heres some tips to get you sorted
load an image rather than a bitmap, then before you rewrite the screen do a paste image and it will clear the screen with the door image, then print over that
start your code
sync on
sync rate 40
then when you have finished printing to the screen etc just do a sync so that the user see`s the alterations you made (as in when you print over the door picture)
NEVER use wait inside code, it just wastes CPU time that you could use to add some extra polish to your program, plus 5 seconds to read those options would be annoyingly long for some people and too fast for others, if you want the program to continue anyway, but still give the player a chance to exit it before the timeout then do something like
t=timer()+5000
blah!!!
print "space to continue"
repeat
untill ((timer()>t)or(spacekey()))
thats busy waiting but it will exit after 5 seconds even if the player does nothing, you could stick a call to some subroutine to animate the door shaking slightly or something inside that loop so that time isn`t wasted with the cpu busy doing nothing..eg
repeat
shake_door()
untill ((timer()>t)or(spacekey()))
when asking for input don`t ask people to type in huge replies, in a long game they get very annoying, and it irritates people when they type "opem door" by accident and then have to type it all over again because the program can`t understand they meant "open door", there are two common ways to make a program more useable
(a) use lines like
press 1 to open door
press 2 to hide under sofa
press 3 to run away screaming
then all you have to do is check for a string that contains "1","2" or "3", no chance of typing errors and the game can run a lot faster, wrong keypresses can get a random message like "you can`t do that!" or "wrong key...please press 1,2 or 3"
(b) use cut down words, tell the user that only have to type the first two letters of every reply, this means you will have to take some care when you chose the replies so that there is no confusion, then you need to use a simple string function to get the rightmost two letters of each reply, so
open door becomes op
hide under sofa becomes hi
run away screaming becomes ru
the commands you would use are
reply$=left$(reply$,2)
reply$=upper$(reply$)
this would give you the first two letters of replystring and make sure they where uppercase, so even if they typed the whole reply as long as they go the first two letters right the program will understand em.
if you want typed replies then you should make sure they are all upper or lower case since you have no way of knowing if the user has pressed caps lock or held shift down or used a capital 1st letter etc, this make it easier to decode the replies since you only have to check if the reply was
OP
rather than all the possible combinations
Op
oP
op
OP
