text based games

[TRS-Eric]

Hello, I am designing a project that will be a text based / screen based game focusing on different screens with lots of text.

Does anyone here have any advice on working with large amounts of text? I know the string limits are quite severe in ugBASIC (if you're planning on writing a novel). What are my best ways around the limits? Should I just using fixed sized strings everywhere I can?

[PaoloRaven]

Hey mate,

I'm also interested on this topic as I wanted to code a similar game.

you basically have two options:

1) wait for ugBasic featuring the real time disk read
2) shrink the text as much as possible

You know that having a large amount of text was an issue even on 16-bit QBasic and even there the most large adventure games were reading from the disk, so this sounds like a necessity more than an option.

Anyway, you can do some test by printing the much text as possible as you can and see how much the code grows up. The fixed values shouldn't take extra memory beside the code itself, so mess a little around between fixed values and allocated strings and see how much far you can go.

Cheers!

[TRS-Eric]

My hope is that I can put strings somehow into memory banks in a simple way similar to how you can load images into a bank. Perhaps that would require a new command of some kind?

Then I could have all my text in a DATA statement or something and compile it right into the disk image, instead of creating some tool to do it.