Lunar Lander

[Drakker]

I see, that's quite a bit of work (although it would be amazing to harmonize the buffers). What about petit fatfs and it's really small memory footprint?

[Myndale]

What about petit fatfs and it's really small memory footprint?

Facepalm. I'm going to have to claim ignorance, I didn't know about petit fatfs. I just did a test and loading a compressed screen (< 200 bytes) into RAM takes 13ms. Damn, and I was really looking forward to writing that quad-tree renderer....

Thanks again Drakker. Erico: add as many screens as you want, and whatever world size you want!

[Drakker]

Haha! No problem. Now it will be my turn claiming ignorance as I haven't managed to get petit fatfs to work and a working example would be quite welcome.

(Actually I was half expecting you to answer that the damn thing didn't work and that was why you didn't use it. It would have been better for my ego at least.)

[erico]

What about petit fatfs and it's really small memory footprint?

...
Thanks again Drakker. Erico: add as many screens as you want, and whatever world size you want!

Serious?! Uau that is nice! So we are loading level screens from disk?
The current world size seems fine, I may extend the desert and ocean a little bit in case fuel gives too much travelling distance.
I also need to polish what is there already and set up the pads and local gfx.

It already surmounts a lot of landing pads where each carries a story, so there is a lot to do on that front.
But that will come around as the game develops. I´m testing text size these days to check what is an ok amount of text (skipable of course) that is readable on screen.

Game design is more clear on my mind these days so I may soon update this info here so you can check if you agree.

I have some work to get done now till 20th so I don´t have the benefit of full free days.
...also, carnaval seems to start this friday till next wednesday.

[Skyrunner65]

Limitless worlds?
This could open up potential for games.
Please, if anything, share the infinite world code.

[Myndale]

Please, if anything, share the infinite world code.

I'm hoping to get it working over the next 24 hours, when I do it'll be available on its github repository.

[Myndale]

I haven't managed to get petit fatfs to work and a working example would be quite welcome

I managed to solve this today using the default demo as a template. First of all the petit fatfs initialization code needs to be executed before the Gamebuino library initialization:

Code: Select all

  spi_init();
  PFFS.begin(2, rx, tx);
  gb.begin();


And then the SS line needs to be brought low in order to access the card, then brought high again afterwards:

Code: Select all

  digitalWrite(SS, LOW);
  int err = PFFS.open_file("LUNARRUN.DAT");
  //do file access stuff here
  digitalWrite(SS, HIGH);


After today's efforts I can load individual screens into the game engine and display them on-screen and boy do they look good! Working on integrating it with the flight physics so we can fly around the entire world...gimme another day or so.

[Drakker]

Thanks a lot Myndale! I would probably not have figured this out for myself in a loooooong time.

[erico]

...After today's efforts I can load individual screens into the game engine and display them on-screen and boy do they look good! Working on integrating it with the flight physics so we can fly around the entire world...gimme another day or so.

That is superb! Thanks for the hint that led to it Drakker!

I suppose we can now load any assets from disk, like text or music too?

I once thought about having a screen and text to show each location as you go by a la old text-gfx adventures.
I dropped the gfx idea as it would mean monstruous work as some navigating pad can have some like 10 different images.
It would also consume space.

Now I think we are ok with it, but lets first implement the simple functional game, and for that, text should be enough.
(but I will look into having those images later in dev...)

I also thought we could work dinamic music, some music for the different areas, some music for different missions etc.
Worst case scenario, if we don´t get a musician for this, I can do music myself too.

I also thought gravity could be slightly different per location, more on this later.

But extra ideas apart, I´d like to ask you (myndale) if it is possible to implement in game an option to mess with the ship parameters like:
-gravity
-speed of rotation
-power of each thrust
If it is not worth implementing such just for testing, maybe it can be done with that text file you said before.

I also noticed when rotating, that there is a delay when button is pressed till it starts to automatically rotate further.
Since it is a precision game, people is going to be feast clicking a lot.
Within the delay, if I release the button and press it again, really quick, it dosen´t compute the next click.

What I´m trying to say is that if you hold the rotation buttons it goes on rotating forever which is perfect and in a perfect speed.
But, if you click rotation twice really fast, it won´t compute the second press.
So if a button is released, the delay should be reseted and next press should compute imediately.

What do you think? What about the scroll when reaching the borders for next screen? cheers!

[Myndale]

I suppose we can now load any assets from disk, like text or music too?

I don't see why not!

But extra ideas apart, I´d like to ask you (myndale) if it is possible to implement in game an option to mess with the ship parameters like:
-gravity
-speed of rotation
-power of each thrust

No problem, I'll put add these as main menu options in the next build.

What I´m trying to say is that if you hold the rotation buttons it goes on rotating forever which is perfect and in a perfect speed.
But, if you click rotation twice really fast, it won´t compute the second press.
So if a button is released, the delay should be reseted and next press should compute imediately.

This might be a library issue, I'll need to look into it.

With respect to my code I've just added support for the petit_fatfs library to Simbuino and I now have your world loading and drawing in the emulator, which is important because it's much faster to develop on the emulator than the hardware. Very close to having a stable release for you....