Files
akbasic/docs/06-graphics.md
Andrew Kesterson 5709dc160c Keep what a program draws, instead of making it a sprite
A drawing lasted exactly one frame. The verbs are immediate, they went to the
back buffer, SDL double-buffers and the frontend never clears -- so the only way
to keep a picture was to capture it with `SSHAPE` and install it as a sprite,
which is what `examples/breakout/sprites/breakout.bas` spends two of its eight
sprites doing. That was TODO.md section 9 item 9.

The drawing verbs now render into a layer texture the frame composites under the
text and the sprites. Draw once; it is there on every frame after.

**Bracketed around the step phase, not around each verb.** One pair of
`SDL_SetRenderTarget` calls a frame instead of one per `DRAW`, and it is also
what makes `SSHAPE` read back what the program has just drawn rather than
whatever the last frame left.

**The layer is transparent where nothing was drawn.** It covers the whole window
and composites underneath, so an opaque one would black out the frame the moment
a program issued a single `DRAW`. And a fresh SDL target texture's contents are
undefined, so it is cleared on creation -- skipping that puts uninitialised
memory under the first frame's text and looks like a driver bug rather than a
missing memset.

**The line editor forced a wrinkle worth naming.** `akbasic_frontend_akgl_pump()`
is called from two places with different answers to "is a render target current":
the frame loop calls it between steps, and the sink's editor calls it from
*inside* a step, borrowing a frame while it waits for a typed line. SDL refuses
to present while a target is current, so the pump ends the layer, presents, and
puts it back only if it was the one that ended it. `akgl_frontend` caught this --
it drives a REPL session, and it failed with "You can't present on a render
target" the first time the brackets went in.

This does not make a drawing *visible* on its own. The text layer still repaints
every row it owns, opaque, every frame, and by default it owns the whole window;
`WINDOW` shrinks it and that half was already fixed. The two together are what a
picture needed, and the tests assert both -- a pixel still there a frame later
with nothing redrawn, and a pixel below a shrunk text area surviving the text
repaint. The second assertion wipes to a non-black colour first, because against
black it could not tell a transparent layer from an opaque one.

The tests found two of their own bugs on the way: `stop_runtime()` was not
tearing the graphics backend down, so re-initialising it dropped a live texture
on the floor; and a first draft called `begin()` before `start_runtime()`, which
re-inits the backend, so the assertion read back off an orphaned render target
and passed while proving nothing.

Chapters 6 and 13 stop saying a drawing has to be redrawn every frame, because it
does not. The batch-boundary tear stays documented -- it bites an `SSHAPE`
capture, which matters much less now that capturing is not the only way to keep a
picture.

Both games still run clean. 111 with akgl, 110 without.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EwxGB6TdoVvZ11KQQME9cL
2026-08-02 10:46:10 -04:00

8.7 KiB

6. Graphics

Everything in this chapter needs the SDL build and a graphics device. Without one each verb refuses by name:

10 DRAW 1, 0, 0 TO 100, 100
? 10 : RUNTIME ERROR DRAW needs a graphics device and this runtime has none

The coordinate space

A drawing coordinate is a pixel of the host's window, with (0, 0) at the top left. On the standalone interpreter's 800 by 600 window, DRAW 1, 799, 599 lands on the bottom-right pixel and everything in between is reachable. A game embedding the interpreter gets whatever size its own renderer is.

RGR is how a program finds out:

10 PRINT "THE SCREEN IS"
20 PRINT RGR(1)
30 PRINT "BY"
40 PRINT RGR(2)
50 DRAW 1, 0, 0 TO RGR(1) - 1, RGR(2) - 1

Subtracting one is not a wart, it is the last pixel: a window RGR(1) wide has columns 0 through RGR(1) - 1.

A C128 listing assumes 320 by 200 and will draw in the top-left corner. Give it the whole window by naming the space it was written for:

10 SCALE 1, 319, 199
20 BOX 1, 0, 0, 319, 199

That box is now the border of the window whatever size the window is. When no device answers the size question at all, 320 by 200 is what the interpreter assumes — the space a C128 listing was written for is the right thing to fall back to.

Colour

COLOR binds a source to a palette index, and the drawing verbs name the source rather than the colour:

10 COLOR 1, 3
20 DRAW 1, 10, 20

Sources are numbered 0 to 6; palette indices are 1 to 16, as on a C128. That indirection is BASIC 7.0's, and it is why every drawing verb's first argument is a small number that is not a colour.

The verbs

GRAPHIC

GRAPHIC mode chooses a screen mode; GRAPHIC CLR clears it. Mode 0 is text and refuses to draw.

Every picture in this chapter is generated by running the listing above it; see MAINTENANCE.md if you are editing one.

DRAW

10 COLOR 1, 8
20 DRAW 1, 20, 180 TO 90, 40 TO 160, 150 TO 230, 20 TO 300, 120
30 COLOR 2, 6
40 DRAW 2, 20, 190 TO 300, 190
50 LOCATE 160, 100
60 COLOR 3, 3
70 DRAW 3

One coordinate pair plots a point. Two or more, separated by TO, draw a polyline. A bare DRAW 3 — the last line above, and the single red pixel in the middle of the picture — plots wherever LOCATE left the pixel cursor.

BOX

10 COLOR 1, 8
20 BOX 1, 20, 30, 130, 140
30 COLOR 2, 6
40 BOX 2, 180, 30, 290, 140, 30
50 COLOR 3, 3
60 LOCATE 300, 190
70 BOX 3, 20, 160

Corners, and an optional rotation angle — the green box is the same box turned 30 degrees about its own centre. Two coordinates instead of four take the other corner from the pixel cursor, which is the red box.

BOX always outlines; it cannot fill. BASIC 7.0 selects fill with a seventh argument and that is not implemented here — see Chapter 13. PAINT is the fill you have.

CIRCLE

10 COLOR 1, 8
20 CIRCLE 1, 80, 70, 60, 60
30 COLOR 2, 6
40 CIRCLE 2, 230, 70, 75, 45
50 COLOR 3, 3
60 CIRCLE 3, 160, 140, 130, 50, 90, 270

Source, centre, then the two radii — equal radii give a circle and unequal ones an ellipse. Two further arguments are a start and an end angle, which is what makes the red arc: 90 to 270 is the bottom half, because angles here are degrees clockwise from straight up, the same convention MOVSPR uses. Beyond those come a rotation and the degree increment, and a large increment is what turns a circle into a polygon.

PAINT

10 COLOR 1, 8
20 CIRCLE 1, 100, 100, 70, 70
30 BOX 1, 180, 50, 290, 150
40 COLOR 2, 6
50 PAINT 2, 100, 100
60 COLOR 3, 3
70 PAINT 3, 230, 100

Flood-fills the region containing a point, stopping at whatever is already drawn — so the outline you fill inside can come from any verb. If the region is too large for the fill's own working space it stops and reports rather than leaving a half-painted screen with no explanation.

LOCATE

Moves the pixel cursor, which is where a bare DRAW plots and where a BOX with two coordinates finishes.

SCALE

10 COLOR 1, 3
20 BOX 1, 0, 0, 319, 199
30 SCALE 1, 319, 199
40 COLOR 2, 6
50 BOX 2, 0, 0, 319, 199
60 DRAW 2, 0, 0 TO 319, 199

That picture is 640 by 400, and both boxes name the same four numbers. The red one is drawn with SCALE off, so its coordinates are pixels and it covers exactly the top-left 320 by 200 of the window — which is what a C128 listing does here. The green one is drawn after SCALE 1, 319, 199 and fills the window, and the diagonal confirms that 319, 199 reaches the last pixel rather than stopping one short of it.

Turns on user coordinates and gives their maxima. With it on, your coordinates are mapped onto the drawing surface: 0 is the first pixel and the maximum you gave is the last one, so DRAW 1, 1023, 1023 above reaches the bottom-right corner rather than missing it by a pixel. SCALE 1 on its own uses 7.0's 1023 by 1023. SCALE 0 turns it off and coordinates go back to being window pixels.

RGR

RGR(0) is the current GRAPHIC mode. RGR(1) and RGR(2) are the drawing surface's width and height in pixels — those two are ours rather than 7.0's, and they are what a program needs to use a window whose size it did not choose. They refuse when there is no graphics device, unlike RGR(0), which is a mode this interpreter recorded rather than a screen it has to go and measure.

RGR(3) and RGR(4) are a character cell's width and height, also ours. They come from the text device rather than the graphics one — a character grid belongs to the sink — so they refuse by naming that instead. Between them and RWINDOW, which gives the current text window in columns and rows, a program can place a character and a sprite at the same spot without hardcoding a number measured against whatever font the host loaded:

10 CW# = RGR(3)
20 CH# = RGR(4)
30 COL# = 12
40 ROW# = 3
50 CHAR 1, COL#, ROW#, "X"
60 MOVSPR 1, COL# * CW#, ROW# * CH#

RWINDOW follows a WINDOW call, because it reports the window. RGR(3) and RGR(4) do not, because windowing does not change how big a character is.

WIDTH

WIDTH 1 or WIDTH 2 sets how thick a drawn line is. A thick line is drawn as parallel passes; see Chapter 13.

Saving and stamping regions

SSHAPE copies a rectangle off the screen and GSHAPE stamps it back:

10 COLOR 1, 8
20 CIRCLE 1, 40, 40, 30, 30
30 COLOR 2, 6
40 PAINT 2, 40, 40
50 SSHAPE A$, 8, 8, 72, 72
60 GSHAPE A$, 120, 20
70 GSHAPE A$, 200, 60
80 GSHAPE A$, 120, 120

One disc drawn, captured, and stamped three times.

A string array works: SSHAPE SH$(2), ... writes into element 2 and GSHAPE SH$(2) stamps what element 2 names, so a program can keep a set of shapes in one array.

A$ holds a handle, not the pixels. On a C128 the string holds the bitmap, so a program could save it to disk or take its LEN. Here a string is a fixed 255 bytes and the region is a device surface, so what goes in the string is a reference to it — SHAPE:0. You can pass it to GSHAPE and to SPRSAV, which is everything BASIC ever does with one, but you cannot store it or measure it.

What is not here

FILTER parses and then refuses: there is no filter stage to configure. See Chapter 7.

A drawing stays. The verbs render into a layer the frame composites underneath the text and the sprites, so a program draws its picture once and it is there on every frame after. It does not have to redraw it, and it does not have to capture it into a sprite.

What covers it is the text layer, which repaints every row it owns — opaque, every frame, for a reason akbasic_sink_akgl_render() explains — and by default it owns the whole window. WINDOW shrinks it:

10 WINDOW 0, 0, 39, 1
20 GRAPHIC 1, 1
30 COLOR 1, 3
40 BOX 1, 20, 40, 300, 180

Two rows of text at the top, the rest of the window for drawing, and the box is still there a thousand frames later.

A redraw also has to fit inside one batch. The host runs a fixed number of source lines and then presents, and presenting throws the drawing buffer away — so a run of drawing verbs longer than one batch is torn rather than merely transient, and an SSHAPE at the end of it captures only the part issued since the present. Watching TI# change is how a program finds the boundary; Chapter 13 has the measured numbers and Chapter 18 has a routine that uses them.