Weeknight 'Virtual' Dev session #11, Thursday 11th February 2021, 7pm - 10pm (GMT)

[Arcadian]

As the new games and demo coding sections of the forum are currently very active, we are now hosting weeknight "Dev sessions" on Zoom, that are primarily focused on the development of new games and graphics/music demos for Acorn computers as well as development tools, emulators and debuggers.

They take place the week in-between the 2 x Tuesday night 'general' sessions on the Thursday evening, between 7pm and 10pm.

The sessions are intended for developers to share progress updates and request/offer help and feedback. We hope that these sessions will help motivate and encourage developers to see projects through to completion.

Just to be clear - these sessions are open to everyone: programmers, graphics artists and musicians, even if you've just got an interest/appreciation of - or ideas for - new games and demos, please come along for moral support - there may be opportunities to beta-test new versions of upcoming projects . There really isn't a limit to the number of places available - well, the maximum we can host in a Zoom meeting is 100 but it's unlikely we'll ever get anywhere near that figure!

If there are any issues you'd like help with - or would like to demonstrate something - please leave details in the thread and we'll add them to the lists of items to be covered.

If you are new to Zoom, forum member JudgeBeeb has written a handy guide to getting set up and logged in.

I've already sent invites out to most of the Dev Night regulars, but should anybody else want to attend - or if you haven't received the Zoom logins - please post in this thread and I will send them to you.


Agenda:

• 19.30 - 20.00 Editor for Text Compression on his Adventure skeleton (Edwardian Duck)
• 20.00 - 20.15 Jukebox Jury - Pick your favourite intro jingle to New Rally X(Tricky)
• 20.15 - 20.45 2k programming challenge suggestion (BigEd)
• 20.45 - 21.15 Atom scrolling screen concept (Kees)
• 21.15 - 21.30 Metamorphosis demo (Leonard Vettori & Kees)
• 21.30 - 21.45 Subtilis update: new error handling code (Mark D Ryan)
• 21.45 - 22.00 3D game demo (JIM)
• 22.00 - 22.30 GBBC (dudleysoft71)

Attendees:

1. Arcadian (Dave)
2. BigEd (Ed)
3. oss003 (Kees)
4. tricky (Richard)
5. dudleysoft71 (James)
6. sPhilMainwaring (Phil)
7. EdwardianDuck (Jeremy)
8. chrisn (Chris)
9. dp11 (Dominic)
10. revaldinho (Rich)
11. sarahwalker (Sarah)
12. damiensturdy (Damien)
13. JIM (James)
14. Lewis Watson
15. Leonardo Vittori

[EdwardianDuck]

Bump, just to raise awareness.

[Arcadian]

Thanks for the bump!

Would anybody like to take a little slot to chat about what they're currently working on?

[oss003]

Hi Dave,

I have a new idea for a scrolling screen on the Atom and did some testing.
Not sure if it will evolve to a game but it's a nice test ......
So I can show this ...... doesn't take a lot of time because it's just a test.

Greetings
Kees

[BigEd]

Not very far away, there's a challenge to write what you can in 2k bytes - that would be, in 2k bytes without using the OS or BASIC or anything else. I wonder - is anyone interested in that challenge?

There's a 1k game here, so that's possible. I daresay it uses some OS facilities, but perhaps in the other 1k there's room for what's needed - keyboard and sound, maybe.

[Arcadian]

This is in just over an hour!

If you'd like an invite and haven't already received one please post in this thread!

[sPhilMainwaring]

Be there or be a regular quadrilateral

[Arcadian]

Just recording the running order of agenda items, for the current (ongoing) event ...

• Editor for Text Compression on his Adventure skeleton (Edwardian Duck)
• Jukebox Jury (Tricky)
• 2k programming suggestion (BigEd)
• Atom scrolling screen concept (Kees)
• 15 minute Metamorphosis demo (Leonard Vettori & Kees)
• Subtilis update: new error handling code (Mark D Ryan)

[Chuckie]

My mate wrote a text compression routine for his Text adventure on the BBC Micro and a text wrap around. How did they squeze the hobbit into 32k? You could in theory get zork in there with 64k or disk access who know. I wrote a text adventure for muy Olevel comp sci project on the beeb!
Scot adams new who to write erudite adventure hes still doing them! Also a multi word text parcer.

[EdwardianDuck]

• Editor for Text Compression on his Adventure skeleton (Edwardian Duck)
  ...

Arguably a better description would be "an editor for adventure game text, objects, rooms etc. with text compression and code generation targeting CA65 for his adventure skeleton".

Based on taking bits of several ideas from Thursday's meeting, text compression has gone from <71% to <54% of original size, with the side effect that the word lookup dictionary is now itself compressed. There is no significant slow down in text output (obviously there is some, but not enough for me to notice).

Fun stuff to work on, if a little mind bending.

Jeremy

[BigEd]

Good result!