Hello everyone,

I'm loving the discovery of zxbc and having a great time working on the game I always wanted to make! Thanks Boriel!

I've written code that randomly generates a map (well, its floor), which is stored in an array. To keep the size in memory down, I store the rows as bits and have written a routine to make reading this back in the game code nice and simple. I can easily determine if any given coordinate is floor or not. I'm really happy with this. Bit operators are brilliant!

I'm now at the stage where I need to start putting my graphics on the screen. Using the map floor as a reference, I intend to display the walls and floor of the dungeon using 3x3 character blocks, with each successive row overprinting the bottom of the row before it. This way I should be able to display a 9 x 9 view with a pseudo 3D view and the player in the middle.

Using the floor as the starting point, what's I'm trying to work out right now is the best way to could assemble the whole view of this and print it to the screen in one go so the player doesn't see it redraw tile by tile. As the game is turn based, I don't mind if preparing and moving the updated screen isn't instant.

I've thought of two methods:

1. Dynamically create a string and colour it in using control codes, to set everything up that is then printed in one go.
   
2. Scroll the screen, a tile in whatever direction needed and then fill in the space.
   

My program is calculating attribute memory addresses for screen characters. In the interests of only DIMing what I need, I store the screen coordinates as UBYTE since I only need numbers from 0-32 at most.

I have spent a long time to find that the compiler doesn't perform the maths properly when these UBYTE variables are used with larger numbers in a calculation - even though I'm never asking for that UBYTE variable to be made any larger. See this example:

In Sinclair BASIC you can DIM the length of a string using
DIM a$(5)

If I try something similar in Boriel BASIC
DIM a$(5) AS STRING

the compiler seems to interpret this as an array declaration.

Sometimes it's useful to declare the largest expected length of a string if you want to build it up of component pieces. e.g. In Sinclair BASIC:

It seems as if the compiler gets this wrong when the x coord is greater than 27. See example:

I'm having trouble passing a string to a Function in order to edit it. The code which works fine outside of a Function just won't modify the string inside the Function for some reason. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

In my program PAUSE doesn't seem to work. Is that normal? I would find it useful to delay execution a bit while my program prints an error on screen when the result of an INPUT isn't compliant. I can't see any mention of PAUSE in the wiki. I mean I can use a FOR loop to count to 10,000 instead, but I thought the aim of Boriel BASIC is to be a faster superset of Sinclair BASIC so it's surprising this seems to be missing.

I'm new to the compiler, using it on Mac OS. Compiling a simple test program works fine. If I paste in the code from the FSin function from the documentation it won't compile:

Bikers - a brand new commercial game for the ZX Spectrum Next written using Boriel's ZX Basic Compiler and my own custom libraries for the ZX Spectrum Next.

https://cavern.games/bikers

• 256 colour screen mode
  
• Huge sprites
  
• Tile mapped horizon graphics
  
• Split tile map scrolling using copper
  
• 30 fps at 60Hz
  
• AY-3 music
  
• 1MB or 2MB ZX Spectrum Next
  

Hello,

I wonder what the limit is to code size with Boriel on:

48K
128K
ZX Spectrum Next?

Can I write my program without thinking about how Boriel is paging memory in the background?

Hello friends, how are you?

I present you the game made by the FitoSoft team. Made in Basic and compiled with Boriel zxb.