[Game]Pokitto Grand Prix

[Hanski]

I haven’t been working on it because I assumed you were either still on holiday or getting settled back in at work after being away on holiday.

Yes, I am now back in business.

(Still a bit of noticable tearing, but it’s bearable.)

I do not know how to get rid of it. Traditionally, tearing happens when the internal screen refresh is not in the sync with the application updating the content to the front buffer. As a result you see the combination of two frames on screen. To fix it the buffer update should be made during the vertical blank time. As far as I know, in the Pokitto LCD, there is no vblank or internal screen refresh, but I might be wrong.

If you’re getting back to working on this then I can get back to working on the graphics as well.
I’ll be able to do more next week than I can this week because I’ve got another project that I’m currently working on.

Great! Maybe the background (off-road) texture update?
I will work on sound effects next, and maybe on some rudimentary collision detection.

[Pharap]

As far as I know, in the Pokitto LCD, there is no vblank or internal screen refresh, but I might be wrong.

Honestly I don’t know either.

I assumed there wasn’t because nobody else had complained about tearing yet,
but maybe nobody else has attempted something where it would be noticable?

I suppose one way to tell would be to uncap the frame limiter and continually render differently coloured frames and see if there’s any noticable tearing.

Great! Maybe the background texture update?

More backgrounds? Sure.

I’ll have to finish what I was doing with the ships first though:

[WIP] F-Zero-esque demo (graphics needed!)

For colouring I've got a system of 'shades' where 1 'shade' is 0b0001000 (or 0x08) in RGB888 terms (which is the 'epsilon' of R and B in RGB565). This allows me to lighten or darken images by adjusting the 'shade' of every colour used and to increase contrast by changing the step between 'shades'. The two ships I had before were 2 'shades' apart for each colour. This new one here is 4 'shades' apart for each colour: [image]

I don’t know if I’ll have chance to work on it today, but hopefully I will.

[Hanski]

Great! Maybe the background texture update?

More backgrounds? Sure

To be more precise, I meant the “off-road” texture, not the scenery texture.
(btw. I do not have your latest scenery texture yet in use)

I was also thinking that should we take into use some fixed “full color” 8-bit palette? It is a tedious work to transfer bmps to C++ headers (with img2pok which is an excellent tool btw), and if the palette indexes change, that should be redone for all textures (!). Using a fixed palette would solve this.

[Pharap]

To be more precise, I meant the “off-road” texture, not the scenery texture.

Ah right. That can be done too.
Grass and dessert would probably look good.
The pink stuff was actually supposed to be for the road border originally.

I was also thinking that should be take into use some fixed “full color” 8-bit palette?

I’ve been intending to build up the palette over time based on which colours I need for the images.
I’m worried that if I pick the colours first that the palette won’t be flexible enough to respond to things like “add more depth to the ship sprites”.

It is a tedious work to transfer bmps to C++ headers (with img2pok which is an excellent tool btw), and if the palette indexes change, that should be redone for all textures (!). Using a fixed palette would solve this.

If I knew what image data format was needed then I could write a new tool that generates a header with both image data and palette data.

I’ve already got a command line tool for Arduboy that I could adapt to Pokitto,
I expect about 75% of the code would be the same.

[Hanski]

If I knew what image data format was needed then I could write a new tool that generates a header with both image data and palette data.

There is already @jonne 's BMP2POK command line tool, but unfortunately it does not support 256 color palette.

edit: https://github.com/pokitto/bmp2pok

edit: looks like it does support 8-bit palette ! I will give it a try.

[Hanski]

I tested a simple audio with the demo. Here are the performance results:

• Without sound: 57 fps
• 8 kHz: 52 fps
• 22 kHz: 47 fps
• 44 kHz: 38 fps

[jonne]

That’s pretty decent

[Pharap]

I’ll try to either finish changing the ship graphics or come up with a new graphic for the roadside some time tonight.

I’m currently close to being able to tick another project off my list so I’ll have time this week to focus on doing some art for this.
(Art should be a nice break from code for a while.)

I’d like to try to trick convince @Vampirics to donate some art for this because he’s a good artist and has done art for some of the other games I’ve been involved in.
(He’s a better artist than I am, but that’s not saying much :P)

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If anyone’s interested in what my other project is, I’ll post a link after its done.
If anyone’s still interested after that, I’ll contemplate a Pokitto port :P

[Vampirics]

I’d like to try to trick convince @Vampirics to donate some art for this because he’s a good artist and has done art for some of the other games I’ve been involved in.

Nice try, as much i would love to contribute, i can’t commit to this for this week because i won’t have much time. but i will sure try next week if i can.

P.S. : I also have to check what’s needed exactly and what are the limitations. (even though i am used to limitations)

[adekto]

if you do some lowpoly modeling and rotoscoped the art like my sample, it might make things easier.

[Hanski]

As a progress info I have now implemented:

• (very) simple sound effects,
• a simple collision detection,
• the ship shadow, and
• made more turns to the track (even one U-turn ).

I will come up with a new demo version soon once I have finalized the changes.

[Hanski]

The new demo:

• (Very) simple sound effects,
• A simple collision detection. Do not go off-road because it is bumby and you lose speed!
• The ship shadow, and
• Made much more turns to the track!

Binary: PZero.bin (61.0 KB)

[spinal]

(Very) simple sound effects,

Cool, how’d you do it? PROJ_SOUND_BUFFERED ?

[Hanski]

I used Jonne’s SynthTest InPokittoLib as a reference. It is really simple:

In My_Settings.h:

#define PROJ_ENABLE_SOUND 1     // 0 = all sound functions disabled
#define PROJ_ENABLE_SYNTH 1
#define PROJ_AUD_FREQ 8000

In the code:

Pokitto::Sound snd;
snd.ampEnable(1);
snd.playTone(1,tonefreq,amplitude,wavetype,arpmode);

[spinal]

Oh, playtone:-(

[Pharap]

Sorry for the delay in getting art up.
I had a few setbacks with some catestrophic bugs on the project I was hoping to be done with earlier in the week (mainly stack overflow bugs because I forgot to validate some data - you know you’re doing extreme and dangerous things when you get a stack overflow :P).

And if you’ve been following the other threads you’ll see I’ve had a powercut eat 4 hours out of my day so I’ve been unable to work on the art today.

Next week I’m going to set aside some time to focus on nothing but art for FZero.

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The other thread has reminded me we never discussed the licencing for the art.
Do you have a preference for what you’d like to release the art under?
I’m happy to release under any of the Creative Commons licences (other than CC0).
The licences are also available in Finnish if you prefer. :P
(Though I doubt you’ll need that. I hear most Finnish people speak excellent English.)

[Hanski]

Next week I’m going to set aside some time to focus on nothing but art for FZero.

Ok, good to know.

I am currently making a tool chain, so that I can manage changing the global 256 color palette and easily add new graphics to the game. I was thinking to use ImageMagick, but ended up to use the good old NetPbm tools (+ Bmp2Pok ) for the task.

The other thread has reminded me we never discussed the licencing for the art.
Do you have a preference for what you’d like to release the art under?
I’m happy to release under any of the Creative Commons licences (other than CC0).

I will release the code under the MIT license or something like that. For the graphics do as you will.

(Though I doubt you’ll need that. I hear most Finnish people speak excellent English.)

It is true that you can manage quite well with English in Finland. Finnish itself is very far from English as a language, but we study English a lot at school. Also, foreign films are never dubbed here, except for small children, so we are “exposing” to the English language a lot

[Pharap]

I will release the code under the MIT license or something like that. For the graphics do as you will.

If you’ve got no plans to use this commercially then I’ll go CC BY-NC-SA, otherwise I’m happy with CC BY-SA.

(Even if we go CC BY-NC-SA, I’m happy to licence it separately to Pokitto Oy if @jonne has any plans about using it for promotional or financial purposes.)

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Finnish itself is very far from English as a language

Indeed. I could see that from the thread about the Finnish article from Skrolli.

It’s a very interesting language, particularly its rule about how suffixes change a word’s usage (I suppose technically it’s similar to how English uses different suffixes for different tenses, but it doesn’t feel that way).

but we study English a lot at school

It seems that quite a lot of countries do.

so we are “exposing” to the English language a lot

Yeah, I get what you mean.

I just wish more films were EN-GB instead of EN-US,
seeing American spellings everywhere on the internet drives me nuts. :P

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Tangentally related, I watched a documentary called “The Rise and Fall of Nokia” earlier in the year.
It was very interesting.

[Hanski]

Tangentally related, I watched a documentary called “The Rise and Fall of Nokia” earlier in the year.
It was very interesting.

I was there, exiting times! But what goes up, must come down. Nokia lost its mobile phone business to Apple and Google, but is still strong in mobile phone networks ( what many people do not realise).

[Pharap]

I was there, exiting times! But what goes up, must come down. Nokia lost its mobile phone business to Apple and Google, but is still strong in mobile phone networks ( what many people do not realise).

Also, a lot of Nokia’s talented former employees have moved on to other tech companies, so it’s still making an impact on the world. :)

One of the former employees bought a laundrette. :P

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Another interesting thing, they showed this guy who had built a modern smart phone (touch screen, swipe action, internet browsing) back in 2002, and none of the companies would touch it.

The day Apple announced the iPhone he got so angry he threw his phone at the wall.
Unlike an iPhone it didn’t break.