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And selecting an area with your cursor as well

Hum, there's still some graphics issues...

I'm SUPER happy to announce that my pathfinding algorithm works for 99%! It uses A* to find the path, and once it hits the end tile, it just stops, rather than doing the reverse, to find the actual path in the closed list. The speed is now 28K cycles for this path:



Not that bad, I would say

Here is the algorithm, any optimization is welcome

Very interesting !

Good news! I decided to pick this up again, and I've made good progress with the graphics. Luckily I found the complete spriteset, so I've pretty much finished all the graphics! There's not much to show though, but I've changed the entire codebase, added all the graphics, and improved some things. I have good hopes the speed will be above 10FPS, which was my original target. This week and the next year (heh, that sounds cool ) I will work on displaying the map, buildings, units, and after that the actions, like fighting, moving and whatever. Stay tuned!



As you see here, there's a black border around the map. I will write some code to make it pretty much fullscreen, except the top bar with the resources and population, and a bar at the bottom with some key actions.

Here's some more general information about the sizes and whatever:

• All the buildings and unit for each age will be stored in 1 appvar (I still need to check if this is possible for age III, since that age has too much buildings). This means you always have transfer at least 4 appvars
• There will be another appvar with all the standard sprites which is needed in every age, such as cursors, foundation, rubble etc. This is the 5th appvar.
• The last appvar contains the sprites for the main menu, which is 34kB in total. This is the last and 6th appvar. In order to get AoCE running, you need to transfer 6 appvars and 1 program to the calc No worries though, everything can be put into the archive, such that it won't take up RAM.
• Looking at this pastebin, you see that age 4 will take up the most RAM, in total 83686 + 37591 = 121277 bytes. This simply doesn't fit into free RAM, excluding 32768 bytes for the map data, all the units, and AoCE itself which will be around 30kB I hope. Thus, AoCE will always backup RAM and use full RAM, which should be enough. I've spend 2 days to get this fully working, and it finally works (kinda). Here are some screenshots of the process
  
• Meanwhile, the main menu is already fixed, and I still need to add some code to load sprites from appvars to the RAM.

And that's it! I'm working super hard to get everything working so stay tuned. If you really want to follow the process, join #aoce-dev on EFnet

that's some nice work

Uh oh, I need help I don't really know how to draw all the units. I can't draw them after the tilemap, because then they will be displayed in front of everything, which is clearly not right. I can't draw them before the tilemap either, then the tiles will overdraw them. So the only solution is to display them together with the tilemap... which is almost impossible. Since they are constant moving, my idea was to put all the units in an array, with their coordinates, health, attack points etc.. but how do I draw a unit at a certain tile? Going through the entire list all the time is way too slow

Time for a quick update! I selected and edited all the sprites for the units AoCE has, and managed to fit it in 2 (full) appvars. This means that in the final game you need to transfer 8 appvars + AOCE to your calc Luckily everything can be put in the archive, which means you won't lose RAM. Outside of that, if AoCE crashes for some reason (which might be very likely once I start adding stuff..), there is no memory leak, and your entire RAM is saved.

AoCE is now an app!



I entirely switched to fasmg, which was a horrible move, but now it's much better. You don't need spasm anymore to build it, just download the C toolchain.