ZombXB

[Tursi]

Kind of silly to start a new post for an update, but I was flooding the main one.

 

Here's my update to Zom-BXB... I took the Farmer Owen and his Zombie-filled fields motif and ran with it (except I am not good enough to make a nice field-like backdrop like some of you!) I've also improved the frame rate quite a lot (I feel), added a difficulty curve (though it's a little slow to kick in), and upped the graphical resolution. (The only reason I did Magnify 2 sprites the first time around was because I was saving memory - not necessary.)

 

Although I used a lot of it for fluff, the game's up to 30 lines of code and 10 lines of data. I never would have thought I'd spend so much time on a 40 line program. But here you go...

 

Also updated the story, and the archive includes the farmer pic (it's adapted from some old clipart I have on supposedly royalty-free CDs ), and the slightly 'commented' source code in text form.

 

I did a couple of unusual tricks to speed it up. Besides lots of shuffling around of stuff in the main loop, I removed random numbers completely by pre-generating a handful and dropping them in an array. I experimented with some advanced theories, like turning off the console interrupt with a CALL LOAD (and even running the sound generator manually), but that turned out to have a rather small difference in speed here. Unless sprites are actually MOVING, stopping the interrupt doesn't give much CPU time back. (In this version of XB.. in the early ones it did.)

 

 

ZombXB.zip

[sometimes99er]

Hehe, very nice. Pretty hectic. And I like the "on error".

[marc.hull]

I never would have thought I'd spend so much time on a 40 line program. But here you go...

 

 

It's Owen's special 40 line XB crack that he got us all hooked on

[The Codex]

Ha ha ha, that's hilarious Tursi! I love the reworking.

[Tursi]

Hehe, very nice. Pretty hectic. And I like the "on error".

 

Hehe... meant to mention all my tricks in the first post. Using ON ERROR let me save some time in the loops to read the data... by ordering the data so that the end of a block would cause an error to occur, and having that just go to the next block, I didn't need to hard code the size of the char tables or write code to look for a terminator.

 

Of course, when there were real bugs, they were hard to track down, as they'd just appear as characters not being redefined. (Or in a few cases infinite loops where it kept branching back to the last ON ERROR target).