The Sinclair QL Forum

Following on from the new users thread, one person was typing up an FA Cup Game and another fancied porting Football Manager, I'm currently working on a graphic mock up for replays if anyone fancies it. Work in progress.

That looks really great!

Hopefully going to have a stand drawn in etc. No idea if it's any use. Is is possible to load that as a back drop then plot footballers over the top?

Regarding Football Manager: There was a Football Manager by Chic James - no 77 Microdrive Exchange - but I cannot find any magazine in which it was published.
Also one of my QLs came with a QL FOOTBALL MANAGER BY M.V.MITCHELL. V 1.3 1988 - with executable and SuperBasic source code .

vanpeebles wrote:Hopefully going to have a stand drawn in etc. No idea if it's any use. Is is possible to load that as a back drop then plot footballers over the top?

If you take the simplest approach of defining the graphics as characters of a font (user defined graphics), just use OVER -1 when drawing and undrawing 'players'. Apart from black ink, using over -1 means that the second time something is drawn in the same place, it cancels out. Best to avoid black INK.
Example:
Ink 7: rem white text
over -1:rem XOR printing
At 5,0:print 'A' : rem show an 'A'
Pause 50
At 5,0:print 'A': rem erase the 'A'
Over 0 : rem back to normal printing

Gross over-simplification, but should provide the starting point. You can use any font editor to design 5x9 QL pixel characters (or even 8x9 pixels if you stick to using CSIZE 1,0 or CSIZE 1,1 for printing the text).

Andrew wrote:Regarding Football Manager: There was a Football Manager by Chic James - no 77 Microdrive Exchange - but I cannot find any magazine in which it was published.
Also one of my QLs came with a QL FOOTBALL MANAGER BY M.V.MITCHELL. V 1.3 1988 - with executable and SuperBasic source code .

Some programs submitted to QL World were just too big, so they put them straight into the MDV Exchange system without publishing in the magazine.

dilwyn wrote:

vanpeebles wrote:Hopefully going to have a stand drawn in etc. No idea if it's any use. Is is possible to load that as a back drop then plot footballers over the top?

If you take the simplest approach of defining the graphics as characters of a font (user defined graphics), just use OVER -1 when drawing and undrawing 'players'. Apart from black ink, using over -1 means that the second time something is drawn in the same place, it cancels out. Best to avoid black INK.
Example:
Ink 7: rem white text
over -1:rem XOR printing
At 5,0:print 'A' : rem show an 'A'
Pause 50
At 5,0:print 'A': rem erase the 'A'
Over 0 : rem back to normal printing

Gross over-simplification, but should provide the starting point. You can use any font editor to design 5x9 QL pixel characters (or even 8x9 pixels if you stick to using CSIZE 1,0 or CSIZE 1,1 for printing the text).

Could u make the top half of a player one font character and the bottom half another? would u recommend 5x9 or 8x9?

vanpeebles wrote:Could u make the top half of a player one font character and the bottom half another? would u recommend 5x9 or 8x9?

You certainly can.
The only drawback is that it seems to me that printing a character is slower than moving the same amount of bytes in memory. But I might be wrong.

You probably could as long as halves are transparent (bits reset). But why would you want to do this? To overlay different colours for player shirts/shorts, maybe? As Andrew says, probably faster to move bytes around in memory, though that needs more programming knowledge.

As for use of 5x9 or 8x9, depends what you want to achieve. Remember that 8x9 fonts only work in csize width 1, which in turn rules out mode 8. But 8 pixels gives you those 3 extra pixels if you want to have freedom to design graphics to represent simple leg movements etc. In all honesty, using such text graphics is probably going to look pretty coarse and clumsy in the end, but it's a way of doing animated graphics without resorting to sprite and animation toolkits.

Did you want to animate player movements? I can probably put together a very simple demo of animating a character to get you started if you give me a day or two, I just need to clear the decks of a few non-QL things out of the way before Wales goes into lockdown later this week.

To be honest I won't do any coding on it, but I'll do some graphics, and I can always draw some stick footymen if anyone fancies a go. I was interested to see how the programming would effect how the figures would be drawn. I was thinking legs/waist lower character, and top one arms, chest, head etc.