akbasic/docs/08-sprites.md

8. Sprites

Eight sprites, numbered 1 to 8, as on a C128. They need the SDL build.

A sprite here is a real object in the host's graphics library, registered alongside whatever the host's own game is drawing — so a game that embeds this interpreter can see and manipulate a script's sprites.

Giving a sprite a picture

SPRSAV does it, and it takes three kinds of source.

From an image file

10 SPRSAV "ship.png", 1

The most useful form, and not one a C128 has. The path is tried against the working directory first and then against the directory the running program was loaded from — so a .bas stored beside its artwork works wherever you launch it from. Anything the image library can decode will do.

A sprite loaded this way takes the image's own size. It is not forced to 24 by 21.

From a saved region

10 BOX 1, 0, 0, 24, 21
20 SSHAPE A$, 0, 0, 24, 21
30 SPRSAV A$, 1

Draw it with the graphics verbs, capture it, install it. The C128 documents SPRSAV's string as the SSHAPE data format at a fixed 24 by 21, so sharing the mechanism is faithful rather than a shortcut.

From data

10 DIM P#(63)
20 FOR I# = 0 TO 62
30   READ P#(I#)
40 NEXT I#
50 SPRSAV P#, 1
60 DATA 255, 129, 129, ...

63 bytes: three per row, twenty-one rows, most significant bit leftmost. This is the form a type-in listing uses.

It takes an integer array, not a string. A C128 puts the raw bytes in a string; a string here is NUL-terminated, so it cannot hold a zero byte and therefore cannot hold a sprite. DIM P#(63) is exactly the right size.

Writing a sprite back out — SPRSAV 1, A$ — is refused. That would be a disk operation.

Showing and moving

10 COLOR 1, 2
20 CIRCLE 1, 20, 20, 18, 18
30 PAINT 1, 20, 20
40 SSHAPE A$, 0, 0, 40, 40
50 GRAPHIC 1, 1
60 FOR N# = 1 TO 3
70   SPRSAV A$, N#
80 NEXT N#
90 SPRITE 1, 1
100 SPRITE 2, 1, 6
110 SPRITE 3, 1, 8, 0, 1, 1
120 MOVSPR 1, 30, 80
130 MOVSPR 2, 110, 80
140 MOVSPR 3, 190, 60

Three sprites from one drawing: the first in the default colour, the second in colour 6, and the third in colour 8 with both expansion bits set, which is what makes it twice the size. GRAPHIC 1, 1 on line 50 wipes the drawing the sprites were captured from — the picture would otherwise still show the original disc in the top-left corner.

A sprite's colour multiplies the artwork rather than replacing it, so a white disc takes the colour cleanly and a coloured one comes out darker than you asked for.

SPRITE n [,on] [,colour] [,priority] [,xexpand] [,yexpand] [,multicolour]. Only the number is required and an argument you leave out is left alone, so SPRITE 1, 1 turns sprite 1 on without disturbing its colour.

MOVSPR has four forms, and the punctuation is what tells them apart:

Form	What it does
MOVSPR 1, 100, 50	put it at (100, 50)
MOVSPR 1, +10, -20	move it by that much
MOVSPR 1, 10 ; 90	move it 10 pixels along bearing 90
MOVSPR 1, 45 # 8	set it moving along bearing 45 at speed 8

A bearing is degrees clockwise from straight up, so 0 is north and 90 is east. In the polar form the distance comes first and the angle second — the opposite order from the continuous form, which is a trap worth remembering.

The continuous form does not move anything on the statement itself. The sprite moves as the program runs, paced by the host's clock. Speed 0 stops it.

Coordinates are the same window pixels the drawing verbs use, not the VIC-II's raster coordinates — see Chapter 6, and RGR(1) and RGR(2) for how big the window is. SCALE does not apply to them: a sprite is positioned in device pixels whatever the drawing verbs are doing.

Collision

10 COLLISION 1, BUMPED
20 REM ... main loop ...
90 GOTO 20
100 LABEL BUMPED
110 PRINT "HIT: " + BUMP(1)
120 RETURN

COLLISION 1, target calls a subroutine when two sprites overlap. The handler is entered between lines and must end in RETURN, exactly like a GOSUB body. Omitting the target disarms it.

BUMP(1) returns a bitmask of which sprites have collided — bit 0 is sprite 1 — and reading it clears it, which is what makes "has anything hit me since I last looked" answerable.

Only type 1, sprite-to-sprite, is implemented. Types 2 and 3 are refused by name.

Collision is by bounding box, not by pixel: two sprites whose boxes overlap but whose artwork does not are reported as colliding.

10 COLOR 1, 2
20 CIRCLE 1, 20, 20, 14, 14
30 PAINT 1, 20, 20
40 BOX 1, 0, 0, 40, 40
50 SSHAPE A$, 0, 0, 40, 40
60 GRAPHIC 1, 1
70 SPRSAV A$, 1
80 SPRSAV A$, 2
90 SPRITE 1, 1, 6
100 SPRITE 2, 1, 3
110 MOVSPR 1, 110, 55
120 MOVSPR 2, 145, 90

The artwork here includes a border around the whole 40 by 40 sprite, so each sprite draws its own bounding box. Those boxes overlap at one corner and the two discs are nowhere near each other — and BUMP(1) reports a collision.

Giving a sprite a shape

That false positive is what SPRHIT is for. It says what part of a sprite collides, rather than leaving it as the whole picture:

SPRHIT n, kind
SPRHIT n, kind, x1, y1, x2, y2

kind	Is
0	nothing — the sprite stays on screen and stops colliding
1	a box
2	a circle, inscribed in the rectangle
3	a capsule, round ends left and right
4	a capsule, round ends top and bottom

The rectangle is two corners measured from the sprite's top-left, in device pixels — the same x1, y1, x2, y2 that BOX and SSHAPE take, because a dialect with two spellings for a rectangle is one nobody can write from memory. Leave it out and the shape fits whatever the picture turned out to be, which is what a sprite loaded from a file needs: SPRSAV "ship.png", 1 takes the image's own size and the program never learns what that was.

So the two discs above stop colliding as soon as they are discs:

90 SPRHIT 1, 2
100 SPRHIT 2, 2

and a ship whose art does not fill its frame can say so:

SPRHIT 1, 1, 4, 2, 20, 19

A sprite nobody has shaped collides with its whole frame, expansion bits included, which is what every sprite did before SPRHIT existed. Adding the verb changed no existing program.

SPRHIT n, 0 is the ghost, the flashing invulnerable player and the pickup that has already been taken: still drawn, no longer in the way. Hiding the sprite with SPRITE n, 0 also stops it colliding, and is what you want when it should not be seen either.

RSPHIT(n, f) reads it back, in SPRHIT's own argument order — 0 the kind, then 1 to 4 for the two corners. It needs no sprite device, the way RSPPOS does not.

Colliding with things that are not sprites

There are eight sprites. A wall of bricks wants sixty, and until now the only way to collide with one was to do the arithmetic yourself against your own array.

SOLID registers a rectangle the interpreter will collide sprites against, and it costs no sprite slot:

SOLID id, x1, y1, x2, y2      register or replace rectangle id
SOLID id                      retire it
SOLID                         retire them all

id is 1 to 64 and it is your own number. That is the whole trick for "which brick did I hit": the id comes back out again, so a wall built as SOLID I#, ... maps straight onto B#(I#) with no lookup. Retiring a broken brick is the same verb, SOLID I#.

Rectangles are in window pixels — the coordinates BOX draws in and MOVSPR positions in, with SCALE not applying, exactly as for a sprite. So a brick drawn with BOX 1, X#, Y#, X# + 24, Y# + 10 is registered with the same four expressions.

The bare form retiring everything is what a level change wants, and it follows TRAP, COLLISION and DCLOSE, which all read absence as "off".

COLLISION 2 is how you hear about it. On a C128 type 2 is a sprite against the set pixels of the bitmap screen; here it is a sprite against the rectangles SOLID registered, which is the same question in a form this interpreter can answer. BUMP(2) is its mask, and it is a separate accumulator from BUMP(1) — a sprite hitting a wall never sets a bit in the sprite-to-sprite mask, so a program that only cares about one of them is not disturbed by the other.

10 COLLISION 2, WALL
20 FOR I# = 1 TO 60
30   SOLID I#, BX#(I#), BY#(I#), BX#(I#) + 24, BY#(I#) + 10
40 NEXT I#
...
100 LABEL WALL
110 M# = BUMP(2)
120 IF (M# AND 1) = 0 THEN RETURN
130 REM ... the ball hit something ...
140 RETURN

Sixty-four is the ceiling, and it is a real budget rather than a round number: these come out of a pool of collision proxies shared with whatever game this interpreter is embedded in, and eight sprites plus sixty-four rectangles is most of akbasic's share of it. The sixty-fifth is refused by name.

NEW retires them all. A rectangle is invisible, so one left behind by a deleted program would be an unexplainable collision in the next; CLR leaves them alone, because it clears variables and a rectangle is not one.

Reading state back

Function	Gives
RSPPOS(n, 0)	x
RSPPOS(n, 1)	y
RSPPOS(n, 2)	speed
RSPRITE(n, f)	one of SPRITE's settings, in SPRITE's own argument order
RSPCOLOR(1) or RSPCOLOR(2)	one of the shared multicolour registers

These read the interpreter's own state rather than asking the device, so they work even with no device attached.

SPRDEF

Not implemented, and deliberately. It is an interactive full-screen sprite editor driven by single keystrokes, not something a program can call — and this interpreter does not own the screen it would take over. The three SPRSAV forms replace it.