ZXodus][Engine

[cheveron]

My intention was to save memory as tiles in Multicolor mode take almost twice bytes in comparsion with the normal.

It's 64 bytes per tile. That's only 28 bytes more per tile. And tiles are stored in banked RAM. Plus if you're only using 2D or only using 3D you could leave one tile set out completely for an extra 16K.

Also running the games on other Spectrum modells than +2B (which I do not own) is something I want. There are Pentagon, ZS Scorpion, Chrome and other clones.

The game will run on any 128. It may glitch a little on non-ASIC 128 models. I'm planning a Pentagon release of the game I'm working on so I imagine at some point there will be a Pentagon compatible version of the ZXodus][Engine. It will be a separate build though. Why waste RAM on model detection?

There is only little amount of text, so no text compression is used after all, but if, then I will write dictionary type of text compression with on-fly unpacking, so "Prepare for attack" will be divided inty byte sequences, some representing multiple letters: "P re pa re/space/f or/space/a t ta ck": 12 bytes, while original has 18. Print was used for characters, fonts, etc, but its runtime is too big.

I'd suggest using digraph compression (which is what the ZXodus][Engine uses). There's no depacking as such, just a bit trigger for printing letter pairs, and the compression is often better than dictionary word compression. http://foro.speccy.org/viewtopic.php?f=6...aph#p33001

This sounds good. When will it be released? Is there documentation of all features online?

Well there's the sticky part. First: it's not going to be ready for some time. There's a hell of a lot of work to do on it, I'm the only one working on it, and my priority for this year is to finish SE Basic 4.1. Second: I'm probably not going to finalize it until after the game that I want to release using it is written. That's going take even longer. Third: I'm not giving it a public release. I've put all my previous efforts out there for anyone to use and in return I've been publicly vilified by people who have benefitted from my work. Therefore I am keeping the ZXodus][Engine closed source, and I will decide who gets to use it. That said I'm happy to license it to yourself and Boriel. Licensees will get full techincal support. The licenses won't cost anything, but I will expect a cut of the profits of any commercial releases.