Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24454571-20140204220440

Alright... So, my goal is ultimately to be productive in using PTC. I want to be able to understand it as much as possible, so another one of my goals will be to utilize as many commands as I can, in the most proficient and creative manners conceivable.

In this thread I expect to be coming up with simple ideas that have a lot of room to be expanded upon, or altered in various ways, and hopefully I'll recieve some pretty interesting responses. Mostly I'm looking for detailed descriptions of how functions of coding work and can be used. I'm also interested in making use of the programs such as CHRED etc, and I definitely plan on studying them later, along with the sample programs and games that other people have built as I begin to consolidate my new understanding of PTC.

One more thing that I'd like to mention which I'd really like to learn in this thread is sound design in PTC; I've witnessed some 'cover'/remakes of classic games that also include some of their signature sounds, so I'm curious about how one may be able to manipulate sound in PTC to recreate such kinds of sounds, including the sounds of the instruments built into it.

I'm relatively new to PTC & coding in general, so the code that I'm most proud of creating on my own so far is this example, which demonstrates some of my research:

FOR S=1 TO 15 COLOR S:?S:VSYNC 7 NEXT

So, now that you have been humbled, I'd like to delve deeper into a concept that I can't reasonably fashion together myself in the present time, but I'm going to attempt to explain how I imagine that the program would be put together and I would appreciate some responses with answers or ideas of your own.

I want to make a room with a hole that spawns in a random location, and a character that moves around and can fall through the holes. I will consider this to be a lesson in movement, collision detection and animation. Since I want to make the experience very sublime and atmospheric, my goal is to use programs like CHRED, SCRED, whichever are most practical, to include my own graphics with consolidated color themes.

I imagine collision detection may make use of comparison operators, or a built in collision detection command that, for example, could detect that a character is 67% within the sprite of the hole before allowing them to 'fall through' - something that I read a little bit about while researching smileBASIC - and perhaps some 'grid' system that utilizes an Array and Data set of 0's and 1's to define boarders - another things that I've seen used before, but I am certainly curious about what kinds of alternatives there are to these things, and I'm also interested in learning how to use them (Arrays, DATA, READ, etc) myself as well. I also imagine the space of the grids aligning/corresponding with the size of the sprite, divided by the space of the screen. And also also also, I know that the RND command picks a number between 0 and 1 less than (your variable).

Now, I also want the falling through the hole to come across as being vivid and animated, but I think that I want the process to be a little bit more extravagant than in say a Zelda game where this is merely expressed with an animation - I think that I would also like to make use of screen panning to show this, requiring that two levels exist at once (until you the 'landing' event occurs on the new level), and I also think that it would be logical that if a hole randomly spawns underneath of the hole that you just fell through that you should keep falling, and while you're falling your movement is disabled.

So, the falling event is described as thus: the hole is set to the furthest back layer, the player is set to the layer above that, and the 'old' level is set to the front-most layer; the 'background'/stage then begins panning up, revealing one blank space in between it and the 'new' level beneath it, and the scene continues panning until the character 'lands' on the same square as the level above, which then determines if there is another hole before granting control back to the player.

I think this is a neat, simple idea, that has a lot to teach to beginners aspiring to utilize PTC to make games, and it also leaves a lot of room for development such as implementing AI monsters and various abilities/attacks\etc. for your character to perform, which, are things that I would certainly like to move on to if I recieve some positive answers in this thread.

If you have any advice on how to use programs like CHRED/SCRED (in conjunction with commands like SPANIM), or how to use important commands such as GOSUB, RETURN, DATA, READ, DIM, etc. or how you think this idea should be constructed, altered, improved upon, or even what you'd like to make or do, please include it in your response. 