Pokitto is on the way, what games should I make?

Well my idea was something more vulgar/crude.:

  • Take a dungeon in 3d
  • Render offline (PC) with high res/ high color every room with view in four direction N/S/E/W.
  • Store the images with their coordinate and move them to the sd-card.
  • When you navigate in the game load that image and apply monster as billboard .
  • Maybe add some scaling/merge effect to the image moving from room to room.

Basically pre-render everything can be visited and apply monster over.

I think that would work fine.

Reminds me of Myst - a point and click where all the backgrounds were high-detail prerenderings.

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Could be interesting – as I said I’m not a big fan of having a huge amount of images prerendered, I prefer small, compact games – but nice idea nevertheless :slight_smile:


I’m now slowly setting up my dev environment . As a part of this I might actually make some super small testing game, like 2048 (I think I haven’t seen this one on Pokitto).

EDIT:

Not so lucky with the environment setup so far :smiley:

  • PokittoSim is very unstable on my OS for some reason (looks like some SDL bug). (but I have a dirty workaround)
  • Mbed refuses to compile my programs with an internal error, probably a problem at their end? working now
  • EmBitz webside is down so I can’t download it and use instead of mbed. it’s Windows only anyway :frowning:
  • Also tried PokittoEmu but couldn’t get the WIP codebase to build. compiles now!

Not giving up though :slight_smile: Let’s hope things go better tomorrow.

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Embitz is also up

Also which repo are you trying pokittosim or pokittolib?

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Super weird, it’s something with my computer – the page doesn’t load in my browsers, even when using a proxy, but I can access it via Tor. Don’t know what’s happening, but am downloading EmBitz already :slight_smile:

I think EmBitz is Windows only, and I’m guessing you don’t have a Windows computer.

Best report it to @FManga in this thread.

I had similar problems so I made a couple of PRs to solve some of them:


I didn’t solve everything though, so I couldn’t get it to compile.

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Yeah, I just found out :confused: I might be able to use it via wine, but web IDE may actually be more comfortable for me. Ideally I’d like to get the Sim/Emu to work and only use the IDE to produce the final build, because I really like my vim workflow. Are there any other potential compilers for the Pokitto microcontroller that could be used in the future?

Also I’d be very glad to get the Sim working without code::blocks – it uses gcc anyway. Would be awesome to have e.g. cmake as an alternative… This is just an idea for the future, code::blocks can be invoked from CLI in the meantime so it’s no blocker to me.

Just download the toolchain and use it directly. I use this with make/emacs, you should be able to get vim working just fine.

What errors do you get compiling the emulator? I still haven’t had a chance to look at the PRs @Pharap sent me.

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Code::Blocks (like most IDEs) is basically just a middleman,
eventually it just feeds comands to GCC.
If you can figure out which commands are needed then you can cut out the IDE.


I notice you didn’t mention PlatformIO, Atom or VSCode,
is there a reason you haven’t tried VSCode+PlatformIO or Atom+PlatformIO?

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Or Vim+PlatformIO

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Wow, looks great, I’ll try.

Sorry for my ignorance, I tried compiling the code::blocks project but now I noticed there is a Makefile, compiles just fine :slight_smile:

Yes but it’s also a build system (or it seems to me) that knows where all the objs and libraries are and links it all together with a thousand of commands. This is exactly what cmake could do pretty easily, but I haven’t tried yet because I have so many new things to set up.

The reason is I don’t know what it is :slight_smile: Checking it out right now, it better be all FOSS :slight_smile:

The Code::Blocks project is what I had issues with as well.

I’m not sure it would be as many as a thousand.
Probably just one very long command.

I’ve never attempted to compile with GCC on the command line because there’s so many options.

I wouldn’t bother suggesting otherwise.

(Yes, Microsoft is capable of using open source licences.)

Atom is probably open source too, but I’ve never used it.

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I just keep copy-pasting the options from the old projects :slight_smile: You just adjust a few options here and there.

I got close to compiling it all but got stuck somewhere at linking the PokittoLib. I’ll get back to it later.

I know, the problem is a lot of open-source programs are dependent on proprietary platforms – that’s one of my main issues with open-source vs free software. As long as it can all be run using only FOSS, I have no problem with Microsoft being signed below :slight_smile:

Okay, I managed to compile with gcc only, and disabled sound in simulator so that it doesn’t crash. Guess I can get to development now :slight_smile:

What toolchain + os are you now using, Miloslav? Platformio + Mac?

Edit: or simulator?

Linux Mint, bare command line gcc + simulator (with sound disabled because of pulseaudio library bug). For final build I’ll use mbed.

EDIT:

Still I have to use code::blocks if I want to recompile anything else than my program, e.g. if I change a screen mode or another global #define. To achieve complete independence from code::blocks I’ll have to use CMake, in which case I might as well make a tutorial. Let me see.

As I’m looking at it, CMake can generate code::blocks project files as well as regular Makefiles and many other build systems, so having a CMake might be the ultimate solution.

EDIT2:

There’s a precompiled static library /lib/linux/libPokittoCoreLin.a – how can I recompile this? What source files was it generated from? I think it may also be the source of the pulseaudio library segfaults.

EDIT3:

Seems like too much work now, I think I’ll just go make some small test game :smiley:

first experiments :slight_smile:

pok2048

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It’s on the Pokitto now!

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There’s no settings file with this.
What screen mode does it use?
Is it lores mode? (110x88 16 colour)

Nevermind, I found the screenmode option buried part way down the code.
I find it odd that this code would compile without a My_settings.h file.


Also, for the record, using small datatypes like uint8_t and uint16_t is probably more expensive on ARM because ARM needs extra instructions to truncate its 32 bit registers after performing arithmetic.

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The settings file is there somewhere, just not in the repo. I still don’t know how it works exactly, will look at that tomorrow :slight_smile:

Interesting, I’m still used to it from Arduboy, I’ll reconsider this. Is there a way to see how much RAM is occupied with global variables, like with Arduino?

EDIT: Just to make it clear, it’s not complete yet. Probably will be tomorrow though.