Stu's Rusty Bucket

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Fishguts I : GP2X and general stuff

Between ‘work work’ today I added back in GP2X support on the new open2x toolchain.

Had to do some hacking to get everything to build on amd64 and work on the 32bit arm (some of the script bytecode was not being saved/loaded and correctly sized).

It was nice to see the new tile graphics running on the GP2X I altered my original button layout to be a bit more GP2X friendly. Clocked it down to 133 and its running just fine. 100mhz seemed a bit slow btu that could have been my delay’s to give clock ticks back to the system being too long.

The map scrolling works very nicely too, (currently there are no diagonal movements so it only ever has to load 3 segments at once), with each segment at 127bytes and the largest at 300 bytes (obviously compressed), this makes loads pretty quick, enough not to make the system stutter anyway. New map loads are a bit more involved since each map has a tileset etc and you need the initial 9 segments (unless its a town which might not have 9 segments to start with).

I took some pics of the game running on the GP2X since I thought it would be nicer than some really tiny 320x240 pics but the gp2x screen keeps reflecting back on the camera even when no flash is used, so screenshots will have to wait..

Also drew a new player character, which is much improved over my original white stick figure.

Oh… I also animated the shallow water + water tiles and frame limited it to 10fps, but I will test out on the GP2X to see if I can get it at 25fps nice and smooth. Mostly I want to work out a nice FPS rate vs clock rate, since I want to keep the game clocked low (around 133mhz) to lessen battery drainage, since an CRPG is supposed to be played for long periods…

Which is a nice segue into save states. I’m not doing the console thing where you only get to save at certain points, you will be allowed to save anywhere on the overland map but not in towns or dungeons. There will be only 1 save slot tho (at present).

Ive also been thinking about the transact screen. Since when you transact with someone it replaces the map screen you in affect stop time, I will have the game eat X time for each question asked etc, not asking questions is like sitting on the stats screen. I may dynamically clock those screens down to 100mhz or so and pump it back up for map screens.

I just about abandoned by KISS principal for the first game and went with a more ultima reagent magic system but abandoned that idea, maybe for the sequel.  I need to keep a simple magic system (aka some preset spells).

Also did a tweak to tile + font blitting. Because I am using 24x24 tiles, they don’t quite fill to 32x240, so I’ve nudged the horizontal offset and for psp, nudged the vertical offset and it all looks good

I still need to do the LOS, and as I keep saying, it should be easy I just have to drop my code in from my roguelike.