I'm not sure if any chip / pocket chip users have been following the discussions over at nextthing forums but it looks like they are officially done.

We have traditionally taken our updates via apt-get update and I was wondering what might happen if their servers go offline. Is there going to be a binary that we can install?

I don't think anything is going to break anytime soon but I thought that it couldn't hurt to ask.

D

I'll preface this by saying that I am a (very) novice programmer who is really enjoying creating games with Pico-8.

I think that this question is more of a structural one. I don't know how to handle a break in game action so that I can do a simple animation when - say - my main character / spaceship is destroyed.

Lets say that I just want to do something that I imagine is pretty straight forward - say use CLS() with different colours (CLS(1), CLS(2), CLS(3) ... etc.) so that the screen flashes six or seven times when my spaceship is destroyed.

I know how to create the animation that I want through code, but I don't know where to put it / how to structure the _update() or the _draw() to "pause" the game so that the animation can run and then the game can pick up from where it was before.

I'm not sure that I've explained myself all that well here but if anybody has any guidance, I'd appreciate it.

D.

Hi ...

I am looking for some guides / guidance when it comes to checking for collisions between sprites. I have found some excellent tutorials that have given me a set of strategies that I can use when working with shapes created by rectfill() and circfill() but I am struggling to bring these ideas to situations where I have created my own sprites.

All I am interested in doing right now is finding a way to check if one sprite is touching another but I am not sure how the 8x8 grid that we are given for our sprites can be read / checked for - most particularly if a sprite doesn't take up the full 8x8.

I am basically starting from scratch here and any help, guidance or suggestions for something to read / watch would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

D.