Sweet game. Just as addicting as UncleWorm.

fun fun fun... i lov snake games

I do too. It's amazing how many there are in the archives. (Not that that's a bad thing!!!)

I tried out snake 2-it's great!!!

programming-wise... how would you find out where to erase the snake if it moves in 40 directions?

You store where it has been and check it later to erase.

wouldnt that take loads of space for a long snake though?

Thats how I did it in my Snake 2...but I'm going to change it to use an array...the max size for the array in any Snake game would be 768 bytes.

Yeah, Reggie! You got your game featured! This will give me a motive to work on Broken Paradise more! And this is an idea I thought would be cool: Make a scrolling snake game. Anyway, just a thought!

what is the standard procedure for getting something featured. Do you upload it, and then in the "notes to archiver" section you say: "This game is awesome, you should feature it?" Or do you send someone an email and say, "I've got this great game, you wanna feature it?"

That's the number 1 question in all ticalc.org history besides "I have a lot of time to help you guys out, can I become an admin?"

If you write in the "comments to filearchive" box that probably won't do you much good. I usually forget to look back over those after I finish a uploading session. There are two things that can help you out in my mind:

1. When I process the screenshots I usually take note of which programs look cool, so PROVIDING SCREENSHOTS HELPS, becasue I then send my sugestions to Michael.

2. Secondly, send an e-mail to news@ticalc.org if you think your file or any recently updated file is featurable. The file will be reviewed at the least.

>>Secondly, send an e-mail to news@ticalc.org if you think your file or any recently updated file is featurable. The file will be reviewed at the least.


I have to ask others to consider me a good programmer?

Reminds me of something I once did to bug a sister. I stood behind her and started yelling "Give me attention." Note to self: I need to buy a mega-phone.



The one and only Cheerio:
-Samuel S

... only on a 96x64pxl screen.

2000 bytes on a TI89

1024 bytes on a TI85/86

more on a TI92+/Voyage 200

Well, I hope that the snake isn't going to be one pixel wide, and that no one would ever survive that far.

Well, this may be really inneficient, but here's my guess at all of this.
Store the coordinates of each dot (which could be represented by a pixel, of a 2x2 block of pixels) of the snake in an array. When you move, every array element moves down one and you add the coordinate of the new position. You can also detect if you hit yourself or a wall easier, this way, because you can just search through the whole array to see if the "head" of the snake touches any of the other points on the snake.

That's sort of how I did it in the snake games that I wrote in this fashion. I'm sure there's a much better way to do this, though.

That's the only (good) way I can think of...the other way would be to analyze each new coordinate, and create a sort of vector table with the line end coordinates, shortening the length of each line....wait, that might be a good way to do it :-) ....*opens Assembly Studio and starts coding*.

Why move every element in the array down one? Create a cyclic buffer - keep a variable that says which position in the buffer is the 'head', which overwrites the previous tail. If there is a maximum snake length, this is all constant-time, if not, computation is needed only when resizing.
As for collision detection -- a copy of this data can be stored in a hash table or balanced binary search tree indexed off of the coordinates of the point to allow for log(n) access.

Another idea I had which could have the potential to be much much faster is not to keep track of anything except the head and tail positions. Video memory is used to determine if the head has moved into an 'on' pixel. No need to test for edges or anything. Of course, in this case, the hard part is erasing the tail of the snake. This can be done by searching for lit pixels near the tail. (doesn't work it the snake can 'touch' without crashing -- ie no border around snake).

I had an idea a few months ago that i never tried out for a nibbles game. This would have to be done in C, because of pointers (unless ASM has pointers too). You make a 1D array, a list, out of characters, and it is twice the worm's length, an x and y value for each point. As the worm moves, you erase the last point, draw the new point, and then add the size of a character (1 byte?) to the pointer and then write the head's coordinates into the new spot. So in effect, your worm is a list, and that list actually snakes through the memory. Here's a visual, if it comes out right when i post:
______Block of memory______
|___|___|___| ___|___|___|___|
^the pointer to the start of the array points here

then the pointer is increased by one, so the viewing window of our 6 element array, for a 3-long worm, is shifted. Thus the old head becomes a part of the body, and the old tail is shifted away. The big problem if this would actually work at all is that this would be snaking its way through memory and probably start messing up protected memory. I doubt this would ever work, but its just an idea i had...

ya... i did something like that in basic a long time ago, and used lists, but there were problems cause the max list size is 999 values

well, the thing is, the list stays at a size of 6 elements in my example. But the actual memory the list points to shifts. If you dont know C and how pointers and arrays work this probably wont make any sense. And even if you do know C, it still might not make any sense because i dont think it will work...

Well, you can store four pointers instead of one to get a circular buffer: head and tail (heh, literally), and begin and end. head and tail are pretty obvious, I think. The begin and end pointers are the upper and lower bounds of the buffer.

When you put in a new coordinate for the head, store the (x,y) at head and increment it; if head matches end, then set head to begin. Similarly, do the same for tail, but get the (x,y) from tail instead of storing it.

By the way, ASM doesn't have pointers, exactly ("pointers" is a C concept). In ASM, a variable can hold the address of another variable or object, so you could call that variable a "pointer".