New Video : Pandora: Things To To When You're Not Playing

[gruso]

Simply fantastic videos. They really showcase the crazy amount of work that's gone into this OS. Notaz, DJWillis, take a bow.

Yes.

 

[rabidpoobear]

ED, just wondering how many lines of code were actually needed to get the game running? Will all Pygame projects really be so easy to port?

This really boils down to the resolution they use. So long as it's less than or equal to 800x480 then you can port with basically no code changes whatsoever. That's one of the coolest things about Pygame - no compilation, platform independent. But it's a semantic problem if they use a different screen res - you'll have to deal with that when porting. for example if the programmer made the screen 640x480 you could either port it correctly by upping the resolution but this may break stuff (if they refer to absolute pixel coords to position stuff) so you may just leave the resolution default and have the LCD stretch it (but then it will be the incorrect aspect ratio.) Or you could create a 640x480 surface and blit it in the center of the screen. etc. etc. There are many ways to handle it.

Another stumbling block is that if they use some libraries that are written in C they will need to be recompiled. This is generally not a problem because most people that write pygame games tend to use Python libraries anyway which already have easily-buildable source (eg. to install scipy just run

python easy_install scipy

and it will download the latest build and compile + install it for you).

But other than that it's basically just copying + pasting the code to get it to run on a new platform - I often develop my python games on Windows and deploy them on Linux and MacOS as well, usually don't have to change a line of code. But then again I usually run the games windowed and at a fixed aspect ratio so I don't have to deal with the aspect ratio thing.

(Another thing the programmer needs to be smart about is when using OS-related functions, eg. don't do open(dir + "/" + file), do open(os.path.join(dir, file)) and it'll work on Windows too.)

 

[EvilDragon]

ED: I found something really, really weird. @4:38, the % of charged goes down from 68% to 67%. But the timer goes up instead, it goes from 6:32 estimated time left to 6:37. Is this a bug or is looking at the CPU usage too?

EDIT: Just saw that after AbiWord it goes even up to 6:47

Could you explain this please

Sure. You were absolutely right - the remaining time changes according to the actual usage.
If you close the lid (which turns off the LCD), it even goes up to 18 - 20 hours.

I was running an emulator before the video which needed a bit more power. Therefore, it corrected itself when the CPU usage went down again.

Has been pretty accurate for me It said 45 minutes left yesterday night while working on it, and after about 43 minutes, the battery was empty.

ED, just wondering how many lines of code were actually needed to get the game running? Will all Pygame projects really be so easy to port?

Also, The provided themes a re awesome, whie you were switching between Windows look alikes I was thinking "If there's a Mac look alike I'm going to laugh my ass off" 10 seconds later I needed some glue. I wonder though what's the process for changing desk top images? I would imagine there are dozens of pictures in already the OS, but if the Nand isn't something you want "Joe Average" to mess around with will it still be possible to place your own personal images as the desktop background?

It depends
I put Snowball on the card and ran it. No prob, worked fine without any tweakings.

Barbie Seahorse Adventure needed more work:
First, you can't do your own button configuration in-game (you can do so in Snowball), so you need to change that in the code.
Also, it was meant to run 640x480, so I had to change one parameter. That part of the game is well coded, so it worked out of the box just changing the resolutions.

After changing those two things, it was fully playable - but slooow.
Unfortunately, the game engine is VERY unoptimized (it even says in the sourcecode that it's unoptimized ). It needs a lot of CPU power (I know it ran on the gp2x with about 1 frame per second).
As I can't code at all, I couldn't change the game engine, just sped up the movement of all the sprites.
This makes it a bit more choppier, but still playable.

If someone can optimize the engine, that would rock.

Anyways, back to topic:
PyGame games work out of the box, unless they want some non-Pandora-nice resolution (1024x768 ) or OpenGL.

I want to wrap up more games, so I guess when the Pandora launches, you'll have a lot of classic pygame retro-like-games ready

 

[EvilDragon]

But then again I usually run the games windowed and at a fixed aspect ratio so I don't have to deal with the aspect ratio thing.

Works pretty well on the Pandora. A 640x480 pygame screen on the Pandora looked nice and what centered.
Looks like it always centers the screen. here

 

[torpor]

Really nice work ED! Great to see pygame working so well .. I'm sure this will help me pick up my Python skills a little, especially if the Appstore thingy is going to be filled with these games for easy download/install .. so thank you for the hard work you're doing to make this all work so well and be an enjoyable experience for us!

 

[juniorm33]

Thanks ED,

These are the sort of things I've been wanting to see more of!

 

[borgqueenx]

You have already tried Audacious and stuff?
Looks to me a great media player for pandora.
that GNome player looks ugly skinned, and is way to big.

 

[urjaman]

You have already tried Audacious and stuff?
Looks to me a great media player for pandora.
that GNome player looks ugly skinned, and is way to big.

Thats XMMS just with a different skin.... (yeah, its skinnable, as is Audacious (they're related you know))

 

[emil10001]

Maybe we could try to convert the engine portions of the code to C with Cython. http://www.korokithakis.net/node/109

EDIT: I'm talking about slow PyGame games, btw.

 

[Hitnrun]

"Things To To When You're Not Playing"

But half of the video was about gaming...

 

[EvilDragon]

"Things To To When You're Not Playing"

But half of the video was about gaming...

What part was gaming except for a short Vice video?
Abiword? The file manager? PDF Reader?

 

[borgqueenx]

Will the theming support GTK 2.x themes from http://xfce-look.org/ ?

 

[sryidc]

here it is


think you for this video ed. i have been dieing to see the internet stuff.

 

[WizardStan]

Wait, you've got Yahoo working? How? Where? I've been looking for the ARM built libPurple plugin for YIM for a long time.

 

[peca]

...Not really a big deal, as long as you don't press a modifier key ('"´`) directly afterwards, the compose is ignored...

Can You add a few more diacritics? I can learn how to configure it, but if it works out of the box, then it will be cool. (pretty please
In Czech we need caron (not breve) (ˇ->čďěňřšťž) and ring (°->ů), in Slovak is circumflex (ˆ->ô) and neighbours Poles (from Poland) have some slash and stroke (Cosurgi knows better than me). Not to speak about other nations over world that use Latin alphabet.

 

[EvilDragon]

...Not really a big deal, as long as you don't press a modifier key ('"´`) directly afterwards, the compose is ignored...

Can You add a few more diacritics? I can learn how to configure it, but if it works out of the box, then it will be cool. (pretty please
In Czech we need caron (not breve) (ˇ->čďěňřšťž) and ring (°->ů), in Slovak is circumflex (ˆ->ô) and neighbours Poles (from Poland) have some slash and stroke (Cosurgi knows better than me). Not to speak about other nations over world that use Latin alphabet.

Well, it's Linux standard, so if you press ^ or ° instead of ", it will work already, yes.
We don't have a ˇ-key though, don't know how this is handled.
You could check some Compose-Key-Information for Linux on some websites, it's a normal standard we're using here.

 

[peca]

Well, it's Linux standard, so if you press ^ or ° instead of ", it will work already, yes.
We don't have a ˇ-key though, don't know how this is handled.
You could check some Compose-Key-Information for Linux on some websites, it's a normal standard we're using here.

Thanks a lot. If it is standard then it will work somehow. And other thanks for those videos!

EDIT: Wiki, as always. "c" for caron and "o" for ring.

 

[ximple]

Also, was I the only one who thought that the Pandora displaying the C64 BASIC screen kicked ass?

Nope, that's probably the #1 reason I'm getting a Pandora.

Same here - having C64 and Atari 400/800 will bring back some great memories.

 

[gibberish]

nice vids - both the os and the internet look really nice and quick. good work.

 

[rabidpoobear]

After changing those two things, it was fully playable - but slooow.
Unfortunately, the game engine is VERY unoptimized (it even says in the sourcecode that it's unoptimized ). It needs a lot of CPU power (I know it ran on the gp2x with about 1 frame per second).
As I can't code at all, I couldn't change the game engine, just sped up the movement of all the sprites.
This makes it a bit more choppier, but still playable.

If someone can optimize the engine, that would rock.

Hey ED, I'll look into optimization over the next week (spring break). I'm surprised Phil made an unoptimized game! Oh, I see, it was for Pyweek. That explains it. Phil's normally a stickler for optimized code, but he's pretty busy with Galcon these days. Kinda sad, he was really into the pygame community for a while. Makes sense though since he's trying to make a living now...

Anyway I'll take a look at it and see what I can do. So all you changed was the resolution, right?