>It's quite easy to visualize graphics using monospaced fonts when you use a
>. to indicate a 0 (i.e. transparent) and a character like X to indicate a 1
>(a visible sprite pixel). 1 and 0 are too similar in contrast that it makes
>it considerably more difficult.
>
>In my comments in DD I wind up repeating my bit pattern using those
>characters just so I can see what I'm doing.
>
>There was a thread on this a long time ago, must have been 2+ years ago and
>the consensus then was that it was a good idea to add.
Yes, on reflection I think this is probably useful.
How about incorporating automatic playfield knowledge, too? Perhaps allow the system to encode any quoted string with spaces as a bit-pattern, separated into groups of 8-bit wide bytes - and, in the case of a 40-bit wide string, producing 6 bytes (or 5 packed bytes, even) representing that playfield in correct PF0/PF1/PF2 format.
something like...
PIC "X X XXXX"
PIC "XXX X X"
PIC " X X X"
PIC " X X X"
PIC "XXX XXXX"
for sprites, and
PIC "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
PIC "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX"
PIC "XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
PIC "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
for playfield?
X could be any non-space character (a 'solid' character comes to mind). Quotes are necessary so that the width of the 'picture' can be determined. I'd anticipate a few modifiers to the command (eg: allowing a bottom-up definition to be drawn right-side-up, but actually assembled upside-down, packing the PF0 half-bytes into a single byte, defining half a playfield (for mirrored use), etc).
Input welcome.
Cheers
A
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
