Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - phenomist

Pages: 1 ... 4 5 [6] 7 8 ... 10
76
Art / Re: Shrink 16x16 sprites
« on: March 18, 2011, 01:04:12 am »
16x16? I count 24x24... this would be hard.

I admit, pixel art is not my thing. (Though each of these sprites are only 7x7... gives you one extra pixel to clarify the arrows?

77
TI Z80 / Re: Belts
« on: March 18, 2011, 12:51:38 am »
Sure, I can make the game sideways. It wouldn't make programming the game much different... as the playing field is essentially square.

But wait, that'd make a fairly awkward game.

78
TI Z80 / Belts
« on: March 18, 2011, 12:25:50 am »
Alternative possible names: "Conveyor", "SortBall"

First, I want to know if this is an original concept on the calculator. (Inspired by a game from the LEGO website, back when it still had decent games - yeah it's removed)

Basically, you can control the direction of the conveyor belts (I'm thinking of using the F1-F5 keys) to sort the balls into the right sacks. Physics will be simple (no parabolic motion, say) to keep the game running fast. Additional elements like teleporters, linked conveyors, floor hatches, mutator machines, and more will be added eventually.



A mockup of the game is shown. Made with good old MS Paint :D

79
TI Z80 / Re: Chess
« on: March 17, 2011, 10:48:20 pm »
Slight AI problem, and a reason why one-turn value evaluation isn't necessarily the best option:

In the early game, you can get your queen out in the open, and the AI always tries to capture it by using his knights and bishops (often placing them in danger of, say, my pawns). One-turn value evaluation sees this as good, because its potential gain (+9) far offsets its potential (actually probable) loss (-3). This also creates a largely offensive-based AI, where the AI ignores defense almost entirely.

(Also, this pretty much rules out the AI from ever sacrificing material)

Nevertheless, I'd say that the AI can't get much smarter without pulling some computational feats that surpasses the speed of the processor :P, so still pretty impressive. Just throwing out some cases where the AI can potentially become even better :D

80
ASM / Re: Really Long Source Code
« on: March 17, 2011, 10:40:14 pm »
Hmm... If you don't have Word Wrap turned on, you could use the statusbar at the bottom, and create something of a "Table of Contents" including the line numbers for your routines.

You could create an ASCII-art type comment in order to be able to identify routines when scrolling.

Yeah, I suppose that non-interpreted comments would be a good way to mark your routines.

81
General Calculator Help / Re: Branch defined functions NSpire
« on: March 17, 2011, 07:04:15 pm »
Oh, and if you need to actually take the value on the piecewise graph without having to switch between graphs, you can add them together; e.g. Y1 = (2.5X)(X>10)+(5X)(X<=10). (This is on the TI-83/84)

82
Graviter / Re: Graviter - Axe
« on: March 15, 2011, 07:58:21 pm »
Development is now confirmed on hiatus until I figure out how to compile this thing (It always gives me ERR: BLOCK, even though I got each and every source program and subprogram from leafiness0)

Development is now confirmed on hiatus until I figure out how every single function, subroutine, subprogram, and other stuff works.

83
News / Re: Ultimatum
« on: March 14, 2011, 06:43:20 pm »
Well, I don't know the last time you ACTUALLY read the "Terms of Services" for any product :P (look, we've all clicked "I have read and agreed to everything in the ToS" without hesitating, right?)

So I suggest that if you want to get the message across to new members, it shouldn't be easily shrugged away.

To retain more members, make the ToS rememberable but required reading.

84
News / Re: Ultimatum
« on: March 14, 2011, 06:32:01 pm »
How about present the rules, Star Wars style? Like in a marquee so they can't fake-scroll.

85
Introduce Yourself! / Re: Calculators and Me
« on: March 14, 2011, 01:22:55 am »
Interesting, Tetris Marathon is. I believe scores of 140000 would be around Level 9-10 (Read: 10 minutes?). In our school, I was the first to finish level 15 (and win the game at 850k, around 20 minutes). leafiness0 subsequently broke 1 million, due to what I believe is a prudent use of force-drops and tetrises.

86
Introduce Yourself! / Re: Calculators and Me
« on: March 14, 2011, 12:41:47 am »
lol, I'm on a free budget. Everything after the first calculator was not bought.

So, if these competitions offer Casio Prizms, I'll get a Prizm. More likely are they going to give me a TI-nspire CX though.

87
Introduce Yourself! / Calculators and Me
« on: March 14, 2011, 12:35:28 am »
This story's a long one, so bear with me :P

------

It might sound a bit like bragging, but I am good at math. Competition math, to be precise. So the story goes...

5th grade, 2006-07
I started my competition with the AMC8. As a 5th grader, this was unheard of (back then. Now, you see 3rd graders and 4th graders qualifying for the USAMO only 3 years later). So, I took it.

I got a 24. The maximum score that you can get is a 25.

Now this set off a "warning bell" to the administration, and after some conferral with my parents, I was immediately fasttracked to Prealgebra, then a 7th grade class. I decided to take the AMC10 just because, scoring a 127.5, then moving onto the AIME, where I ended a (pretty good) streak. Did ARML for a bit, made SFBA's ARML B team.

This has nothing to do with calculators. It just sets the scene for later. (Yes, in retrospect, I didn't have a graphing calculator when the AMC's allowed graphing calculators... pretty bad, right?)

6th grade, 2007-08
The junior high school's Algebra 1 course (the class after Prealgebra) was full, so instead I went to the high school Algebra 2 course.

Algebra 2 => Graphing Calculator.

Thus, I got my first calculator. It was a TI-84+. I still have it, only that the screen's slightly dented. Anyways, I went through the entire competition thingy again, made USAMO, made ARML A team. SFBA A team won. ARML gives calculators to winning teams. In other words, I got a calculator.

The TI-nspire was a new cool gadget back then. Guess what we got? Exactly.

TI-84+ (September 2007)
TI-nspire (May 2008)

7th grade, 2008-09
Now in junior high school, graphing calculators were no longer a rare sight, as a new Algebra 2 class was instated to allow the 8th graders who skipped a single grade in math to not have to commute from school to school. Axe was not a programming language back then; Super Mario was the next best thing that existed back then. (Ztetris would probably rank third or so) People in our junior high school avidly created level packs. Seeing the existing level packs as too easy, we created new, harder, level packs. People like leafiness0 went on the technically-advanced route, creating several pixel-perfect regions in mere seconds. Other people like me decided to create levels that were more puzzle-like and esoteric in nature. I'll attach some levels from the era; as a guessing game, try to figure out which two levels are leafiness0's and which two levels are mine :P (Two more levels are included and are by other people from our school).

I made Mathcounts Nationals that year. => Calculator, also an TI-nspire.
Also, SFBA ARML team => calculator, yet another TI-nspire.

By now, I was unimpressed by the TI-nspire's OS: It was slow and clunky, lacked BASIC programming stuff, and its emulator was perhaps a third as fast as before. Hence I gave one TI-nspire away as a gift for usage of their house for temporary storage, and "auctioned" one TI-nspire off for $250 (in reality, the final winner was trolled by people who never intended on buying the calculator).

During ARML, one guy saw me playing on my calculator. He showed me this interesting TCG on his TI-84+ SE and the capabilities of Calcsys. When he also won a TI-nspire, he was like "Hm I wonder if I can make a raycaster out of this". He's one of your forum's members; his username is bwang.

(Yeah, I googled "TI-nspire raycaster" a while later during the summer, and stumbled upon this site :P , but didn't register because at the time I didn't have anything to say)

8th grade, 2009-10

Same old, same old. However two big changes: 1) All the calculator-toting people went to high school and 2) Algebra 2 and Geometry were swapped, Geometry not requiring calculators. Which meant that there weren't very many calculators in sight.

I really do not know what I did in 8th grade. Perhaps it was studying for some test, injecting propaganda for a certain student council member, or eating lunch as slowly as possible. Whatever it was, it usually wasn't graphing-calculator related.

National Science Bowl 3rd place => TI84+ SE, which I use very often now.
ARML => TI-nspire CAS, which I keep
Mathcounts => TI-nspire 2.0, which I gave away
9th grade, 2010-now
Super Mario became popular again. Also, due to relaxed restrictions, so did iPhone/iTouch games. I found some games and injected them into the calculator-playing realm, and, like a virus, it spread. In particular, I spread Geometry Wars and Tetris Marathon (You're welcome, Brian Coventry!). leafiness0 spread Space Dash and Cube Runner, so he's obviously a squidgetx fan. Anyways, we had the same stats class, and we decided to compete against each other in small programming contests. We started with a random letter generation program. It had to automatically scroll down each step.
My code was this (yeah, it's pretty bad)
Code: [Select]
"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ->Str1
ClrHome
Disp "","","","","","","
For(A,1,7
For(B,1,16
Output(A,B,sub(Str1,randInt(1,26),1
End
End
While 1
For(A,1,16
Output(8,A,sub(Str1,randInt(1,26),1
End
Disp "
End

Then leafiness0 discovered Axe. So he won.

I make Tron on BASIC. He goes off making Axe Tron and comes back with a product that's 20x faster.

At this point, I decided to give Axe a try. The new syntax was fairly overwhelming, and the most I could make was a skyscraper-making diversion. Looks like calculator programming's out of my scope now.

Then, leafiness0 contacted me regarding a new game he was making, Graviter. He told me to make some levels. I did.

After three complete rebuilds, each with a brand-new engine, I've been trying to make levels on new parameters each time. First I had to make it 18x12, then I could make it any size, and then I had to make it 18x12 again. Now he's showing me new mechanics (which I'm not at liberty to say right now) and I have to adapt my levels to satisfy those, etc.

Pretty annoying how his requirements change every week or so, but it's pretty satisfying when I see a level of mine in his game :P

And that's how the story ends. So far. (By the way, I'm expecting at least another TI-nspire... maybe a CX?)

88
Graviter / Re: Graviter - Axe
« on: March 12, 2011, 08:17:53 pm »
I'm sorry. (Though, that 3rd level is probably going to be one of the levels on the tail end, or possibly not even packaged in the main game itself, as a "challenge level pack")

89
Graviter / Re: Graviter - Axe
« on: March 12, 2011, 12:46:42 am »
Wow, leafiness0 just gave me rights to Graviter until summer break (3 months from now)

I guess I'll have to start learning the more specialized functions of Axe :P

Some stuff you might be seeing if I am successful at learning this:
- Graphical Level Editor! <- This is a priority of mine
- More levels! Some easier levels, too!
- Possibly optimized, faster gameplay!
- (?) New gameplay elements?

90
Hmm, I guess that something strange overwrote the background image, and Chrome was reading off of that image instead of the actual background image. (This is done to save time and memory, so that you don't have to redownload all the time.) By clearing the cache, the browser is forced to redownload a background image, where it picks the right image.

EDIT: It appears that the banner picture was wrong too. I believe the picture index for omnimaga was shifted leftward or something, causing all of the pictures to remap.

Pages: 1 ... 4 5 [6] 7 8 ... 10