Faster picture drawing for GAC adventure games

[rk last]

Quite some time back (when I used the Caprice emulator) I used GAC and discovered a problem with the graphics that I had created.  Everytime I chose one of my creations the image displayed looked messy and displayed lines and shapes which I hadnt included.

Maybe it was Caprice which caused the issues?  Never the less, I had alot of fun milking as many colours out of the 4 allowed with stipple mode

[||C|-|E||]

I really love the patch, the GAC was known for drawing the pictures a bit slowly and the patch vastly improves this. Regarding the creation of new games with the GAC, I guess that I would  be choosing PAWS or DAAD all the way but it is a question of personal preference  . I think that the biggest difference is that the GAC allows you to use complex conditions, something not possible with PAWS. Moreover, using vectorial graphics is much more tape friendly, since the PAWS graphics patch requires loading the graphics in real time (although they can be much more detailed). Those two things make the GAC to stand out.

Problem nowadays is that the GAC is an application by itself, based on a menu system, whilst the CPC version of PAWS is just a compiler, an interpreter and a graphics patch. This allows coding in the PC using the text editor of your choice and then compiling the game the same as if you were coding in any other language. I find this, that was a problem in the past, extremely convenient nowadays because it allows you to annotate the code as much as you want and organize and edit it in a very efficient way. For example, the code of our game including annotations is more than 350KB, and this is a blessing because the vast amount of notes allows me to navigate it very fast. Another advantage is that PAWS interpreter, including the graphics patch, only uses 13.5 KB of RAM. The rest is free for the adventure and loading graphics does not consume additional memory, you can add as many graphics as you want if they fit in the floppy.

Nevertheless, GAC is a great parser, way better than the Quill in my opinion, and there are great games written with it. It just happens that, by chance, working with PAWS for the Amstrad is still very user friendly nowadays and allows seamless integration with PC tools, like Scite, Photoshop... (the same is true for the DAAD). This is a bit of a paradox, in the past if you were working with PAWS you had to write all the code in CP/M using a text editor and I can imagine that it was a bloody nightmare 

[MiguelSky]

You are right, ||C|-|E||: I made the CPC version of CommodorePlus games (Mansión Kali 1+2 and The Prisoner) by using The Quill in emulators and it was worse than a chinese torture, even when I was using some emulation acceleration!

[SRS]

thx for your updates !

after my actual project (porting an old short c game to cpc) i may have a look at paws (and the patch for it).

[dcdrac]

I had GAC back in the day made a couple of games but was never happy enough with them to send them out

[MiguelSky]

I had GAC back in the day made a couple of games but was never happy enough with them to send them out

Well, perhaps you could recover them for us

[zeropolis79]

I'd love to use this on hte games I made using GAC but sadly, they no longer exist...

[dcdrac]

they were on discs long since gone sorry