i think that 2014 is going to be the best year for video games since the 90's! both of my favourite game creators of all time (Keiji Inafune and Doug Tennapel) are making new games that are spiritual successors of their best previous titles, but moreso (the latter being Armikrog, if you haven't seen it yet). additionally, the best Wii U games are scheduled to come out then (HD Zelda?!). simply put: EXCITE!
^exactly. axe allows you to read variables directly from the archive using what it calls files. basically, you assign a var to a file (which use the Y1-Y9 function variables) and then refer to it as you would any other pointer. that's why i was talking about using several smaller map chunks rather than one giant map; if you split your 20kb map into 4kb chunks and then the user only modifies two of those chunks, you only need to write back those 8kb upon exiting rather than the entire 20kb map. again, depending on what sort of game you're making, there are lots of more efficient ways to reduce the necessary amount of writing, so it would be nice to know more specifically what sort of game you want to make (particularly things like how often you expect tiles to be changing and how many different values they can take on etc.).
you can use the bcall _ErrNotEnoughMem to check if enough free ram is available (usable in axe via inline asm). apparently 9815h also contains the total amount of ram free, so you could check there too.
also, like several other people have said already, there is no reason for you to be unarchiving anything ever during your program's execution. all that "unarchiving" does, anyways, is copy the variables to RAM and then delete them from the archive, and there's no reason for them to be deleted.
writing directly to archive is both tricky and a terrible idea, as it risks bricking your calculator. also, like i said above trying to write back a huge appvar every time your program is exited will be annoying for the user (taking a long time, causing lots of garbage collects, and, eventually, wearing out the flash). to get around both this issue and the issue of having too little ram during runtime, you basically have one of two options:
if you expect your user to only modify a few tiles here and there, the best method is to keep separate diff files for sections of your map, like i described above.
if you expect basically every tile on the entire map to be overwritten, you might want to break your map up into smaller chunks and write back only those that have been modified, decreasing the amount of writing necessary a bit.
do the changes you want to make to the map have to be written back and saved for the next time the program is run? if so, that's going to make compression stuff difficult. if they don't, you can just break the map up into compressed chunks and only decompress them when that section of the map needs to be loaded. if they do, though, you might be better off storing the changes applied to the map separately so that they can be changed dynamically without having to recompress the entire chunk. having to both decompress map sections and apply a diff can slow things down quite a bit, though, so it becomes a bit of a balancing act between saving space and saving time.
wearable tech is definitely the "next big thing". hopefully the future turns out well (i.e., robotics/3d printing/etc allow for self-sustaining systems that allow humans to survive without ever having to do a day's work in their lives, thus doing away with stupid capitalism and allowing innovation to take over [remove all the money grabbers from the equation, leaving only those who actually want to improve things]) rather than the alternative (capitalism realises the threat to itself and creates more stupid stupid restrictions in the same vein as copyright, resulting in a continuation of today's rapidly-degenerating worldwide police state developments and general unhappiness for everyone apart from those who are already without a care in the world financially).
i don't think there's actually a single local band on there
菅野よう子 (Yoko Kanno): japan. music organiser/composer behind cowboy bebop, ghost in the shell, wolf's rain, and a few others Radical Face: florida. sort of ethereal, pop-ish electronica, often written as first-person accounts of historical figures. Julsy: french canadian (i think). she makes pretty sounds with a computron. Wolf Parade: montreal. much more "classic rock" than most things i listen to. crackly voices. some electronics in later albums.
@Shmibs: Wow, out of all those musicians I recognize only two; Olivia Newton-John and The Seatbelts. I'll check out some of the others when I have some time. Do you have a few favorites to recommend?
this list is based primarily on what i've listened to for the last month, so it's not really "my favourites". i'd have to know more about what you like to say anything else.
does anyone else actually use lastfm?
* shmibs is still really curious about what most people here listen to. maybe some fun graphs could be made.
I'm into indie, electronic, soundtrack, folk, and ambient, including: 菅野よう子, Radical Face, Flashygoodness, Yellow Ostrich, Julsy, Wolf Parade, Matthew Dear, Youth Lagoon, Solar Fields, Generationals, David Housden, Fanfarlo, The Voodoo Trombone Quartet, LCD Soundsystem, Julsy & Zach Schimpf, Andrew Bird, Beirut, Heather Woods Broderick, Sin Fang, Tepetl, World.I.Made, Stars, johnny_ripper, The Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Ilaria Graziano, Shoji Meguro, Gregory and the Hawk, Electric President, Laura Marling, Tim Kliphuis, Cornelius, Tujiko Noriko, Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, Olivia Newton-John, Jim Guthrie, Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren, Sufjan Stevens, The Seatbelts, Helios, Theophany, Dan Deacon, Portugal. The Man, Mystery Jets, Ohbijou, Laura Gibson, Gregory Alan Isakov, Alec Holowka, Born Ruffians, Benoît Pioulard.
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