Release Frozen Bubble


Mr Rob

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Hello all:


I noticed that Frozen Bubble, a wonderful open source game, has yet to be ported to Pandora. Compiling and the like led to errors, so instead, I packaged up the Debian arm binaries for Frozen Bubble, and uploaded it to repo.openpandora.org.


http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=frozen-bubble-2.2.x


I say it's still in beta, as it'll crash occasionally, but not consistently. I may be missing a library or two from the Debian side of things, but I won't have time to debug it for a day or two.... Gameplay seems to work well, though, so I figured I'd upload it for others to tinker with as I work through the other issues.


So give it a go, and enjoy.
 
I must say this is an excellent game in all respects.


I was always a 'bust- a- move' fan and this is a superb clone. Even surpassing bust- a- move.


Thank you Mr. Rob for bringing us a high quality pnd.


Cheers!!
 
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Nice work, this is a really nice port, smooth, looks great and plays great. Unfortuinately my dodgy colour perception is ruining it for me(i am really struggling with red and orange, yellow and green) :-( but looks like it would be great for people who have normal eyes.


obviously this game looks great and plays great so i am not expecting any updates (and am not fishing for one neither) but if there is ever a need to update this can i make a sugestion: the coloured ball that at the bottom of the screen is currently split in two. The colour in the top half is the colour your shooting and the bottom half is a silvery white colour i think. This is where i am getting thrown abit. think if the entire ball was to be coloured in it might help distinguishing the colour of the ball for us colour blind folk. i find my eyes strain to much trying to work it out becuse its quite a small area that is coloured and my eyes just cant seem to distinguish what i am looking at and end up repetedly firing orange balls into red balls and green balls into yellow balls and vise-versa.


dunnno if there is anyone else out there with a issue with colour perseption or if it just me.
 
Nice work, this is a really nice port, smooth, looks great and plays great. Unfortuinately my dodgy colour perception is ruining it for me(i am really struggling with red and orange, yellow and green) :-( but looks like it would be great for people who have normal eyes.


obviously this game looks great and plays great so i am not expecting any updates (and am not fishing for one neither) but if there is ever a need to update this can i make a sugestion: the coloured ball that at the bottom of the screen is currently split in two. The colour in the top half is the colour your shooting and the bottom half is a silvery white colour i think. This is where i am getting thrown abit. think if the entire ball was to be coloured in it might help distinguishing the colour of the ball for us colour blind folk. i find my eyes strain to much trying to work it out becuse its quite a small area that is coloured and my eyes just cant seem to distinguish what i am looking at and end up repetedly firing orange balls into red balls and green balls into yellow balls and vise-versa.


dunnno if there is anyone else out there with a issue with colour perseption or if it just me.
Nay B) .


The color looks spot on for my eyes.


Sorry, no issues with color here.
 
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Nice work, this is a really nice port, smooth, looks great and plays great. Unfortuinately my dodgy colour perception is ruining it for me(i am really struggling with red and orange, yellow and green) :-( but looks like it would be great for people who have normal eyes.


obviously this game looks great and plays great so i am not expecting any updates (and am not fishing for one neither) but if there is ever a need to update this can i make a sugestion: the coloured ball that at the bottom of the screen is currently split in two. The colour in the top half is the colour your shooting and the bottom half is a silvery white colour i think. This is where i am getting thrown abit. think if the entire ball was to be coloured in it might help distinguishing the colour of the ball for us colour blind folk. i find my eyes strain to much trying to work it out becuse its quite a small area that is coloured and my eyes just cant seem to distinguish what i am looking at and end up repetedly firing orange balls into red balls and green balls into yellow balls and vise-versa.


dunnno if there is anyone else out there with a issue with colour perseption or if it just me.

Fascinatingly enough, Frozen-Bubble comes with a 'colour-blind' mode with a shape inside each bubble, corresponding to a particular color: http://www.gbgames.com/games/frozenbubble/fb2.png Apparently it can be toggled with 'M', but I don't know if that works presently. The other method is a command line flag, which is a bit inconvenient on the Pandora.


It's simple enough to build in, PND's allow you to have two separate applications in one with a different execute script, so one contains the flag and another doesn't.


I need to fix a couple things in the PND, anyway, as the game'll crash occasionally on me (probably a library issue, has anyone else had it crash or is it just me?), so that's something I can easily add, too.
 
Can't wait to give this a try, don't have the ability to get this on my Pandora at the moment, but soon. Thank you, big fan of Bust A Move, and I got my girlfriend hooked on it too!
 
Just played to level 20 or so with no hitches whatsoever. However, when I went to input my name on the high score screen, it wouldn't let me type anything. I didn't have any trouble hitting enter and then navigating to quit the game otherwise.
 
amazing thanks rob i hope that makes a great difference, and alot less stressfull :p


cheers and keep up the great work.
 
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Nice work, this is a really nice port, smooth, looks great and plays great. Unfortuinately my dodgy colour perception is ruining it for me(i am really struggling with red and orange, yellow and green) :-( but looks like it would be great for people who have normal eyes.


obviously this game looks great and plays great so i am not expecting any updates (and am not fishing for one neither) but if there is ever a need to update this can i make a sugestion: the coloured ball that at the bottom of the screen is currently split in two. The colour in the top half is the colour your shooting and the bottom half is a silvery white colour i think. This is where i am getting thrown abit. think if the entire ball was to be coloured in it might help distinguishing the colour of the ball for us colour blind folk. i find my eyes strain to much trying to work it out becuse its quite a small area that is coloured and my eyes just cant seem to distinguish what i am looking at and end up repetedly firing orange balls into red balls and green balls into yellow balls and vise-versa.


dunnno if there is anyone else out there with a issue with colour perseption or if it just me.

Youch! Although I often advocate taking into consideration colour perception when it comes to web design, it never occurred to me how profoundly it could affect such a simple game concept.


Digging into the Frozen Bubble source reveals some images designed for those with colour perception problems. They're in /share/gfx/balls and each bubble has a different "texture" to make them more distinguishable. Perhaps there's a setting in Frozen Bubble to toggle the use of these balls on and off.


Edit: From here: http://www.frozen-bubble.org/troubleshooting/

If you are colourblind, we already have what you're looking for: please use the -cb commandline parameter, and bubbles will be printed with little geometrical symbols inside.
 
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For those playing at home, I've updated the PND to 2.2.0.1. New stuff:


1. Added a couple more libraries from the debian build. I don't think this fixed anything.


2. Added a second app for color-blind mode. As shown above, the frozen bubbles will have textures inside them to distinguish between colors. Should show up as a second application on the Pandora.


Enjoy.
 
Thanks for the update rob love that you added the colour blind setting it makes such a dramatic difference for me, there are still shapes i cant see lol mainly the the blue triangle but luckily enough for me i can see the shapes in the colours i was struggling with.


I appreciate that this is a difficult fix for all as everyones eyes are gonna cope better with different colours to others.


The fact you have listened to the post gone to the effort of updating the PND so fast brings a smile to my face.


Robs the man
 
I like Puzzle Bobble, nice to see there is a Open Source Alternative. :) Thanks for Porting and especialy thanks for updating. It's always good to see when a PND is not just thrown out into the Repo and then forgotten. ^^
 
Thanks for the update rob love that you added the colour blind setting it makes such a dramatic difference for me, there are still shapes i cant see lol mainly the the blue triangle but luckily enough for me i can see the shapes in the colours i was struggling with.


I appreciate that this is a difficult fix for all as everyones eyes are gonna cope better with different colours to others.


The fact you have listened to the post gone to the effort of updating the PND so fast brings a smile to my face.


Robs the man

Alright. Remember, we do have the source, so I could tweak the blue bubble to be extremely obvious. Just looking at the frozen bubble image directory, yeah, the blue triangle (attached) is very hard to see inside. I'm terrible with graphics, but if someone could make this stand out a little more, I think we'd all appreciate it, and I'd include it in the next version. I could get you the others for comparison, too, so you don't need to muck around the source.


I'm also tempted to make an emoticon mode, too. If someone happened to find a creative commons 32x32 emoticon set....

bubble-colourblind-3.gif
 
that sound like it would be awsome for anyone with really bad colour vision, because the shapes are quite thin and the inner and outer colours are the same the colour can make the whole bubble and image blur and blend in together so its makes the image appear as if isnt actually there (thats the best way i think i could explain it).


So if there where different image sets to chose from, something with a thick image outline completely blacked out/ white in the black bubble would help out anyones vision thats towards the worse end of the spectrum. Also your emoticons idea sounds like thats would be really good to i would have thought.


I would love to help out but i am very illitarate in the graphics department.
 
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I've commissioned a friend who's a little bit more graphically inclined than I am to touch up the blue bubble. Are there others that are hard to differentiate, too?
 
Not easy to improve this Graphic because of all the glare effects. Here is a quick test:

So I went ahead and became awesome by putting these images online so we could see them easily. I've added an edit by me (Triangles? We don't need no stinkin' triangles) and an edit by Fusion_Power (thanks, by the way), so people can see the images side by side to tell if they're hard to distinguish or not:


http://wwwic.ndsu.edu/~foertsch/for/pandora/index.html

I get an error about unable to mount the pnd when trying to run the colorblind version. the regular version runs fine.

This is caused by my own dumb-assery. The PND isn't being unmounted correctly after it's done, which is why the color blind version failed after you ran the first one. Easy fix, but'll require a new PND obviously.
 
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