I was considering adding powers to my growing string math routines, until I thought about how to handle decimal powers.

For instance:

256^2.25

A pseudo algorithm to handle this crap would go something like...

256^2+25/100 ' Make into a fraction.
256^2+1/4 ' Reduce by GCF.
256^9/4 ' Combine whole number as a fraction with the fraction.
(256^1/4)^9 ' Move the largest whole number outside the equation.
(4 root of 256)^9 ' Apply root calculation.
4^9 = 262,144

Anyway, not to bad, until you get into even something not a whole lot more complicated than log2 of 10 or 2^3.3219280948874

So ...

2^3+3219280948874/10000000000000 ' Make into a fraction.
2^3+1609640474437/5000000000000 ' Reduce by GCF.
2^16609640474437/5000000000000 ' Combine whole number as a fraction with the fraction.
(2^1/5000000000000)^16609640474437 ' Move the largest whole number outside the equation.
(5000000000000 root of 2)^16609640474437 ' Apply root calculation.
Well, if you can f'ing figure out what the 5 f'tillion root of 2 is, you can raise that to the power of 16609640474437 and get 10.


I mean to wipe out some digits and approximate, the 5th root of 2 is approx.1.148 and that to the power of 16.7 gets you pretty close to 10, so this should work, but now I'm wondering after doing square roots, how much more involved it would be to calculate general roots?

Pete

QB64 Phoenix Edition v3.2.0!
https://github.com/QB64-Phoenix-Edition/...tag/v3.2.0

Enhancements

1. #21, #164 - The $Unstable command was added - @mkilgore
   • $Unstable allows usage of language features that are not yet finalized.
     
   • Features hidden behind $Unstable may have breaking change in new releases, unlike regular parts of the language which do not have breaking changes in new releases.
     
2. #155, #164 - Added MIDI support to `_SNDOPEN` - @a740g, @mkilgore
   • MIDI support is current unstable, and hidden behind $Unstable:Midi.
     
   • MIDI is enabled by using the $MidiSoundFont metacommand to specify a soundfont for playing MIDI files.
     
   • The selected soundfont is compiled into your program, so the file does not need to be present at runtime.
     
3. #162, #164 - Compiler settings can be supplied on the command line - @mkilgore
   • QB64-PE now accepts the `-f` flag for supplying settings accessible in the `Compiler Settings` menu.
     
   • Settings are only applied for that run of QB64-PE (they do not modify the preserved IDE settings)
     
   • Using `-f` with no flag will print all of the available options.
     

• #161 - Fixed _MOUSEMOVE when window is resized - @mkilgore
  
• #165 - Fixed compiling source files that have a `'` in their name - @mkilgore
  
• #169, #171 - Fixed `_SNDOPEN` to return zero on failures. - @a740g
  
• #170, #171 - Fixed `PLAY "MB"` so that it also causes `SOUND` commands to play in the background - @a740g
  

Just another in my huge line of tech tips to share with the growing Phoenix community. If you enjoy this coding tip, please feel free to use the code by donating to my GOFORKME page.

Okay, so have you ever used a GOSUB routine that goes on forever, but under several conditions needs to be exited early? If so, maybe you just added several RETURN statements after said conditions. That can get messy in a hurry, and it might be hard to debug when you are searching RETURN and trying to figure out where those RETURNs return to. So for all you tired of being pasta coders out there, here is my 5-cent solution. (Lucy would be so proud....)

Instead of...

So I tried this new improved division code I created in the pi routine Jack provided, and wow, a 700% speed improvement! That makes it 500%+ faster than that same pi routine running with Treebeard's string math.

From the pi thread, I commented about the improvements...

"Basically what I did was to shortcut zero and 1 divisors, chop out leading zeros in small decimal numbers making less digits to calculate, estimate the mult loop by using just the first one or two digits of the divisor and the dividend or remainder so it usually only takes two tries to get the right multiplier before subtracting to obtain the remainder and, of course, working with chunks of numbers with multiplication and subtraction in the long division process.

I knew it would be faster, I'm just amazed it's so much faster.

Now I'm wondering how much faster it could be if I switched from string concatenation to fixed string replacement? I did that once with a c keyboard WP routine (about the only complicated C/C++ prog I've ever written) and the speed increase was pretty impressive. Converting for string math might be a bit of a challenge, and if too many conditions need to be added, it might end up being a push."


So this code was added to that pi routine, but you can try the it out here as a divison calculator by inputting a dividend and divisor. It will validate input, but I left out my conversion of scientific notation to numerical expresion for this demo, so don't input SI.

It has a variable named: BETATEST%. Set it to ZERO to avoid all the screen notes, SLEEP between loops, and just get the results. I kept betatest% = -1 for this demo, to show the divison steps in progress.

Increase or decrease the limit&& variable to control the number of digits displayed. Note: for this demo, I did not include my rounding routie to round the last digit displayed.

So while my previous string routine was accurate for large numbers, this routine is looking to be both accurate and fast. I think it's fast enough now to be to calculate numbers with several hundreds of digits to sevreral hundreds of places almost instantaneously!

As for beta testing, that's another workhorse in the making. I will need to try some huge numbers out on n online precison calculator later. Of course if anyone spots any bugs, let me know, and I'll look into it. Maybe soon I can bump this baby up to a work in progress.

Thanks to Jack for getting me motivated to look further into this project.

Don't look at this too long.

This code can be used in adventure games or any other type of game or app. It makes random looking hills on the screen and when you press the Space Bar it makes different looking ones. I was experimenting with graphics. You can also change the PSET _RGB32 color to blue if you wish to make water waves instead. Just replace the last 0 with the c and the c with a 0.  

If only because I have a habit of checking for a newer version I came across 3.0, which became 3.1  I was on 0.8.2  Only today I got 3.1 almost a week after first release.

A nice feature/option to check once a week or month for a newer version and inform the user on startup.  There isn't even a check for update in the IDE.

First off, greetings! Nice to see some familiar names on here after the whole QB64 nuking fiasco.

Still working on my game (Scrapship) and just recently started learning about sprite sheets.

I have a program that can create sprite sheets (Texturepacker), but now that I have a sprite sheet, I'm not sure how I would implement it in QB64/PE.
Below is little pic of the sprite sheet I currently have.




Has anyone done any work with sprite sheets in QB64 before or am I walking into uncharted territory?

Side note: I am not using any libraries or game engines, strictly QB64 code.

exclude duplicates

Over the past week I've been on a trigonometry quest to better understand the math needed for degree, radian, and vector math for my tutorial. The previous tutorial was lacking in this area and I'm changing that.

I've been using a routine written by Galleon back in 2009 to rotate a sprite using trig and _MAPTRIANGLE. I thought I would see if I could rewrite it using new commands that have come out since then like _HYPOT, _ATAN2, _D2R, etc..

The code below is my attempt at this, and it works. But still not nearly as efficient as Galleon's. I have marked Galleon's lines of code and my lines of code with REM statements, ' ******* RITCHIE and ' ******* GALLEON.

I've stared and stared at his lines 59, 60, 70, and 71 (Galleon's calculations) and I'll be damned if I can make sense of them. Could someone please explain to me how his lines of code achieve the same thing I'm doing? What am I missing here?

This might be one of those things that "everyone knows," but I missed the memo. Is there any way to input a string variable which includes commas?

For example, in NMEA 0183 "sentences," all field delimiters are commas. Of course, one option is to change all commas to something else, like semicolons or just spaces. Which I have done, and then afterwards replaced that delimiter with a proper comma.

Is there any way I could input the actual NMEA string as one variable, then in the next step split out each character? I didn't see anything about this limitation in the wiki.

Here is an example of a NMEA 0183 GLL sentence, from a GPS receiver (identified by GP), which provides geo position, UTC time, and "mode," always in ASCII:

$GPGLL,3953.88008971,N,10506.75318910,W,034138.00,A,D*7A

The last two characters, after the * character, are the XOR-based checksum, as two hex characters.