[Exophase]

Lachesis, on 17 November 2010 - 10:38 AM, said:

The proposed string indexing and subroutine command would be kind of cumbersome to type out -- I'd prefer stuff more like

$str.n --> $str[n]
$str.length --> stays the same
$str+x#y --> $str[x,y]
#subroutine --> sub "subroutine"

The idea was to avoid syntax in places where it's difficult or expensive to parse, particular if it means parsing at runtime instead of compiletime, something which has pretty far reaching performance impacts. It's easier to limit the amount of syntax, and in MZX's case it's a good idea to make it very clear what is and isn't part of a name and can be generated at runtime.

Lachesis said:

I'm also not sure what the problem with set "$string" "string" is.

The problem is that parsing strings by name can be ambiguous at compile time, because names in MZX are dynamic. It's better to make strings distinct by context and not by name.

Lachesis said:

As for loops, I think the best thing would be to keep the existing functionality the same but also add for and (do?) while.

I wanted to discourage people from using MZX's loops because they suck, but the truth is it would have been bad to pollute converted code with this sort of junk. Maybe should have been implemented as macros.. just so long as it doesn't waste bytecode operations.

[zzo38]

smilymzx, on 17 November 2010 - 06:13 PM, said:

Then a program to extract all ZZT (and SuperZZT?) boards to proper BRD files with DOS names can be in order? (ZBRDEX - ZZT Board Extractor, could be a name for one),

And these other utilities: BRD2ANS, BRD2MZM, ANS2MZM, and MZM2ANS, We should call these five: MZCNVPAK (MegaZeux Converter Pack)

Yes, If you can post it here, or at least submit it to ''Other Software Releases'' forums

Thanks you for these suggestions! I have already started writing the ANS2MZM and MZM2ANS, now I can write the others too. I could also write ZBRDEX, extracting boards from a ZZT world, and BRD2MZM (both board-type and layer-type MZMs; although ANS2MZM and MZM2ANS work only with layer-type MZMs and not board-type MZMs). I will post them to "MegaZeux Development" or "Other Software Development".

This post has been edited by zzo38: 18 November 2010 - 09:09 PM

[Lachesis]

This is actually a feature that's in PZX that zzo mentioned to me, and I thought it'd be a nice addition to the main line. In the board editor, there's no way to directly access what's beneath a CustomBlock or Robot IIRC, so my suggestion is to have SHIFT+INSERT be able to copy what's underneath to the current selection and have SHIFT+SPACE put what's in the selection beneath what the cursor is pointing at, if applicable.

[Lachesis]

I find the V (View) functionality kind of tedious and bothersome. Can it center the view around the cursor instead of jumping to 0,0 or at least have a faster method of scrolling?

[nooodl]

A "log" command to write strings to the console for logging would be nice for debugging purposes.

[ajs]

I think adding another command for this is _probably_ overkill, but the idea isn't a bad one. How about printing all comment commands out to the console? We could decorate the debugging with the robot name, timestamp, anything else people find useful.

One issue with this is that the comment command has somewhat gone away in debytecode. All comments that aren't of the form . "@robot_name" get converted to // comment but the command does still exist for the robot renaming feature. Since I don't think it can go away, maybe we can overload the comment command with another special prefix for log statements (since logging needs to persist into bytecode, and comments are removed from the bytecode stream in debytecode).

Another problem with this would be that console output is redirected to a file on Windows (stderr.txt/stdout.txt). If this debugging is always on, these files could get quite big, which probably isn't desirable. One workaround would be to only print the messages out in test mode, or perhaps make it a config option.

--ajs.

[Sai'ke]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that take away the ability to print the contents of variables and such in logged files? I reckon some kind of crudely formatted string (or expression if you will) would be the best use of such logging really. Would it be possible to redirect the * command for debugging purposes?

[ajs]

The problem with * is that you would have to manually remove the logging from your game when you had debugged it, or you couldn't use the message line for other non-debugging things. This probably isn't a huge deal, as you can simply comment the lines out, but it's a bit less flexible.

Translating the expressions isn't something normally done for a comment but we can easily do it for specially formatted log comments. Just as you have . "@something" you could have . "+somethingelse&a&" which would be evaluated before being printed out.

--ajs.

[Old-Sckool]

I kind of want to be able to log branches/failed branches on things like If and Loop for statements. Like for If statements, it could record the actual statement, the values of all the counters used inside the statement, and which label (if any) was jumped to. Maybe something like writing a prefix that will log info either all the time, on a branch, or when branching fails. It would have to account for Rel prefixes though.


Oh, I also had some other suggestions. I want the ability store all of my save files in one directory, instead of them being inside their respective game folder. This is mostly because of the fact that save files are very large for even the most simple games (a while ago I deleted over 100mbs of just mzx saves), and my mzx archive is somewhat messy. If you do this, make it so that that the default save name shares the current world file name.

Actually, throw in a folder dedicated to screenshots too. I can't imagine how many times I've accidentally hit the screenshot button while editing.

[Lachesis]

for f in $(find mzx_folder | grep ".*sav$"); do rm $f; done

Though this isn't necessarily a bad idea, especially the screenshots bit. I hate it when that crap clutters up my game development folders.

[ajs]

I think all your debugging ideas are good, but they're features of a real robotic debugger like Revvy's abandoned robotic debugger. This was able to insert breakpoints, single step, and showed all counters and their values at all times.

My proposal is really quite different -- poor man's "printf" debugging. Much easier to implement but more difficult to use. You can still debug your examples, it just requires more lines of code.

Adding special output directories for SAVs and screenshots is a good idea. The issue is finding a writable location where mkdir() is guaranteed to work. I guess most people on Windows run MZX from the directory extracted by their archiver, which is owned by their user by default and is therefore writable. But you can imagine that if MegaZeux had been copied to program files by another user, or you're using MZX on another platform (Linux, OS X spring to mind) the MZX binary directories aren't user-writable.

Maybe it's time to embrace AppData or Documents on Windows and dot directories on UNIX-ish platforms?

--ajs.

[Lachesis]

While we're on the topic, can the screenshot key be changed to ALT+F12 or such? I hit that key quite often by accident ^^;

[Lachesis]

Pixel precise sprites a la Logicow's draw command. Megazeux needs some fresh new stuff, I think this would be an easy way to get new people more interested in MZX, not to mention, make pixel precision less of a god-awful pain in the ass, and it wouldn't require huge world format changes like more chars and colors would require. While de-sucking Robotic is pretty important, I think new functionality like this needs to be looked at more seriously now, while MZX still has a community.

[Lachesis]

Create New Folder button when saving files

[Dr Lancer-X]

alt-N really that hard to type lachesis?

[Lachesis]

that keys typing press entering buttons combination does not do a thing Lancer-X stop making up features >:|

edit: oh, I had to press it with a directory selected, that wasn't very obvious. I didn't even know about this nnnnnnnnnnnnrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhh

This post has been edited by Lachesis: 14 January 2011 - 02:35 AM

[Lachesis]

Parentheses auto-highlighting in Robotic Editor -- if you put your cursor beneath a parenthesis, it highlights that parenthesis and its corresponding opening/closing parenthesis.

[Lachesis]

15:29:15 <Lachesis> CHAR, BYTE, and CHAR_BYTE really sux
15:29:24 <Lachesis> should be all
15:29:37 <Lachesis> chr&CHAR&,&BYTE&

[Old-Sckool]

I made my own "fork" of megazeux, and added my own bunch of counter functions (to get the hang of C and finding my way through the mzx source) with varying degrees of hackishness...

sprN_active - if not zero, the sprite's position is automatically updated each cycle based on my new sprite counters (probably not the best name for it though)
spr_div - sets how many sub-divisions a char is broken down into when using my new sprite counters (which currently can be set < 1 because I suck)
sprN_xx/yy - just more precise versions of sprN_x,y.
sprN_velx/y - Set's the velocity in which the sprite will travel every cycle
sprN_accx/y - set's how fast the sprite will accelerate each cycle (automatically updating the velocity counters)

Having just written that down, I sort of just realized that you can't really just let megazeux update the sprite's positions on their own automatically, since there would be no way to manage collisions on your own, but replacing the sprN_active for an update function would work just as well. Also, if we were to implement these counters (or whatever they would be translated into in debyte), i think we should implement something that allows you to test for collision along the path that the sprite moves along.

Also, I was thinking about how you could make it easier to draw pixel precise stuff without something like logitech's draw command. My idea is to make a second charset that can be written to, but not drawn (much like the vlayer), and then be able to draw whole chars from that set to a specific point on to the charset in a way that's similar to Char_X, Char_Y, PIXEL, but char specific. To tired to figure out how it'd work out though.

Lastly, there needs to be a function that lets you write a single char/color to a block of Overlay/vlayer, because loading a mzm to do just that every cycle can't be fast...

[xinexix]

If this has been mentioned anywhere on the forums before I couldn't find it.

The original editor "show" functions are kind of crappy. Particularly "show robot" is worthless if the character for the robot is the exclamation point, or if the robot's foreground and background color are the same. Not sure how difficult it would be, but these are my suggestions for improving it, with #3 being the best functionality IMO.

1) Use the mzx_default exclamation point when toggling all robots' character. (This doesn't address the color problem, and requires extra work to reveal exclamation point robots if the loaded character set's exclamation point IS the default.)
2) Have the robots toggle between more than just 2 characters. (Still doesn't address the color problem.)
3) Forget changing characters and change color instead, but change amongst more than the robots chosen color and some fixed color. For example, cycle all robots color from c0f -> c1e -> c2d -> c3c -> c4b -> you get the point.

[allison]

Lachesis, on 27 December 2010 - 03:17 PM, said:

While we're on the topic, can the screenshot key be changed to ALT+F12 or such? I hit that key quite often by accident ^^;

Come to think of it, why not add assignable keys? Then everyone would be happy in the key combination respect.

[Lachesis]

end sam like "sound.wav"

Would make my life a little easier.

. "### SOUND EFFECTS ###"
: "#soundFX"
loop start
if "SFX&loopcount&" = 0 "sfxSkip"
end sam like "&SFX('loopcount')&"
sam 0 "&$SFXPATH&&SFX('loopcount')&"
set "SFX&loopcount&" 0
: "sfxSkip"
loop for "('SFXNUM'-1)"
goto "#RETURN"

. "we don't want any .WAVs to play"
end sam like ".wav"

Or, something that would allow me to toss the end sam bit altogether; this would ignore the sound request if that sound is already playing when the command is executed.

sam 0 "sound.ogg" if not playing

[RyanThunder]

So, sprites can only be 255 x 255...

Any possible way to expand their maximum size in the future?

This post has been edited by RyanThunder: 18 April 2011 - 04:08 AM

[flarn2006]

Add an option to specify a "template" world in config.txt. That way, when you create a new world, it automatically starts with a copy of that world. For instance, I would have it have a 72x19 board and viewport, and have something in the global robot to give you infinite ammo.

[flarn2006]

RyanThunder, on 18 April 2011 - 12:08 AM, said:

So, sprites can only be 255 x 255...

Any possible way to expand their maximum size in the future?

You're kidding, right?

[Lachesis]

max&A&,&B& and min&A&,&B& would save me a lot of unnecessary and ugly expression constructs.

[zzo38]

Lachesis, on 30 May 2011 - 07:40 AM, said:

max&A&,&B& and min&A&,&B& would save me a lot of unnecessary and ugly expression constructs.

Just for information, my own MegaZeux versions supports a kind of MAX and MIN functions, they are the { and } operators in expressions.

But you are correct, it is in fact a useful things to have. (It is also useful to use both at once)

[Dr Lancer-X]

My version of MegaZeux also has MIN and MAX, although they are types and you calculate MIN and MAX by putting down a MIN or MAX type of X colour Y param and the min (or max) of X and Y is used as the char for that object.

Of course, you can also define your own MIN and MAX with lambda spinning guns but I don't advise this because calculations can be slow. Plus you need to use lambda tigers for currying as min and max are binary or even variadic.

[Lachesis]

How do your lambda spinning guns work? You almost have me sold.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Lachesis, on 31 May 2011 - 12:35 PM, said:

How do your lambda spinning guns work? You almost have me sold.

They work like normal spinning guns, except when arranged in sets of 3x5 letters to form a word, in which that word becomes, when henceforth used as a counter, a call consisting of everything on the board in the same rows as the 'word' of lambda spinning guns. Execution continues on this mini world until there are no more bears, at which point the number of gems is returned to the caller.