Prog8 library for frame-based applications (read: games/demos)

[Djehuti]

Thanks. I like the idea of the aardvark, I might use that. I did think about leaving a dead ant on the screen in another color for a few frames, and that might be a fun extension too. I was also thinking that I could make new ants orange until their first move, to highlight them when they pop up. My son has also correctly pointed out that I shouldn't let two ants occupy the same space or spawn on top of each other. Maybe I'll make him fork the repo and implement that feature.

Or I could show the mouse, and let the user click on an ant to squash it. Or let the user interactively adjust parameters like spawn rates and movement speeds...

But I actually wrote the framer to help me port a game, so I should probably do that and come back to the ants after a while. The game will also be open source. (It already is, but in its current form it's a faithful port of a 40-year old BASIC game that fits on an unexpanded VIC-20: https://github.com/djehuti/monsternest/.)

[Edmond D]

Ants seems like is a good demo to show how to use the library. I think extending the ant demo might be best done by those who take the time to invest in learning how to use the library.

That frees you up for your original goal of porting your early program to use the library. Perhaps this task will help find some issues and give you ideas on how to extend it based on a more directed project.

I lookmforward to reading about the progress.

[mortarm]

And for music I was just going to use a bool...

What's a bool?

[Djehuti]

What's a bool?

I meant that for music I will just have a "playing/not" to skip the frame function when the music is paused (as opposed to taking it out of the frame task list).

In asm this is a byte, but the only thing that's important about this byte is whether or not it's 0. In prog8 that's bool.

[Djehuti]

Ants seems like is a good demo to show how to use the library. I think extending the ant demo might be best done by those who take the time to invest in learning how to use the library.

That sounds like a fine idea to me.

That frees you up for your original goal of porting your early program to use the library. Perhaps this task will help find some issues and give you ideas on how to extend it based on a more directed project.

Indeed that's what I've done the last few days, and am using it to effectively reimplement the game. And I've come up with a couple of extensions while doing that.

I look forward to reading about the progress.

Thanks! It's gratifying that folks are interested.