MetalSlime wrote:I plan on writing a bunch of articles with example code to tackle specific topics, so that influx might be coming
Great to hear! I already read your article and this is simple and useful. There is only one issue but not specific to your article. Right now the article was made with some code sample in ca65. Everyone as it's own taste of assembler they like. How to make everyone happy in that situation... I would like to find a way to be able to show the article with different syntax but how. hmm... For example, when you use MSDN, you can select for which language to see the sample by checking some checkbox at the top. I don't know if we can find a way to make something similar or if there is a plug-in for the wiki for this. Another possibility is that we do all the sample for 1 assembler only for uniformity but hmm..
MetalSlime wrote:I think programming articles should be separated from hardware/reference articles.
Yes, this is correct. It should explain the hardware only and not show example. Right now the reference section is a little bit messy about that. The programming section can go in more detail for a specific option.
MetalSlime wrote: I envision a main "Programming" section, and then under it have different sections like "Compression", "Mappers", "Sound", "Graphics", "AI", etc. Then those sections would have individual articles under them.
I have the same idea too. And some section that explain which assembler exist, tool for map etc. There is not enough information about that. I was searching recently for a tool that can import some bmp but there was no information about that in one place, which one is better for what reason etc. You often end up making your own tool when there could be already one available!
MetalSlime wrote: For example under "compression" you'd have a bunch of articles: "programming RLE", "programming Fixed Bit Length Encoding", "programming Huffman", etc. Then, if someone is writing their game and they think "hmm.. I wonder how I should go about compressing the text in my game", they can head to the programming->compression section and read through the articles there. They will get a good idea of how many compression algorithms work, and they will get to see some example code so they have an idea of how they can get it up and running.
Yes, this is what the getting started(or) programming section is for, explaining about common problems that you have to solve while programming for the nes. There is many common one like:
- compression
- Using mapper for more data
- How to organize data (interleaved, column based, screen based compressed etc)
- How to scroll an infinite map
- How to scroll with less artifact
- How to split the screen for a status bar
- How to do parallax scrolling with the scroll register
- How to keep state
- Frame based algorithm
- Trick of the trade from well known commercial games
- Graphic editing (map, tile etc)
- Music, how to make, to play, sound fx
- NMI, best practices (Dish already started a good document about this)
- etc etc
MetalSlime wrote:My hope is that the "Programming Mappers" section will one day be full of articles teaching you how to use each of the different mappers.
Yes. Once you understand a specific "breed" mapper, often many a related so we could group many type of mapper together too.
MetalSlime wrote:I'm going to continue writing little articles like this and organizing them under the Programming page. They aren't really going to be tutorials, but rather example solutions for specific, targeted problems.
It doesn't have to be a tutorial. Any information is a reference that will help other people to understand more. This is already great that you're contributing this information. If more people do the same, we could end up with quite a nice wiki compare to the other platform. That would be great. Keep up the good work
I may change the name of the section already. How many object to this? (wind.... no sound is heard at all). That's almost rhetorical since recently nobody really seems to object to the current direction that it's going. Either people all agree silently or they just don't care as long there is content