[Lachesis]

Wow, that's useful! When's it coming out?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Once I get the hardware breakpoint nonlocal jump command working reliably on most operating systems / hardware combinations.

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Would it be possible to implement a system in MegaZeux where an incomplete game would repeatedly notify their creator to "FINISH ME FINISH ME FINISH ME DAMMIT" until it's finally completed?

[smilymzx]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 31 May 2011 - 07:08 PM, said:

Would it be possible to implement a system in MegaZeux where an incomplete game would repeatedly notify their creator to "FINISH ME FINISH ME FINISH ME DAMMIT" until it's finally completed?

That is a great idea, Since there may be another ''demo curse'' in the future.

Hope that will be there for the next version!

[Frobozz]

smilymzx, on 01 June 2011 - 01:11 AM, said:

That is a great idea, Since there may be another ''demo curse'' in the future.

That requires a userbase that isn't just Lachesis going around posting in threads in an attempt to get the community moving.

[Lachesis]

Hey, that reminds me, it's about time to go around posting in semi-dead journals again

[T-Bone]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 31 May 2011 - 10:08 PM, said:

Would it be possible to implement a system in MegaZeux where an incomplete game would repeatedly notify their creator to "FINISH ME FINISH ME FINISH ME DAMMIT" until it's finally completed?

Or... when you load up a MegaZeux game for edit it shows the DATE AND TIME last edited!

[Lachesis]

A thought for the far, far future: being able to rename the local counters to more descriptive things, or better yet, making all counters local and adding a GLOBAL command for setting non-local counters (or the reverse, a LOCAL command to assign local variables).

[T-Bone]

A big problem that I've always had with MegaZeux is when i mistakenly make a horrible loop and can't get out it. Not even pressing ESC helps. For example if I have a loop that contains a ASK command that returns it back to the command again over and over. Pressing ESC doesn't help. Is it possible to create a combination of keys pressed at the same time to instantly quit your game? Perhaps this would be best for while your testing your game in the editor.

Basically what I'm asking for is a way to Force Quit... out of the editor while in test mode. If a quit menu could be prompted on top of all other windows... that'd be nice. Or an instant escape.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 03 June 2011 - 04:57 AM

[zzo38]

T-Bone, on 02 June 2011 - 09:54 PM, said:

A big problem that I've always had with MegaZeux is when i mistakenly make a horrible loop and can't get out it. Not even pressing ESC helps. For example if I have a loop that contains a ASK command that returns it back to the command again over and over. Pressing ESC doesn't help. Is it possible to create a combination of keys pressed at the same time to instantly quit your game? Perhaps this would be best for while your testing your game in the editor.

Basically what I'm asking for is a way to Force Quit... out of the editor while in test mode. If a quit menu could be prompted on top of all other windows... that'd be nice. Or an instant escape.

Something I am also interested in and have been trying to make something like it. Maybe CTRL+BREAK should do it? Unfortunately in the program there are many loops and subroutines so it can get complicated to do. Maybe setjmp/longjmp would help? But, then, there is still a few problems to deal with in those cases. There is also Robotic Debugger, I do not know whether or not that will help you with this.

This post has been edited by zzo38: 03 June 2011 - 11:44 PM

[Lachesis]

This is one of the most long-requested features, and I'm sure there's a reason it's not implemented. I'd like to hear what AJS has to say.

edit: mostly my use for it is when I have the commands set stupidly higher than they ever need to be though

This post has been edited by Lachesis: 04 June 2011 - 01:44 AM

[zzo38]

Lachesis, on 03 June 2011 - 05:58 PM, said:

This is one of the most long-requested features, and I'm sure there's a reason it's not implemented.

Probably the same (or similar) reason as why I could not implement it, I guess

[Lachesis]

While I'm at it, I might as well ask for an alternate string FREAD mode that sets a string to the contents between FREAD_POS (inclusive) and the next endline character(s) (non-inclusive), and sets FREAD_POS to the first char after that/those endline character(s). Seriously, asterisks

[zzo38]

Lachesis, on 03 June 2011 - 11:47 PM, said:

While I'm at it, I might as well ask for an alternate string FREAD mode that sets a string to the contents between FREAD_POS (inclusive) and the next endline character(s) (non-inclusive), and sets FREAD_POS to the first char after that/those endline character(s). Seriously, asterisks

I agree!! Do you know? My own version of MegaZeux has that, too. Set "STRING_TERM" to a nonzero value which indicates what character you want the terminator to be. (But PZX-mode has to be enabled)

[Dr Lancer-X]

My version also has that, but it is based on the # of NMovingWalls, where X is the number of NMovingWalls on the board, the terminator is X & 0xFF ^ 0x2A, to allow for backwards compatibility with existing games that use fread but don't have any NMovingWalls.

While this feature is useful, I think it's more important that mainline MZX merge my version's support for reading directories, which is facilitated through an awk-like language available only to signs (unfortunately scroll support is broken for some reason.)

[Lachesis]

My game can only have SMovingWalls It's already using NMovingWalls for the player health status abacus

[Dr Lancer-X]

Lachesis, on 06 June 2011 - 10:19 AM, said:

My game can only have SMovingWalls It's already using NMovingWalls for the player health status abacus

That's fine, too- you can change the char ID of the whirlpool graphics to effect a substitution cypher on tile IDs for these extended commands. SMovingWalls might be out, but you could substitute with ThickWeb. Unfortunately this will also make your fish act like runners and there's no workaround for this at the moment.

[Revvy]

zzo38, on 03 June 2011 - 07:42 PM, said:

There is also Robotic Debugger, I do not know whether or not that will help you with this.

My debugger would help if you could get it to open. Unfortunately, doing so requires hitting keys, which fails in the same way.

[Dr Lancer-X]

MZX at least processes SDL events during an endless Ask etc. loop so there's no reason an 'abort' combination couldn't be detected to instantly close the current game. During an infinite loop of Robotic, though, there's nothing. Could always add something to poll events every million commands or every second or so.

Doesn't bother me personally because I just kill MZX from the task manager and reload the __test world

[Lachesis]

Megazeux getting stuck in busy loops like that is caused primarily because somebody spread the great idea of using (-1>>1) as commands, I wonder who that'd be

Capping commands at 1,000,000 would probably fix that easy enough. The game would run slow enough to tell the developer something's screwy, but not so slow that it'd be impossible to get out.

I personally haven't had a busyloop freeze in ages, and I still use (-1>>1), though. I think the self-punishment of using (-1>>1) taught me not to create busyloops.

[zzo38]

Lancer-X, on 05 June 2011 - 07:17 PM, said:

MZX at least processes SDL events during an endless Ask etc. loop so there's no reason an 'abort' combination couldn't be detected to instantly close the current game.

But it still has various subroutine calls internally in MegaZeux when that might happen. In case of ASK command and so on, though, you could have a key event to close dialog boxes and set a signal which terminates the game. Endless robotic loops could have a similar thing too but there is no event to tell you that. What I guess you could have, though, is to make SIGUSR1 to tell all dialog boxes to close and set the signal for Robotic codes to stop executing (but I don't know if Windows has SIGUSR1).

[T-Bone]

Its actually starting to get a bit annoying lol I might even report it as a bug or issue. Because I did another retarded loop... by accident and this time i was using the % <- text box command. Just like the ASK command its near impossible to get out of if your stuck in a cycle 1 fast loop.

Be nice if there was some way of aborting a bad robotic loop. I'm just really bad at predicting bad loops from according before i go into testing. I often have to use Control ALT delete to get out of >_<

[ajs]

Apart from zzo's observation, another thing which makes this hard to fix is that MZX doesn't just have one event loop -- it has one for the editor, one for the game, one for input boxes and dialogues, etc. Why you can't escape out of a loop of ASKs is simply that the yes_no dialog chomps the ESC KEY_DOWN (dismissing the dialog) which means the main loop doesn't see the ESC itself. But I can probably fix this.

As other people have commented, there's really no straightforward way to handle the infinite robotic loop. If control never returns to the event loop, there's no way to handle the pending event.

A modern GUI application would probably run all keyboard processing in a thread and sprinkle the "model" with locking. This way you could always break out. But I'd rather not introduce a thread into a single-threaded application[1].

--ajs.

[1] Not quite true because SDL audio processing is threaded and on some platforms we have other threads.

[iamgreaser]

A nice-to-have thing: MPX/XI2 (Multi Pointer X / XInput 2) support. Odds of that are very low.

Perhaps direct joystick support (as opposed to just the joystick-to-key mapping thing) could be useful instead?

[Old-Sckool]

Pretty sure I mentioned the infinite loop thing like... 4 years ago on irc when I accidentally set a saved player position in line with an out of bounds trigger, so that RESTORE PLAYER POSITION # would be called endlessly.

[Jeep Dragon]

To satisfy the wants that some people have for expanding the number of chars in the char set, would implementing a size 10 array for each char be difficult?

Example: For each char in the char editor you could press keys 0-9 to toggle between copies of edits for that char to basically store up to 10 different renditions of that char (having 0 as the default index).

In the code, you could do something like:

char 'E' 1

to get the char rendition in slot 1 for that char.

Of course have char 'E' 0 mean the same as char 'E' for backwards compatibility.

Something like this could reduce the requirements for char edit commands and some of the need for creating and swapping multiple .chr files.

If storing 10 slots for each char in actual .chr files would be difficult to implement, would it be easier just to have slots 1-9 for each char stored in the .mzx file itself and let the swapping of .chr files only overwrite all the slot 0s for the chars?

This is not something to nag or write home about. Just a suggestion that could add a more editor-friendly approach to heavy use of animations of multiple chars without the need for char edit commands or sacrificing char real estate.

[RyanThunder]

flarn2006, on 21 May 2011 - 11:56 PM, said:

You're kidding, right?

No, I'm not. Try it yourself.

[zzo38]

Jeep Dragon, on 08 June 2011 - 05:22 PM, said:

To satisfy the wants that some people have for expanding the number of chars in the char set, would implementing a size 10 array for each char be difficult? ..... Something like this could reduce the requirements for char edit commands and some of the need for creating and swapping multiple .chr files. .....

As it turns out, my version of MegaZeux can do something like that. But it can be used only for animations and for overlays. It doesn't work like you have mentioned. To do animation, use the CHARANIM command inside of the EV.GLOBAL event. To do with overlay, set the value of "OVERLAY_MODE" counter to 17 (for board-relative overlays) or 18 (for viewport-relative overlays).

(Lancer-X's version also has these kind of things but in an extremely crazy way. Or maybe it does not implement these things at all and I guessed wrong.)

[zzo38]

ajs, on 07 June 2011 - 01:56 AM, said:

Apart from zzo's observation, another thing which makes this hard to fix is that MZX doesn't just have one event loop -- it has one for the editor, one for the game, one for input boxes and dialogues, etc. Why you can't escape out of a loop of ASKs is simply that the yes_no dialog chomps the ESC KEY_DOWN (dismissing the dialog) which means the main loop doesn't see the ESC itself. But I can probably fix this. .....

I realized these things. In UNIX you could probably use SIGUSR1 to set some flag that tells the Robotic loop to stop and the game running loop to stop. But Windows doesn't have that, and I am not sure what to do about that.

[zzo38]

RyanThunder, on 17 April 2011 - 09:08 PM, said:

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

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

That is already more than twice as large (in both dimensions) as the screen. Why do you ever need larger sprites than that?