DS Dev from nothing

I had a spent alot of time on this, I posted on the palib forum but the only comment I got was in the direction of “Double Buffering”.

Not very effiecient for a single screen of scrolling text so I’ve given up on it.

I have decided on using transitions to move from one intro screen to another.

I gave up on wrapping the button code and just dropped the button straight into a MainMenuLayout procedure.

I’ve got the Palib blue front screen, a little CentreSmartText title, transition out, in and the main menu.

When the “Start” button on the screen is hit, there is a transition and the game board shows.

I’ve written most of the good stuff on the number 727 bus home from work.  I get nearly a hour to myself so i’ve been using it to expand my project.

Once, i’ve got the game to a situation where i’m happy, i’ll carve the code up into useful chunks and publish the projects to my googlepages space.  Palib and libnds has made this a memorable summer so far.

I just saw mrshlee’s post about needing $166 dollars by august 31st.  I can’t say that his goal looks insite, only $15 had been donated.  I’ve given $10 but it’s not going to help unless others chip in.

I hope the community gives…  We get so much for free, we overlook the cost to those who stand up and help all of us.

Back to the IDE!

http://devscene.chipin.com/server-fees

Please help out.

It’s good for the community, if the community doesn’t help it’s self then who will?

Far from wrapping PALIB button code, i’ve been trying to get scrolling text to work.

I’ve been using the smarttext and centresmarttext procedures but i’ve not been having much luck.

I paint text on the screen, wait for a vblank and then clear it, repeat 300 times.

The strange thing is the flickering that then ensues.

The top line doesn’t flicker till its near the top of the screen.  Any lines under the top one flicker from the bottom of the screen…

I’ve given up trying things after a week and a bit of plugging away at it and raise d a post in the PALIB forum.  I figure there is a way to do it that I don’t know yet.

I’ll see what comes from that this week.

I’ve been thinkg of ways to make the perfect buttons but non of the ideas i’ve come up with are any good.

I figure there is a way I can dump a bunch of pixels on the screen in a non-sprite size chunk but I haven’t found a way to do it so i’m going to build a re-usable piece of code that dose my buttons for me.

For now I will settle for wrapping the standard PALib functions for GUI buttons and then later i’ll add my own functions if i find the perfect solution. That way I can start to build up a series of useful component i can build my prototype software with.

I’ll write it now and post it later.

I have no idea how to make menu’s.

My big problem is that I can’t draw a tap detectable block with a size of my own choosing.

The only three techniques I can think of of are;

1 stretched sprite

• 1 small sprite repeated in a pattern
• the GUI functions of palib

Another problem I’ve got is text. I’ve no idea how to make big letters…

So I have 2 things to research

• Big text
• big images

I’ve been looking into all this and I’ve not had much luck yet…

I got 30 spam comments yesterday, Cool! I’ve never had spam comments before!!!

I keep working on my naughts and crosses game and i’m getting really proud of it now. If only i could have had this sucess when I was really down, it would have made all the difference.

I’ve sorted out alot of my problems and I’m tkaing the project forward and polishing it up. I’m starting to think about the generic features a game has;

• Menus
• Music
• AI
• Into screens
• backgrounds
• options
• save games
• score boards
• player name and tracking
• wireless

All these things will come up in a finished project so i figure that it’s better I learn them soon.

The music one is nice - PAlib makes it really easy!

Drop the “.mod” in directory named “data”, add a include to the mods name with .h on the end and call PA_PlayMod(<name of mod>).

Sounds are also pretty easy but i’ve not implemented them yet.

Here is a link to my “mostly finished” X project.

I’ve taken all the debug code out and just left the raw game.

I’ve split the code into an other project, X2, into which i’m putting music, sounds, menus, intro’s, options etc…

Heres a link.

http://chewychompy.googlepages.com/X.rar

When I left my O&X code, it was in a bad way. Here are the individual points that needed addresing.

• Function prototyping - solved
  Prototyped functions
• Finish the game Win/Reset Issues - complete, missed 2 occaision it was possible to win…
• Add a frontend with a men - still looking at that.
• Add some options and multiple pieces/backgrounds - thats with the menu
• Add some sound effects - i’ve added a mod playing in the background!!
• Clear up the top screen - done, I’ve took all the text away and put in a a new set of commands when the game is started. You get the blue PA_Lib spash screen and then you get a little title by me for a few seconds. Then the board comes up.

I had some problems where I’d badly named some of the graphics and they were conflicting with the functions. I’ve fixed it and also fixed a stupid problem where I’d prepared a “Winner message” as a sprite when i meant to prepare it as a background. Then I’d named it “Winner” not “winner” and got some probs there…

I got rid of a lot of stupid compiler problems, just warnings that I don’t know how to fix…

I stopped on April 10th and I’d lost a lot of love for this whole thing but now i’m back.

I can’t sit around and let a golden opportunity like this slip through my fingers.

While I’ve been away I’ve been doing a lot of coding in other languages and i’ve decided that it’s time to really cut my teeth on C and buckle down.

I need an idea that good, is deep enough to give me plenty of places to hide when it gets tough and something that I can really love at the end of it.

If there’s one thing lacking in my gaming life, at the moment, it’s a decent space trading game. I’ve played a lot of them in my time but I’ve only loved a few. It’s a very easy thing to make, just what to make it into is the hard part.

The nice thing about a space trading game is the level of challenge. It could be a simple as traveling form location to location trading items or as complex as some of the current generation games. It’s all up to me.

There’s no point in making it too hard, but my yardstick will be the element of “Fun” my game possesses.

The naughts and crosses game could do with finishing, but it could also do with re-writing…

That will be challenge number one.

C really annoyed me as of late and PALib only did a little to help.

 I get pretty annoyed at C’s failing and it didn’t really do alot to pull me through.

 I got a good bit of code put down after I ripped the clever stuff out and I came to the point where I put a message on the screen to show who the winner is.   I hit my problem when I tried to show a “Winner X Wins” message on the screen.  I created my sprites but I found that PALib doesn’t just show bitmaps on the screen, it shows set-sized sprites.

As I was typing this I wanted to be sure I wasn’t wrong so I read up a bit more.

I came across a tiling mechanism that alows me to show parts of tiles.  I’m going to investigate “Code Carving” my bigger sprites and showing the parts as, and where, I want them.

My trust in coding is renewed!

I hate C.  I really hate it and I hate “;”.

I got my a demo of my super win detection code working (horizontal win from top corner) but I don’t want to use it, it’s too difficult for me to prove it will work in every occaision for every.  I’m going to replace it with a basic, simple check and i’m going to release that program tonight.  Then I’m going to start programing the nds - not the stupid win detection.

 More coming.