Foray - XB compiled game idea

[Bones-69]

1 hour ago, retrodroid said:

 

Anyway, all I'm saying @Bones-69 is that you can solve your performance problems and meet your own goals with your project by using Assembly Language.  Depending on your background, you might find it more approachable than you expect.  I know I did. 

 

I tried once, a few years ago. I sourced myself some TI assembly books and started reading. None of it was intuitive compared to my current knowledge. I literally did not comprehend a single thing I was reading and nothing was falling into place. I guess I gave up within just a few days. I've been a TI guy in one form or another for over 40 years and would love to learn Assembler. But the honest truth is - I just don't think I am intelligent enough.

 

 

 

 

[Bones-69]

[retrodroid]

3 minutes ago, Bones-69 said:

 

I tried once, a few years ago. I sourced myself some TI assembly books and started reading. None of it was intuitive compared to my current knowledge. I literally did not comprehend a single thing I was reading and nothing was falling into place. I guess I gave up within just a few days. I've been a TI guy in one form or another for over 40 years and would love to learn Assembler. But the honest truth is - I just don't think I am intelligent enough.

 

 

 

 

Well I can't agree with you, I'm afraid! 🙂 

 

Anyone who can produce the types of character art and game concepts (not to mention the math required to implement it) as you have in this thread alone is plenty capable of learning AL.  The thing is, it's actually, simpler in some ways, than a more complex feature-rich XB environment. There are only a couple dozen different "commands" (operands) and in reality, you can get by with maybe 1/3 of them for most things. The trick is to have a conceptual model of what you are doing that is quite different from Basic. For example, instead of "call sprite()" to initialize a sprite, you add its attributes to the "Sprite Descriptor Table" section of VRAM (video memory) so the graphics chip will find it there on its next vsync cycle and draw it for you. So to some extent, you have to "think like the computer" a bit. Your code will work best as a state-machine (think game play loop), generally executed every 1/60th of a second (or 1/50th on PAL). So you are coding incremental changes that will happen 60 times a second. It's a different mindset for sure, and of course, almost everything is a hex number.  

 

Other than the Compute book, I haven't referenced those books of yours in many many years. The Compute book does have examples that show how to make colors, char defs, sprites etc.  It would be nice if there was a tutorial series that started with extremely simple examples, like implementing a simple loop to increment a number (for/next equiv), stuff like that so you could get the gist of how the same concepts you are very familiar with in XB can be implemented in AL. 

 

In any case, it's certainly not for everyone, you do need a relatively high tolerance for writing what seems like a LOT of code to accomplish things that one statement would have done for you in XB. 

 

[+TheBF]

46 minutes ago, Bones-69 said:

I think the issue is not you but the fact that learning Assembler on a micro-computer requires understanding of the underlying hardware and what that hardware does, how it interconnects and generally a great deal of stuff about the guts of the machine. 

So it's not just a "computer language".

I bet none of these books gave you that underlying information so the "language" part had the context you needed make sense of it.

 

My 2 cents.

 

 

 

 

[tmop69]

@Bones-69 since you've started this new game concept, does this means that your attempt of making Beamrider (Beamrider) is abandoned?

[ti99iuc]

oh yes, @Bones-69 had very nice games concept and I also would love to know about this one platform like, please :p 
and also if there are updates for the nice Grotto Escape, and there are also another couples of your nice game concept that now I can't find the links.
Really hope you will finish these nice games