Not the most useful program, but I enjoyed making it.

3 mysterious monoliths have been placed on the shore.  You can use your mouse wheel while hovering over them to find out what they do.   

Our first showcase of a nice math keyword!  As my math skills are all rusty and out of practice, I'd like to ask one of our resident math gurus if they'd be so nice as to offer us up a nice description of what LOG is, how to use it, and maybe showcase us a few simple examples of it in use.  

If nobody else wants to help fill in this topic, I'll come back to it later this evening and try my hands at a poor LOG example, if necessary, but I definitely feel as if we have some folks around here who are much better with this type of topic than I am. 

I put this pattern SUB together for a puzzle game but decided not to use it. It will tile 1 of 40 different small seamless patterns on the screen.  You can specify the color and size of the patterns.  The DEMO code shows all the patterns and how to use the SUB. 

The main thing I got out of making this was coming up with a tidy way to place/retrieve small graphics for a program in one SUB.  Plan to use this method sometimes in future projects. 

- Dav

Greetings to all and congratulations for the creators of this forum and qb64Pe programmers.


I am programing something in QB64, and I need to create an array bidimensional of 3^14. I need 13 different values in each cell, so I used _bit*4 to store.


But  the down array is the max lenght array I get
matrix = 3 ^ 10
DIM disaci(matrix, matrix) AS _BIT * 4

If I considerer only one bit for cell to store, then I can up lenght array to 3^11.

The question is: Can I make this array with QB64?
matrix = 3 ^ 14
DIM disaci(matrix, matrix) AS _BIT * 4

or forget it?

Thank you very much for attention

This is another one of those commands that, unfortunately, we see people using wrong all the time.  Let's see if we can help showcase a bit of a better way to use it than what many are doing for their standard practice. 

First, let's start with the same basic questions as every day.

What is it?  _PRESERVE is a command which is used when REDIM-ing an array and one wishes to preserve the existing data within it.  It mainly only works properly with single dimensional arrays, so I'm not going to talk about the issues it faces with multi-dimensional arrays here.  If someone is truly curious about those problems, go watch my movie-length video on REDIM and how it interacts with _MEM commands and memory.  https://staging.qb64phoenix.com/showthre...707#pid707

How's it used?  Place your _PRESERVE statement after REDIM and then set your array to the new size that you need it to be.  The syntax here is rather simple for folks to grasp. 

So how's it used wrongly??  Let me share a BAD example of the command to begin with -- we see this type of code all the time:

Building this as an addition to Sam-Clip

So I start typing away at this itty bitty program when all of a sudden, bam! The crazy IDE eats a piece of my code. Well Jane, I look at the screen and say, "Hey! Why'd you eat a piece of my code?" Now the I-D-E, it can't talk back to me, especially with it's mouth all full of my code, but it just goes to show you, Jane, it's always something...

Try and type then press Enter...

I was messing around with radians and ended up making this.   Cheers.

I'm finishing up a Pac-Man clone. The game runs at 60 frames per second just like the original. During game play the speed of both Pac-Man and the ghosts are modified by level events and by advancing to higher levels. The speed of these objects is adjusted in 5% increments resulting in a loss of 3 frames per second per 5% loss:

100% = 60FPS (the fastest any object travels)
95%  = 57FPS (60 * .95)
90% = 54FPS (60 * .9)
85% = 51FPS (60 * .85)
...
...
40% = 24FPS (60 * .4) (the slowest any object travels - ghost in the tunnel on level 1)

The usual way I adjust speeds in games is to use MOD and skip frames when the outcome is 0 (zero):

IF Frames MOD 20 THEN ... (every 20th frame will be skipped resulting in 95% or 57FPS)
IF Frames MOD 10 THEN ... (every 10th frame will be skipped resulting in 90% or 54FPS)
IF Frames MOD 5 THEN ... (every 5th frame will be skipped resulting in 80% or 48FPS)
..
.. Etc.

This can also be done in reverse for lower frame rates:

IF Frames MOD 20 = 0 THEN ... (all but three frames will be skipped resulting in 3FPS)
IF Frames MOD 10 = 0 THEN ... (all but six frames will be skipped resulting in 6FPS)
..
.. And so on

My problem is that neither of these methods will yield 85%(51FPS), 60%(36FPS), 55%(33FPS), 45% (27FPS), and 40%(24FPS) all of which I need.

There must be a simple formula I am overlooking to use within a 60FPS loop:

Object.FPS = 24
Frame = 0
DO
    _LIMIT 60
    Frame = Frame + 1
    ( If Object.FPS multiplied by some magical number= current frame then draw it ... formula here)
LOOP

I know I could set up individual frame counters for every object and skip, say, every 9th frame to achieve 85%. However, the original Pac-Man arcade machine had 16K of ROM and 2K of RAM and I can't imagine this was the procedure used with such limited space.

I also realize that I could simply use single precision numbers for x,y and add the percentage ( x! = x! + .85  : 85% for instance ) to get the desired outcome, but again, using single precision values in that era would have been a no-no given the speed over head.

How did those early programmers do this with Integers? Is there a formula I'm overlooking? Help me Obi-Wan math wizards, you are my only hope. I've stared at this for far too long now. My brain hurts.

Just for the giggles.  BAM-first version that I'll tweak later, if any tweaks needed, to get working in QB64PE.

I've got the buttons setup (including button color change on hover) and a little sound effect when pressing and depressing a button.

A few hours of work left, so sneak peek:

• View the source code
  
• Run the program