Hey @johnno56! so good to hear from you, our game from 6 years ago still Great Fun!
I have to credit tsh73 at JB forum for inspiring me to pull out that old but gold thing.
He was doing a Battleship version actually with a couple of different game options on their "Screen 0" they call MainWin which has no color, no mouse, not really an inkey$ function though Input$(1) works; mainly Input and Print with Locate but that screen scrolls like a console screen and he was using the scroll feature allot to show updates to game. I thought the whole thing would work better without scrolling like our Player Game Board from 6 years ago, only in Screen 0.
But I was impressed how the pure game can still be played with same passion. So I pulled out our game version and coded it for our screen 0 and ported back to JB that worked with the Mod842 new change to the AI. Actually Mod842 was third version I posted at JB. Problem was in building new AI with Mod842, I forgot how some of the old AI did its thing, in particular how it was sinking ships after finding one with a first hit on it. There were variables there that I could not remember what they did so when writing a new possibly even better AI, I kinda winged it with the old ship sinking routines after first hit on ship occurred. Better AI in that you are garanteed to find that pesky little Destroyer in 50 shots or less, it's actually a little more boring too as the average game tends to run longer.... Our version, somebody usually won well before 50 shots easy but there are times when our game actually sucked rotten eggs hunting that dang little destroyer!
Anyway,
Main problem is sorting out if you are hitting one ship or several. tsh73 never had to face that problem because in the rules he was using you could not place a ship right next to another, a space had to go around each ship, which made layout at setup time harder but shooting ships much easier.
TMI? probably, sorry something about this game and writing AI for a game gets me enthused! Battleship might have been my first time for game AI? If so, no wonder it gets me jazzed.
It was quite a coincidence that @PhilOfPerth (hey! maybe you guys are neighbors!!! Johnno, Phil did you know you could be neighbors?) was talking about properly docummenting when I was porting our game to JB Black print on White background console like screen. Blue and White looks so much better in QB64 IMHO.
I have to credit tsh73 at JB forum for inspiring me to pull out that old but gold thing.
He was doing a Battleship version actually with a couple of different game options on their "Screen 0" they call MainWin which has no color, no mouse, not really an inkey$ function though Input$(1) works; mainly Input and Print with Locate but that screen scrolls like a console screen and he was using the scroll feature allot to show updates to game. I thought the whole thing would work better without scrolling like our Player Game Board from 6 years ago, only in Screen 0.
But I was impressed how the pure game can still be played with same passion. So I pulled out our game version and coded it for our screen 0 and ported back to JB that worked with the Mod842 new change to the AI. Actually Mod842 was third version I posted at JB. Problem was in building new AI with Mod842, I forgot how some of the old AI did its thing, in particular how it was sinking ships after finding one with a first hit on it. There were variables there that I could not remember what they did so when writing a new possibly even better AI, I kinda winged it with the old ship sinking routines after first hit on ship occurred. Better AI in that you are garanteed to find that pesky little Destroyer in 50 shots or less, it's actually a little more boring too as the average game tends to run longer.... Our version, somebody usually won well before 50 shots easy but there are times when our game actually sucked rotten eggs hunting that dang little destroyer!
Anyway,
Main problem is sorting out if you are hitting one ship or several. tsh73 never had to face that problem because in the rules he was using you could not place a ship right next to another, a space had to go around each ship, which made layout at setup time harder but shooting ships much easier.
TMI? probably, sorry something about this game and writing AI for a game gets me enthused! Battleship might have been my first time for game AI? If so, no wonder it gets me jazzed.
It was quite a coincidence that @PhilOfPerth (hey! maybe you guys are neighbors!!! Johnno, Phil did you know you could be neighbors?) was talking about properly docummenting when I was porting our game to JB Black print on White background console like screen. Blue and White looks so much better in QB64 IMHO.
b = b + ...