I’ve decided to try a few little changes around here; for a start I want to stick to a schedule (goodness, I used the S word and it almost looked like I meant it too!) so from now onwards all workprint posts will appear on the first Friday of a month like this one is doing. That probably doesn’t sound like a major shift to most people but, as certain editors will no doubt attest, I’m a teensy bit rubbish with deadlines and even worse without! At some point over the “festive season” there’s going to be a few other changes too, but those are still in what I’m rather euphamistically referring to as “the planning stages”.

As far as programming goes, the scrolling shoot ’em up Rubidius in progress for the Hex Files rewrite is coming along slowly but surely with the most recent feature added is the subroutine that preps the engine for the start of a level; previously it was hardwired to just one map and block of attack wave data but now it deals with multiple levels correctly… although that wasn’t the case for several hours! When the new routines went in last Sunday they worked fine with the first level but would start doing bizarre things that should have been impossible during the second, including glitching entire tile rows. Remember kids, always keep a track of your “set in stone” subroutines because sometimes…

In this case the background scroller spreads the load out over eight frames and a couple of missed RTS commands (which I suspect were left out when the colour scrolling was added to previously empty “slots”) meant that, along with the update that was meant to happen on a specific frame, one of the other routines would be called out of sequence as well. I have no idea why the problem only manifested on the second level map though…