That may sound like a minor change, but it opens up the possibility of coding your own little minigames. The call to the keyboard/joystick control routines has moved, so it's now possible to detect movement within a REPEAT loop, so long as you use DELAY 1 within it. Any sprite which has the FALL command in its event will now float to the top of a patch of water and bob up and down. The adventure modification also has a new block type you might find handy: water blocks. Or there's an adventure option, for those Dizzy/Magic Knight affairs, which remembers in-game changes made to screens with the new PUTBLOCK command and redraws them when you leave and re-enter a screen. Alternatively, there's an effects engine which enables scrolling text messages (either in-game or on a control menu/static text screen), double height text and score display routines and a window fade effect. There are 3 alternatives: firstly, there's a particle engine with explosions, starfields, lasers and a vapour trail/magic dust effect. This allows you to specialise the engine for a particular type of game. There's a new miscellaneous menu, with various options. Perhaps most useful of all is the fact that the events editor itself now moves the cursor straight to any lines it does not understand instead of leaving them for the user to find as it always did before. Want an intro/control menu screen? There's an event for that (and a new command, CONTROLMENU, allowing the user to press 1, 2 or 3 to select keyboard, Kempston or Sinclair controls respectively.) There's a new event to trap when a sprite falls too far (ie reaches the end of your jump table) and there are now 2 events at the end of the game - one for victory, one for failure. There are now 9 sprite events, and a few other new events. Note there's still a one-size-fits-all policy, but at least you now have a choice. If 16x16 sprites aren't big enough, there's an option to use 16x24 instead. Sprites can now be individually coloured using the SPRITEINK command.
AGD is a tool for writing your own simple arcade games.
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