[hseiken]

So I'm wanting to make custom enemies and a lot of them to shoot at. Like..a lot of them per board. And I also have custom robots that make the cool border graphics. Needless to say when starting up the a stage, I'm not seeing my enemies spawn.

Not being super familiar with ZZT, I did catch this command called 'bind' which 'saves' programmatic space by having, I guess for lack of better word, 'template' program and then apparently as many instances as you want to 'bind' to it, in which they imitate the original.

This is what I THOUGHT I was doing here...


So, here's the Robotic...and it's not doing the BIND thing...of course, maybe BIND has it's limits, too. I'm not ZZT power user either. That said, it would imply to a novice like myself that the 256 robot limit can be broken if there's 'copies' made, which is what I was/am attempting to do so I can get enough enemies on screen to make even having twin stick controls feel like not enough to survive.

. "load up some grunts"
loop start
set "x" to random 2 to 78
set "y" to random 2 to 23
copy at 73 0 to "x" "y"
loop for 35

Do that for a couple of enemy types and some terrain, then plop in 200 animated robots for the border and well...enemies aren't showing up after the border is drawn.

I'm guess copy isn't what I should use for this? However, duplicate had a note that it wasn't recommended to use...so I'm not sure what to do here.

[Noser]

The relevant limit here is robot count, not code size. If the border just needs to animate and not interact at all, then one way to accomplish it without spending a robot per tile would be to have just one robot changing a bunch of CustomBlocks to make the animation.

[GetDizzy]

Worth noting that you seem to have misread the note you're talking about, specifically you read it backwards.

Quoting the help file here:

Quote

NOTE: DO NOT normally use COPY # # # # to copy Robots; use
DUPLICATE SELF or COPYROBOT. It is useful for copying by Robot
id, however; use COPY rN.thisx and rN.thisy as the first pair
of coordinates.