Bricks! [In development - Test demo available!]

[Drakker]

My current build actually does that... I'll post it up later. I definitely didn't give up on the game, I thought I'd get plenty of free time during the holidays to work on this, well, didn't happen. Before I complete the game I'll work on the level editor, I'll need it to make the default levels set. Now that Simbuino has read-only SD support I could also complete the game after that. But my time supply is really short right now, so it's gonna take several more weeks.

[Jamish]

Now that Simbuino has read-only SD support I could also complete the game after that. But my time supply is really short right now, so it's gonna take several more weeks.

Whaaaaaat, for real? I must have missed that forum post!

[Drakker]

Alright, I roughly patched together a playable "demo". It has 4 levels, unlimited lives (extra balls), and all features that should be in the final version except the level editor and the high scores (best times in this case).

I'm thinking of allowing the level designer to choose what items blocks will give instead of them being random, other than that it's a pretty good idea of what the final game will be like.

As usual, the sources and HEX can be found here: http://www.drakker.org/gamebuino/bricks/.

[rodot]

Awesome, thanks for that update
If fells very smooth (you run at 40FPS?), and I really like all the animations, it makes the game feel well polished.

[Drakker]

Yup, 40 fps. This is not a super CPU intensive game so I could afford it. When there are a lot of bricks the CPU usage does grow over 100%, but that should be fixed with the improved drawBitmap function (although that build uses the old one).

Thanks for the good comments, I strive to make a well polished game, although the code might not feel all that well polished. I tried to save as much RAM as possible, but I went too far and still have plenty of RAM left but a the cost of a weird contrived code structure that uses almost all PROGMEM space. Well it works fine, so I guess that's all that matters. Lesson learned (that's what I'm here to do). ;)

[Drakker]

I've got a question for the more knowledgeable people around here. I'm working on the level editor and I need to write the levels to the SD card. I was hoping to save each level set in a single binary file (up to 255 levels per set). I toyed around with TinyFAT and it doesn't seem to be able to write binary files, and reading them requires reading files sector by sector, which is not very convenient and would require me to write a lot of code to handle the stream, thus wasting a lot of my time and worse, precious progmem.

I tried to get Petit FatFS to work, but the provided demo doesn't work and I haven't managed to get anywhere using Simbuino yet. While Petit FatFS would be perfect for the game executable to read the levels, I am not sure it would work for actually writing them as I'be been looking at the forum for info and I found a few posts from Rodot claiming that Petit FatFS can't write to disk anyway (the Petit FatFS website has documentation for write functions though).

So, is there any viable option for reading and writing binary files that I might have missed? It would be very convenient if there was something like the default C fwrite and fread so I could read/write structs directly, although I am not holding my hopes up. The "best" option so far seems to be to use TinyFat and store my levels as text files, which it can handle very well, but it doesn't seem very efficient to me.

Thanks in advance!