Author : Grant Smith
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frame:byte { Which animation frame the tree is
currently involved in }
active:boolean; { Is the tree actually supposed to be
shown/used? }
END;
VAR Forest : Array [1..20] of Treeinfo;
You now have 20 trees, each with their own information, location etc.
These are accessed using the following means :
Forest [15].x:=100;
This would set the 15th tree's x coordinate to 100.
Restoring the Overwritten Background
I will discuss three methods of doing this. These are NOT NECESSARILY
THE ONLY OR BEST WAYS TO DO THIS! You must experiment and decide which
is the best for your particular type of program.
METHOD 1 :
Step 1 : Create two virtual pages, Vaddr and Vaddr2.
[Note: the C++ version uses Vaddr1 and Vaddr2]
Step 2 : Draw the background to Vaddr2.
Step 3 : Flip Vaddr2 to Vaddr.
Step 4 : Draw all the foreground objects onto Vaddr.
Step 5 : Flip Vaddr to VGA.
Step 6 : Repeat from 3 continuously.
In ascii, it looks like follows ...
+---------+ +---------+ +---------+
| | | | | |
| VGA | <======= | VADDR | <====== | VADDR2 |
| | | (bckgnd)| | (bckgnd)|
| | |+(icons) | | |
+---------+ +---------+ +---------+
The advantages of this approach is that it is straightforward, continual
reading of the background is not needed, there is no flicker and it is
simple to implement. The disadvantages are that two 64000 byte virtual
screens are needed, and the procedure is not very fast because of the
slow speed of flipping.
METHOD 2 :
Step 1 : Draw background to VGA.
Step 2 : Grab portion of background that icon will be placed on.
Step 3 : Place icon.
Step 4 : Replace portion of background from Step 2 over icon.
Step 5 : Repeat from step 2 continuously.
In terms of ascii ...
+---------+
| +--|------- + Background restored (3)
| * -|------> * Background saved to memory (1)
| ^ |
| +--|------- # Icon placed (2)
+---------+
The advantages of this method is that very little extra memory is
needed. The disadvantages are that writing to VGA is slower then writing
to memory, and there may be large amounts of flicker.
METHOD 3 :
Step 1 : Set up one virtual screen, VADDR.
Step 2 : Draw background to VADDR.
Step 3 : Flip VADDR to VGA.
Step 4 : Draw icon to VGA.
Step 5 : Transfer background portion from VADDR to VGA.
Step 6 : Repeat from step 4 continuously.
In ascii ...
+---------+ +---------+
| | | |
| VGA | | VADDR |
| | | (bckgnd)|
| Icon>* <|-----------|--+ |
+---------+ +---------+
The advantages are that writing from the virtual screen is quicker then
from VGA, and there is less flicker then in Method 2. Disadvantages are
that you are using a 64000 byte virtual screen, and flickering occurs
with large numbers of objects.
In the attached sample program, a mixture of Method 3 and Method 1 is
used. It is faster then Method 1, and has no flicker, unlike Method 3.
What I do is I use VADDR2 for background, but only restore the
background that has been changed to VADDR, before flipping to VGA.
In the sample program, you will see that I restore the entire background
of each of the icons, and then place all the icons. This is because if I
replace the background then place the icon on each object individually,
if two objects are overlapping, one is partially overwritten.
The following sections are explanations of how the various assembler
routines work. This will probably be fairly boring for you if you
already know assembler, but should help beginners and dabblers alike.
The ASM Putpixel
To begin with, I will explain a few of the ASM variables and functions :
<NOTE THAT THIS IS AN EXTREMELY SIMPLISTIC VIEW OF ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE!
There are numerous books to advance your knowledge, and the Norton
Guides assembler guide may be invaluable for people beginning to code
in assembler. I haven't given you the pretty pictures you are supposed
to have to help you understand it easier, I have merely laid it out like
a programming language with it's own special procedures. >
There are 4 register variables : AX,BX,CX,DX. These are words (double
bytes) with a range from 0 to 65535. You may access the high and low
bytes of these by replacing the X with a "H" for high or "L" for low.
For example, AL has a range from 0-255.
You also have two pointers : ES:DI and DS:SI. The part on the left is
the segment to which you are pointing (eg $a000), and the right hand
part is the offset, which is how far into the segment you are pointing.
Turbo Pascal places a variable over 16k into the base of a segment, ie.
DI or SI will be zero at the start of the variable.
If you wish to be pointing to pixel number 3000 on the VGA screen (see
previous parts for the layout of the VGA screen), ES would be equal to
$a000 and DI would be equal to 3000. You can quite as easily make ES or
DS be equal to the offset of a virtual screen.
Here are a few functions that you will need to know :
mov destination,source This moves the value in source to
destination. eg mov ax,50
add destination,source This adds source to destination,
the result being stored in destination
mul source This multiplies AX by source. If
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