saboteur

Lets be fair taxes have always been applied to imports, when the UK were in the EU the seller added taxes at their local rate, and those taxes were collected in their local jurisdiction and then reclaimed by your respective government. I'll also note that shipping as a gift has the potential to get you a hefty tax bill and either you or the seller a potential fine and criminal proceedings for lying to an official ( in writing no less ) - but this has always been the case. To be honest, it's not the tax that really bothers me, it's the extra handling and paperwork charges that really get my goat, because from what i can see, carriers are doing little that justifies ( in some cases ) hefty charges that they are applying which is then further bumping up the VAT cost to the end user, who unlike them is most likely not VAT registered and unable to recover that cost. I'd be interested in knowing what the tax is and how its applied to items imported in the US ? Do Federal, state and county get a slice or do they apply their own unless it 'slips through'

Their is a good chance that later in the year the US & UK may do a trade deal, fingers crossed. Also the UK has applied to join the CPTPP, which is also something the US was going to join, but President Trump put the brakes on it, so maybe that may also change ( i also hear rumblings that China wanted to join ). I assume Albert that you could always get UK orders of the gamedrive shipped direct from here in the UK anyway ? and then also offer digital only versions to avoid all this in the short term.

Has this not always been the case with goods from the US ? I don't remember the EU having a free trade agreement with US that made imports VAT exempt and I know for a fact that my company has always paid VAT and handling on imports from the US and that nothing has changed in that regard. Perhaps i'm missing something ? Is this more a case that HMRC and Customs have got a bee in their bonnet and are picking everything up now whereas before they turned a blind eye as most low value items were imported as 'gifts' or 'samples' - i know that's how my airgun compressor was sent from china to 'avoid' duties and VATand the seller was quite clear that if found out a hefty tax bill may turn up at a later date.

I always liked it tbh. Once you mastered the crappy controls

I'm no expert with RB+ but I can say this, if you want to code a game for the JAG then RB+ is the simplest, quickest way to get one made. Just because your coding in basic doesn't mean the final compilled code is slow either, it's just a way of making complicated things easier for the layman to understand. Sure your not going to make a real super optimised 3d masterpiece, but then who has the time anyway. But it sure is the simplest way to get going PERIOD - you can be up and coding in under ten minutes on windows. And if you spend some time going through the example projects and some of the pinned post's on this forum then you can knock up something simple and playable in under an hour. As has been shown by others already, the more you use it the more you find out and the more feature rich your games can become. The hardest part to making something professional imho is the artwork and audio, and for that you need someone with a different skillset to a coder. So download it and try it over the christmas period ( 12 days of codemas ), you'll be suprised by what you can turn out.

Thanks tonma, i'll have a looki when i get home later. I have a feelling my loadclut statement is wrong.

Anyone got a working example or a working rapinit.s using 8bpp images ? I have no problem using 4bpp but as soon as i create one in paint and save it as 8bpp I get a load of crap on the screen. I've tried changing the rapinit.s by hand and using OMF's excellent tool, but still cant get it working. Any help appreciated. Cheers

I think i was sold on initial false promise cos I got my first jag new with Tempest 2K, AVP and Wolfenstein, at the time no other titles for the jag came close to matching the quality.

Godzilla and co destroying japan, obviously.

For me q1 and q2 are related. First up, as with the jaguar, it was late to market ( certainly here in the uk ). I remember ordering mine pre-release and then it turning up after i'd forgotten about it. ( In fact I reckon a lot of kickstarter campaigns take a page out of Ataris's playbook and are run in exactly the same way - promise a date and let it slide ) IMHO it could have sold if the launch lineup was stronger/larger but again this was probably due to the lateness of actual hardware being delivered and atari's disengenous attitude to developers. As for launch titles - well for me a Lucas arts tie in would've made a massive difference ( Tie Fighter, Dark Forces etc ) maybe doom2, hexen or rise of triad or something like Medal Of Honor. It was also a real shame that AVP 2 ( enhanced by the larger storage of the CD ) was never released. But as usual for atari a great idea, imperfectly executed.

And that's ( NOT ) numberwang.

Save yourself the heartburn and just record a video of vladr's progress so far and post it. You'll be doing both yourself and vladr a solid. Oh and a home made beefburger with extra mature english cheddar and crispy bacon with lettuce, tomato and ketchup in a lightly toasted bun is the way to go.

Gotta say - I thought that was a predator at first. Very nice work.

Would this mean that an author could request the unique id from the purchaser and then modify their code accordingly, and provide the customer with either an electronic download or an image on a sd card that will only work on that specific SD cartridge ? That would seem pretty reasonable to me.

I've never suggested a game for conversion because i'm never sure how it would translate to the jags controller and I would think that's quite a headache for CJ. However now that you've opened pandoras box, I always loved microposes Gunship and didn't they do Grand Prix ? But..... 'Rocket Ranger', 'The 3 Stooges', 'It Came From The Desert', Strider, Hunter, Carrier Command and 'Where Time Stood Still' before the end of the day would be great ( And don't forget we've unleashed the pain stick now )

Holy Crap, what a gaff. But it gets worse, how come I even have to touch the jagpad at all ? why the f*** doesn't it just read my mind and automatcally load up an play the game i'm thinking about. Saint, I can't believe you didn't consider this, consequently oxfordshire is going to annexe gloucestershire and impose daily administration of the pain stick - and it's all your fault.

Thanks for taking the time CJ A perfect explanation and gives me a few pointers cos i was scratching my head with the pixel perfect collision detection and raptors built in hit boxes.

May I ask a technical question ? I assume the collision detection for the foreground is all handled by a single call to the raptor api and the foreground image is X x Y pixels with the non collission area being a certain colour that is then treated as transparrent. How do you assign the transparrent colour ? or is it always black for example. ? Looking good though.

Whoa now hold on old son. England is more than the UK, official policy is to make the work England and has been for at least 500 years, we're just having a period of r & r at the mo for tea and biscuits. Next thing i know you'll be sending men in white over here trying to retain the ashes. bloody cheek. Now get back in your darkened cave and crack on with the requested numberwang.

I see what you did there, and it's rookie jag game development 101. See you've missed explaining all the complicated maths and feature planning and such and gone straight to showing a playable demo. No no no, it just won't do All that aside, I used to love Thrust and Thrust II on the good old speccy, but I seem to remember that involved picking up and towing objects as well, which was very hard and extremely satisfying when you completed a mission. And i know what you mean about this type game being a time waster, defying inertia and gravity just keeps you coming back for more. My hats off to you sirs.

Thanks for the reply. No need to apologise - your helping me, not the other way around Anyhoo - nearly there, I had already changed the rapinit as you sugested but it still wouldn't work. However, it got me thinking so i checked the blank.bmp and that wasn't the same size. Also the drawtile procedure loop is wrong I think. Currently it's for i=0 to map_height-1 I think you meant for i=0 to tile_height-1 Now it works but the bottom row is not on the screen - so a bit of fettling and I think i'll be there. Thanks for all the help - it really is appreciated.

this is what i get using 8 pixels height

The source image is 48x16px - so made up of 3 16x16px tiles As I said when I set the tile height to 8px it all works fine except each tile is displayed half height - as I would expect. However no map is displayed when setting tile height to 16px ' ' Your code goes here ' Have fun! ' rlist=(RAPTOR_LIST *)strptr(RAPTOR_sprite_table) basic_r_indx=0 basic_r_size=0 'RLOCATE 0,202 'RPRINT " RAPTOR BASIC+ - REBOOT " 'basic_r_size=0 'basic_r_indx=0 'RLOCATE 0,218 'RPRINT " Derived from BCX BASIC v6 " DIM ID_player% DIM GVAR_player_gfx_loc% DIM GVAR_player_gfx_size% ID_player = 2 ' RAPTOR Object number for player 'GVAR_player_gfx_loc = RGETOBJ(ID_player, R_sprite_gfxbase) 'GVAR_player_gfx_size = RGETOBJ(ID_player, R_sprite_framesz) set maps[15][20] as short '01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 {00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00}, ' screen 1 row 01 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 02 {00,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,00}, ' screen 1 row 03 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 04 {00,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,00}, ' screen 1 row 05 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 06 {00,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,00}, ' screen 1 row 07 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 08 {00,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,00}, ' screen 1 row 09 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 10 {00,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,00}, ' screen 1 row 11 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 12 {00,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,00}, ' screen 1 row 13 {00,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,01,02,00}, ' screen 1 row 14 {00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00} ' screen 1 row 15 end set loadclut(strptr(tiles_clut),0,16) dim x as short dim y as short dim c as short dim tilex as short dim tiley as short dim map as short dim i as int DIM pi!: pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795 dim ph! ' The screen to draw the map's width in bytes. ' Think of this as <width in pixels>*<bits per pixel>/8 const dest_screen_width_in_bytes=160 ' Our tile's height in pixels const tile_height=16 ' Our tile's width in bytes. ' Think of this as <width in pixels>*<bits per pixel>/8 const tile_width_in_bytes=8 ' Number of available maps. const no_maps=1 ' The screen to read the tile's width in bytes. ' Think of this as <width in pixels>*<bits per pixel>/8 const src_screen_width_in_bytes=24 ' Map width inside the map array const map_width=20 ' Map height inside the map array const map_height=15 map=0 ' Draw map for y=0 to map_height-1 for x=0 to map_width-1 c=maps[map*map_height+y][x] tilex=(c % map_width) tiley=(c/map_width) drawtile(x,y) next x next y rlist[1].x=19*65536 vsync do call Player_Update_Position vsync loop sub drawtile(x as SHORT, y as SHORT) for i=0 to map_height-1 ' Our tiles are 16x16 big in 4bpp mode, which means they are 8 bytes wide in RAM. Hence we need 2 LPOKEs per line. lpoke strptr(scrbuf)+y*(dest_screen_width_in_bytes*tile_height)+x*tile_width_in_bytes+i*dest_screen_width_in_bytes,lpeek(strptr(tiles)+tilex*tile_width_in_bytes+tiley*(src_screen_width_in_bytes*tile_height)+i*src_screen_width_in_bytes) lpoke strptr(scrbuf)+y*(dest_screen_width_in_bytes*tile_height)+x*tile_width_in_bytes+i*dest_screen_width_in_bytes+4,lpeek(strptr(tiles)+tilex*tile_width_in_bytes+tiley*(src_screen_width_in_bytes*tile_height)+i*src_screen_width_in_bytes+4) next i end sub could it be anything to do with rapinit? cheers

OK still no joy. So my source image is 48x16px = 24bytes ( 3 tiles of 16x16 ) if i set the tile height at 8px i get a map displayed but obviously all tile heights are half height. If I change the tile height to 16px it all goes horibly wrong and crashes Now as I undertsand it I shouldn't neet to change the POKES cos i'm still only doing 16px in 2 4 byte lumps. Any ideas ?

Thanks for the info GGN - the i loop was what was throwing me out i think. I'll let you know how i get on. cheers