30 JAN 2021:
Scrapship got its first donation!
This is really exciting for me and definitely motivates me to see the game through to completion!
One of the most important things I learned this week: Scaling works . . . but it also causes the image to "tear" a little and look a bit more jagged than usual. Scaling also sets the x and y coordinates to the center of the sprite instead of the upper left-hand corner. Basically this means that scaling will make hit box calculations much more tedious and complicated to write in code. So with that in mind, I still plan on using scaling, but only in specific instances.
Automatic monitor resolution: I also learned that QB64 has a command that returns the width and height of the current display. Using that, the game now automatically detects your monitor resolution and picks the most applicable window that will fit the screen! I tested this with my BenQ monitor at 2560x1440 and then tried it on my smaller Sceptre monitor at 1920x1080.
A proper pause button: The original pause button stopped the game -- and that's it. The new one I'm working on shows a "Paused" indication while still showing all the frozen action on screen. Eventually I'll integrate a menu system of some sort so that the player can change things like sound and display settings mid-game.
Hide / unhide debug tools: Allows me to see the game as the player would see it, without all the variables cluttering the side of the screen.
Like any game, Scrapship uses a lot of pictures in various formats and I'm also learning a lot about how to display graphics as "cheaply" as possible.
Imagine you need to make a black box with a thin white border. I did some experiments with Aseprite:
A 1280x1280 .jpg of a black box with a white border -- 33kb.
A 1280x1280 .png of a transparent background with a white border -- 5.8kb
A 1x1280 .jpg of a vertical white line and a 1280x1 of a horizontal white line -- A dirt cheap 452 bytes!
So definitely look at all your options! I was surprised to see that the first .jpg was more "expensive" than the .png.
Thanks for reading!
Play the old version of Scrapship here.