UI starting point? (Character creator and other RPG Utils)

[leech]

I'm working up toward learning C so that I can try to code some cross platform utilities (I'm hoping to eventually target Atari 8/16bit and Commodore 8/16bit, starting on the Atari 8bit) and was wondering if there is any sort of standard way to develop an Atari UI.  Going to see how portable I can make the 'engine' of this (going to be RPG based utilities for tabletop games) and then probably specifically create the UIs per machine so as to make them equally capable, even if you only have 40 columns and no mouse vs high resolution monsters. 

 

The interesting bit, I think will be to try to figure out printing on each platform as well...

As a side note, anyone else interested in such a thing?  Either ideas or coding help would be awesome.

[ilmenit]

There is no standard way of doing it cross-platform nor standardized UI for Atari 8bit. The easiest way is to draw characters directly to screen memory and the default character set has some tiles for borders and lines if needed.

[leech]

34 minutes ago, ilmenit said:

There is no standard way of doing it cross-platform nor standardized UI for Atari 8bit. The easiest way is to draw characters directly to screen memory and the default character set has some tiles for borders and lines if needed.

Thanks, kind of what I figured.  Will have to think about how I want to lay it out.  Like context switching with say Atari Key+number to switch between Stats / skills / etc.

[ilmenit]

In a few cross platform projects I made an abstraction layer with functions like printat(x,y,string) and implementation of such functions was platform dependent (on Windows and Linux using Curses library)

[glurk]

I still have my original 800, and at one time, I also owned a C64 too, and there are some commonalities between them.  So if you design for these commonalities TO BEGIN with, your job will be a lot easier in the long run.  Put another way, try not to do anything that can't easily be done on BOTH machines.

 

[leech]

3 hours ago, glurk said:

I still have my original 800, and at one time, I also owned a C64 too, and there are some commonalities between them.  So if you design for these commonalities TO BEGIN with, your job will be a lot easier in the long run.  Put another way, try not to do anything that can't easily be done on BOTH machines.

 

Thanks, yeah that's what I'll be looking into.  I also had a different thought entirely that I'm going to look into.

 

Basically, for various platforms to be more of a client machine.  Create a database backend where people can host their own character creations and share them, but then be able to access them on multiple platforms.  Then all that needs to be individualized is the clients.