Saturday, December 02, 2017

spriteram vs . Resource

Using InspectorWidget to understand buggy situations has become abnormally hard. Just look at the picture we got earlier this season. Compare that to what it used to look like. I've got the "boxes" area all messed up. Of course: in School Rush I now have two things trying to use the sprites of the bottom screen: Inspector Widget and the HUD.

I needed to change a bit the code for the HUD (which uses a SpriteRam to load hud.spr) so that it tells the GUI engine that it used some resources, which are thus no longer available to the InspectorWidget... and let the Engine give some other tiles to Inspector Widget.

One thing I had overlooked is that I devoted up to 256KB of VRAM to background tiles on the main screen, leaving only 16KB for HUD sprites. At 256 bytes per 16x16 block, that means I can have at most 64 different blocks at all. I have 20 different sprites used, 44 left.

Inspector Widget uses 1 such block for "box-borders" (with 4 different flips), and then it has 4 areas-reporting sprites (made of 64x64, 16-color sprites that get scaled up and down to match the effective area shape). That's 32 "tiles" count each for the engine, or 8 of the "blocks" I've used above. So with proper values, I can get it right.


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