.org, and lower newsing activity...
* in 2010, I received an unexpected POTY, because one of my creations was the only one mentioned in that category over the whole year, though definitely not the only possible one (Benjamin Moody's titools sprang to my mind at the time), and probably not even the most interesting or (potentially) useful one. While novel, and not even that time-consuming, tiosmod+amspatch have seen little use in the wild, for legal reasons: we can't redistribute ready-made modified OS images, so users have to perform manual operations (compiling, or downloading binary patchers and applying the provided binary patches). Anyhow, I didn't spend time on this old idea of mine until 2010, leading to a far too belated tiosmod+amspatch release.
* in the Nspire category, the 2012 POTY vote was significantly truncated by the fact that like half of the important programs of the year were not uploaded to ticalc.org in the first place, or for those which were, no news was posted about them on ticalc.org (despite being featured on Omnimaga, TI-Planet and/or Cemetech).


Oh, and I missed something on the previous page:
Quote
But native-code programs can't be larger than 24K; that's a bummer.
The artificial size limitation on ASM programs was added by the AMS 2.xx series in 1999, at first 8 KB, and later raised to 24 KB. However, it's so weak a "protection" that it was immediately defeated, before the 21st century ;)
"ASAP or Exec string too long" and "Invalid Program Reference" have always been useless in practice, neither has prevented large ASM programs or math ASM programs in any kind of significant way. Both are killed by all "kernels", as well as tiosmod+amspatch.
On the TI-Z80 series, until recent discoveries, ASM programs were also limited to 8 KB.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: XiiDraco on June 01, 2013, 01:23:29 pm
Ok, I'll just stick with Ps Vita. :|
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: Sorunome on June 02, 2013, 03:25:04 pm
But is it just me or is the 68k series getting more popularity nowadays, I have the feeling that more people get 'em (maybe it is just me paying more attention to who has one because i have one now too?)

And DJ:
On ebay i got my TI89 (non-titanium) for $52.
Title: Re: Top-down shooter - 83+/84+ or 89/Ti?
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 10, 2013, 08:14:06 pm
Yeah I meant in retail stores or from official online retailers and brand new. As for their popularity I think every good coder leaving back in the days due to the KK drama left a huge gap with no people making the platform interesting. It is possible that if a lot of new coders arrive that more people might be interested about it. That's, of course, as long as TI continues selling the calc, but the price won't help, considering at most places you can get a color screen calc for the same price or less. :P