AMOS TOME Series IV Manual

Map Update On
Map Update Off
Switches the Map update system on/off When switched on, the Map update system will automatically record any Map Plot's, so that when you do a Map Update X,Y any of the changed tiles that are within the screen area will be pasted to the current screen.

Map Update x,y
Performs a Map Update. This is basically the same as doing a Map Do x,y but it will only paste tiles that have been Map Plotted since the last update. e.g

If HX<>HXO or HY<>HYO Gosub NICEMAP : Endif
Map Update HX,HY

The system is flag driven, so if there weren't any tiles plotted in the previous frame, then the routine won't do anything. Basically, Map Update is easy to use, and it's incredibly fast !

Normally you would do a map update just after handling the scrolling using either the NiceMap: subroutine or the Map Handle command.

Map Anim n,x,y,r,d,anim$
Sets up tile animation n at co-ords x,y. r is the number of repeats (-1 = infinite ). d is the number of updates between each animation (1 is normal). The animation string is made up of Chr$'s, 1 for each tile to mutate between, and can be from 0-44 characters in length (""=anim off) e.g

Map Anim 0,3,4, -1,1,Chr$(4)+Chr$(7)+Chr$(7)+Chr$(24)

You can also make the anims move around the map by making the anim number negative and coding the move and anims in blocks of 3 characters. of Chr$(DX)+Chr$(DY)+Chr$(Anim). Obviously, you can't store as many anims, but you can move them around !

The maximum length for a moving anim is 14 frames. To do negatives, it is basically a case of adding the negative value to 256, i.e -1 would be 255, -2=254 etc. or using the Mkb$(v) function in the Shuffle extension as this converts a 1 byte value in the range of -128 to 127.

The anims are updated every Map Update.

As an alternative to whacking in huge great strings AMAL style, you can use the Animation Controller in the TOME editor to design the Anims, and save them as a bank, which can be loaded (or Bload'ed) into your