Letters from Terra - early projects

My very development as a programmer is catalogued in the history section; in this area of the site I will attempt to provide a record of the major projects that absorbed me as I was starting to acquire a more secure grasp of the language, and use this as as evidence of my development as a programmer and the increased sophistication of the programs I attempted to formulate. My first major project employing graphics was Trooper I, which I presented as a full game, with menus and high score files.This consisted of one background screen, with a device moving sprites in a simply animated fashion over it: and although Trooper I was infinitely less complex than Trooper II or my 3D engine, it required a similar duration of programming, due to my unfamiliarity with both the language and standard form of game programming. However, during this process I acquired the confidence of using MCGA sprites, and simple tools such as Canvas, my home made drawing program that allows simple design of unformatted images (img files), and allowed me to effectively edit my home made animation sprites. I also included a PCX file loader for the background, and manually converted the palette for the sprites. Once the game was finished, the addition of mouse control, and my own understanding of the image routine libraries allowed formed a natural progression to Faculty, which operated in much the same way: images moving in front of a static background, with simple mouse control allowing interaction. However, in order to include images of different size, for the first time I had to almost completely rescript the pascal image routines, inventing my own means of storing image data, as well as my own records for the registering of images within the program. It also raised issues pertaining to the memory in use: Trooper I had used exclusively Data segment defined arrays for the storage of sprites, but this was no longer sufficient, and pointers to other areas of the heap had to be employed.

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