About new AGD version

[nra]

Jonathan, could you tell how a new engine will handle lines and points (or even circles), if any? I mean if you really let coder decide what to do and in what degree then would such feature slow down the gameprocess badly? Because if you're using XOR then one would need to draw it OVER to restore the picture.

The point is that I really miss points and lines, but they are scarce in my projects, say, just to imitate shots. Yet I would like to have a slowly falling gleaming nightsky as upper background and neither objects nor sprites would do at the moment. Particles or points? However the former is less controllable and the latter will require some dim() or stack/queue...

And how about the depth? Minimum two levels are required IMO. Anyway, could you kindly give us at least a short insight about a new version? Of course, we will surely ask for more, but a tiny piece of your future pie can be tasty too)

[Jonathan Cauldwell]

AGD 4 has lasers, so you can fire them from a sprite with a command like this:

LASER 0

and then check for a collision in sprite events with this:

IF COLLISION 10
 REMOVE
 SOUND 5
 EXPLODE 30
 SCORE 50
ENDIF

Explode just tells the particle engine to start an explosion with 30 dots.

There's also a nifty vapour trail/magic dust effect which you can implement in the sprite events with the TRAIL command. I'll add a starfield option if there's room.

Of course, this assumes you've "specialised" the engine for particles. You may choose not to use them and instead go for other effects (I've done this to keep the size of the engine down to maximise the RAM available for games) such as double-height text, a window fade and scrolling messages (both on a menu/title page or as in-game status updates). Or you could use the puzzle option instead, which remembers changes you've made to screens using PUTBLOCK and remembers them when you leave and re-enter rooms. Handy for opening and closing doors, flipping switches or any other changes you might want to make to screens mid-game.

You'll have to implement depth yourself though.

[nra]

Oh! It should look and sound really great)

So, it would be more modular approach, right? Makes sense for for such limited machine like Speccy.
But how about 128K and mouse then? Indeed, it's a higher-end specs, but many people still have real 128k+ models with micro/SD and mouse. I think it should be suitable as a module.

Jonathan, as far as I remember the AGD is shuffling the sprites to make it smoother or something. As far as depth is emulated via the drawing order it would require some manual control or a different drawing queue.

Ok, looking forward to the time when you release the new version of the AGD.

Cheers.

[gabriele1969]

omG! this looks soooo promising!