Odonata = Not So Great. So What Gp2x Only Games Are You Playing?

[DavidBeoulve]

YouTube is great. I found Odonata:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE8kO-Q_VNg
and here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3vhXBNIo6w
which are the same video.

Anyone know anything about this game? Where to buy it? Google's take on the issue.

"Ent² has released a pack of the latest screenshots from the upcoming shooter which is a new commercial game for the GP2X.
Download Here"

I must be out of the loop. That's our digs the download is on.

DING! Once again, Epicenter helps me catch up.

"I was pretty disappointed with this release, as were a lot of people clearly ... but I think you'll be impressed with what we're achieving with Stargazer. The GP2X is capable of much more in terms of graphics, audio, music and the sheer intensity of gameplay possible-- Odonata in its present state does not really scratch the surface. We're also keeping to a unique, creative design with unconventional unique gameplay elements, characters, storyline and depth not found in your average generic space shooter. I think you'll soon see the GP2X is capable of far more than any CPS2 game can throw at it! Keep an eye out!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH STARGAZER. I swear, you guys are killing me. Payback's not out, the BoB has become a dead albatross, and Zelda Classic's nowhere near ready for the GP2X, Elsewhere is elsewhere, and I don't see mention of any RPG I can sink my teeth into.

Pardon for being emotional.

Currently my pay options for GP2X games are Vektar and Blazar?

I recall someone was making an RPG that Evil Dragon was helping out with.

My 9 year old daughter loves my GP2X and frankly, so does her dad. I've long gotten bored of NeoGeo/Genesis emulation. Whoever said GP2X only games were where it was at may be right. I didn't grow up with a Genesis, so I can't connect to the games. Neo Geo is like listening to marching band music by Sousa, a little Sousa goes a long way. So I see things like Odonata on YouTube and think "Oh my God! My GP2X dreams are coming true!" and then find out...

Mayhaps I should peruse the downloads section.

 

[DavidBeoulve]

Certainly finding stuff to try out.

 

[Epicenter]

I will admit the scene seems to be slowing rapidly, like someone hit the brakes sharply 2 months ago. I suspect there are some very good reasons for this.

#1, Hardware limitations of the GP2X are constrictive. While initial use of the system shows promise, there are growing pains involved. As games get larger and more advanced, peformance defecits begin to make themselves evident. Valuable CPU performance is lost to be relegated to drawing sprites due to the anemic blitter and bottlenecked memory subsystem, and complete lack of true 2D acceleration. Lack of SD-DMA support makes loading times a major issue for games with many large sprites, or any sort of sampled music or sound effects. The faulty stick limits appeal of many games, and this compounded with battery/power issues limit the appeal of the GP2X as a viable commercial platform.

#2, The GP2X has lent itself to the emulation community first and foremost, and it shows. Homebrew development has remained fairly primitive, not really testing the capability the GP2X *does* have. Multimedia features are still sorely lacking, the video, audio, and photo viewers are still sorely lacking. The hotly-anticipated Mplayer source, I predicted, would lead to the development of a stable and more capable media player, but I have seen little to no development occuring on it as of late. Some codec support was added, but improvements were meager, stability is still an issue, and I'm hearing reports of the same old problems rearing their ugly heads (I read about an audio sync problem today, even! Again!) I feel very strongly there is a greater need to attract serious software developers with serious ambition.

I can personally speak for both sides of that. While I've achieved a lot of things I didn't expect to be able to using the GP2X hardware, I'm hitting peculiar hardware barriers. I'm finding I need to waste most of the ARM9's considerable horsepower drawing graphics when it should be handled by a decent 2D accelerator, severely hindering performance. RAM contention is a challenge, playing audio can even become a challenge, the hogging of the CPU is so great, and memory contention issues prevent the 940T from being useful for audio playback at this time. SD-DMA being broken means long load times, and the impossibility of streaming data off the SD card without almost entirely stalling the ARM920T.

I've not released much information at all about Stargazer for a while, because we've been pursing commercial publishing/distribution outside of GBAX/GPH, and have been ironing out plans in that regard. However, I've been hit hard by the fact that when purchased by our prospective publisher, he was disgusted by the GP2X. He thought it felt like a cheap toy, and when he tried to use regualr alkaline AAs, he thought the machine was dead until he bought an AC adapter. He went so far as to say his company could have produced a better machine with less money than GPH had to work with, found it appalling. I share a lot of his views on the matter. He said he wanted to see NOTHING on the system except the game we are developing, and had absolutely 0 interest in any form of emulation.

Faced with these issues combined, there's little confusion in my mind why the GP2X is encountering limited dedicated gaming appeal.

 

[Paradox]

Very enlightening Eppy, especially the last paragraph... maybe this is why the scene seems kinda dead at the moment. I just hope that this promised *docking* BoB is not a let down.

 

[YakumoFuji]

dont hold your breath, but i am working on an rpg. like ultima iii/magic candle/questronii/lota etc. nothing like ultima 7 or that. its slow right now since I am so busy but I am making some progress...

if you meant some kind of console type rpg, then, we are in different camps

 

[DavidBeoulve]

I will admit the scene seems to be slowing rapidly, like someone hit the brakes sharply 2 months ago. I suspect there are some very good reasons for this.

#1, Hardware limitations of the GP2X are constrictive. While initial use of the system shows promise, there are growing pains involved. As games get larger and more advanced, peformance defecits begin to make themselves evident. Valuable CPU performance is lost to be relegated to drawing sprites due to the anemic blitter and bottlenecked memory subsystem, and complete lack of true 2D acceleration. Lack of SD-DMA support makes loading times a major issue for games with many large sprites, or any sort of sampled music or sound effects. The faulty stick limits appeal of many games, and this compounded with battery/power issues limit the appeal of the GP2X as a viable commercial platform.

Initially I had written up some - nipple tweaking comments about the progress the GP2X is seeing. I scaled that back because I realized "But, I haven't been around for a bit. Maybe there's something I don't know."

I wondered why sprite-based games weren't taking off, and realising that SD-DMA (direct memory access) can't be done hurts. I recall reading that it took forever, not that it can't be done asynchronously with the game, if I read that right, that's a real killer.

#2, The GP2X has lent itself to the emulation community first and foremost, and it shows. Homebrew development has remained fairly primitive, not really testing the capability the GP2X *does* have. Multimedia features are still sorely lacking, the video, audio, and photo viewers are still sorely lacking. The hotly-anticipated Mplayer source, I predicted, would lead to the development of a stable and more capable media player, but I have seen little to no development occuring on it as of late. Some codec support was added, but improvements were meager, stability is still an issue, and I'm hearing reports of the same old problems rearing their ugly heads (I read about an audio sync problem today, even! Again!) I feel very strongly there is a greater need to attract serious software developers with serious ambition.

And serious ambition speaks the language of money. You have to have money to make money, as the adage goes, and so the GP2X was released as a hobbyist toy with the hopes that hobbyists would make enough material for it for hobbyists and consumer hobbyists to want the product. That's what appears to be falling through, due to what you write here.

I can personally speak for both sides of that. While I've achieved a lot of things I didn't expect to be able to using the GP2X hardware, I'm hitting peculiar hardware barriers. I'm finding I need to waste most of the ARM9's considerable horsepower drawing graphics when it should be handled by a decent 2D accelerator, severely hindering performance. RAM contention is a challenge, playing audio can even become a challenge, the hogging of the CPU is so great, and memory contention issues prevent the 940T from being useful for audio playback at this time. SD-DMA being broken means long load times, and the impossibility of streaming data off the SD card without almost entirely stalling the ARM920T.

So the RAM sharing is as much a headache as my father first postulated. When he looked over the specifications of the system the first thing he said was "It shares RAM between cores? That's going to be almost impossible for a hobbyist (programmer) to sort out." I asked him more about that and he said "Basically, since you can't tell exactly when a threaded process will execute, it makes it a real nightmare to track down bugs. Not having (native memory management? can't recall how he worded it) is a killer."

He was also disappointed the ARM chip didn't natively support JAVA, as the ARM 7? does. Forget which model he'd been working on.

I've not released much information at all about Stargazer for a while, because we've been pursing commercial publishing/distribution outside of GBAX/GPH, and have been ironing out plans in that regard. However, I've been hit hard by the fact that when purchased by our prospective publisher, he was disgusted by the GP2X. He thought it felt like a cheap toy, and when he tried to use regualr alkaline AAs, he thought the machine was dead until he bought an AC adapter. He went so far as to say his company could have produced a better machine with less money than GPH had to work with, and was outright disgusted. He said he wanted to see NOTHING on the system except the game we are developing.

Faced with these issues combined, there's little confusion in my mind why the GP2X is encountering limited dedicated gaming appeal.

Reality doesn't care what we think of it. Change calls the tune we dance to. Nicely put, Epicenter.


I get the value of my purchase in having tons of emulated games for my daughters to enjoy. But I had hoped for some Dragon Quest-like picture-based, simple RPG, or some Stargazer-esque SHMUP, or something truly keen, like my dad's 3d game where you use sliders to put together a car, the length of the front & back, how much steel versus aluminum is used, and then crash it at another slider's speed, and see what happens. My idea was to take that and give it an "any view" angle, saved replay, and let the users crash into anything, because rolling and those physics were "already there, we just weren't really using it." "Why not, dad?" *shrugs* "I don't get to make those decisions."

Well hopefully something will evolve out of this primordial soup, though only PokeParadox would have any idea what that means.

 

[krosfyah]

Maybe a bunch of developers are holding out for the contest.. or at least I hope that's the case.

 

[PokeParadox]

Well hopefully something will evolve out of this primordial soup, though only PokeParadox would have any idea what that means.

Oh my... whatever are yo referring to!? h34r:

I think devs are free to devote their efforts how they please, but we really should try and focus on what we have available to us, rather than complaining about what we don't have. We know that the GP2X isn't a 3D powerhouse. That's not to say I don't appreciate the efforts that some are putting into developping 3D libraries, because I do at some stage intend on releasing a simple 3D game(Yes I'm yet to actually start coding it...), using one of the oGL ports.

A game does NOT have to be a quirky puzzle game to be original. Okay, so I made a Pong clone... so I can't talk, but that was more to familiarise myself with coding and compiling for the GP2X platform rather than a super serious game project(although I'll update it at some point) The point I'm making is you can play an existing game, and be inspired by it on how to make a similar game, that will play differently.

Also we don't necessarily need to be pushing the flshiest graphics around the GP2X screen. If anyone has played with the homebrew app AXE on the NDS, you've probably been fixated with it for a good while and all it displays is a square on each screen with a motion blur trail! Admittedly it more about experimental music creation, but I don't think that detracts from my point.

Oh yeah, I'm still enjoying Vektar

EDIT: Sub... I do think that is part of the reason also. There have been many compos announced fairly recently, all around the same time. Some devs are probably holding onto what they have until the deadline(s) have been reached and their projects are submitted... PKAGE... isn't ready yet anyhow, so I couldn't realease it if I wanted to right now...(PKAGE is different from what David was hinting at though ^_^)

 

[nickspoon]

I have a GP2X-only in development... *mysterious*

 

[Alex.]

I bet you a dozen bananas that the apparent inactivity in the homebrew games part of the scene is caused by the upcoming community contest. December will indeed be a good time for everyone here

- Alex

 

[moz]

im gettin gready to ditch

 

[Shikaku]

December will indeed be a good time for everyone here

Christmas time....

 

[Epicenter]

I wondered why sprite-based games weren't taking off, and realising that SD-DMA (direct memory access) can't be done hurts. I recall reading that it took forever, not that it can't be done asynchronously with the game, if I read that right, that's a real killer.

It's feasible to do loading in between frames, if there is free CPU time. E.g. if the game CAN run at 90 fps, run it at 60 fps and use the extra time between frames to load data .. but good luck loading substantial amounts of data in 16-millisecond gaps! This would have to be a very small amount of data because the SD interface is very slow compared to other devices, as well. Unless you're loading individual TILES which most games don't use, it won't help much, and since most programs use higher-level libraries and work with the Linux/Windows filesystems, it's usually difficult to grab small bits of a file, when the API/OS expects you to take it in chunks, that is to say, full files-- probably too big for a ~16ms loading window.

And serious ambition speaks the language of money. You have to have money to make money, as the adage goes, and so the GP2X was released as a hobbyist toy with the hopes that hobbyists would make enough material for it for hobbyists and consumer hobbyists to want the product. That's what appears to be falling through, due to what you write here.

Unfortunately, if the GP2X is not designed, marketed and handled commercially like a 'real' console, all it will see is hobbyist offerings. Circular logic, as you've said, as the software support is much of what makes a 'real' console.

So the RAM sharing is as much a headache as my father first postulated. When he looked over the specifications of the system the first thing he said was "It shares RAM between cores? That's going to be almost impossible for a hobbyist (programmer) to sort out." I asked him more about that and he said "Basically, since you can't tell exactly when a threaded process will execute, it makes it a real nightmare to track down bugs. Not having (native memory management? can't recall how he worded it) is a killer."

The part you can't recall, native memory management, is probably an MMU in the ARM940T. The 940T coprocessor is not visible to Linux, so you can't run 2 threads in SMP like a normal multiprocessor machine, you need to babysit it from the 920T. Its tiny cache makes it hard to run a substantial amount of code on it, and you need to keep spoon-feeding it from the 920T, getting the 940T's output and giving it MORE instructions. It's often faster to just use the 920T than to have it babysit the 940T which is usually of very limited use. Both CPUs fighting over RAM, and the blitter doing the same, makes it very much the same scenario the Sega Saturn faced and the largest part of why it was so unbelievably difficult to program for.

He was also disappointed the ARM chip didn't natively support JAVA, as the ARM 7? does. Forget which model he'd been working on.

It's a feature present on only some ARM cores. If GamePark uses the S3C2460 or some of Samsung's other SoCs in their upcoming XGP line, they'll have the ARM926EJ-S onboard, which uses the ARM "Jazelle" technology your father refers to. This allows native execution of Java code. I haven't heard of ARM7s that had that technology, but then again, I haven't looked into it. That chip's still compatible with the 920T though.

Reality doesn't care what we think of it. Change calls the tune we dance to. Nicely put, Epicenter.

As was that little analogy. I like that saying... yours?

 

[stinch]

The various gp2x hardware isses are not a problem. The problem is that for indi developers selling online all their customer base has a pc with a nice big screen and lots of power. Many will also have a console attached to a tv with nice comfortable controlers.
All the gp2x can really offer is portability which most people don't care about. For the majority of developers gp2x will never be anything but a target for a possible port.

 

[Epicenter]

The various gp2x hardware isses are not a problem. The problem is that for indi developers selling online all their customer base has a pc with a nice big screen and lots of power. Many will also have a console attached to a tv with nice comfortable controlers.
All the gp2x can really offer is portability which most people don't care about. For the majority of developers gp2x will never be anything but a target for a possible port.

It's a niche, and this niche has a market. It's a gross misestimation to say everyone GPH/GP market to have a powerful PC with a big monitor. In fact, 2 of my friends who want to buy GP2X'es have no PC, and one of them only just NOW got one because I helped him build one on a $200 budget-- and it's far from 'lots of power' or a big screen-- he just grabbed a cheap 19" LCD when he found one on sale. Guess what he has to keep himself busy? A TV and a DS. When he wanted to use a PC, he usually goes went a cyber cafe, until we built this machine. The concept of having this machine to tinker with and run software on was very appealing because he could go to a cafe, throw a gig of software and utilities and emulators and music and videos on a card, and play with it on the go.

The hardware faults ARE an issue. The GP2X has 2 200 Mhz ARM9 processors. The DS has a 67 MHz ARM9 and a 32 MHz ARM7. And only a tiny fraction of the RAM the GP2X has. But which one has the better games? .. the DS, by a mile. Even meager graphics acceleration gives the DS a huge advantage, as well as being free from major engineering comprimises. The GP2X wasn't thought out well as a game console, because GPH didn't know anyone would play games on it, even though their name is GAMEpark Holdings. They were, and still are, very visibly confused about just what they are DOING in the market in the first place.

 

[gaterooze]

Regardless of the company's name, the GP2X was never marketed as primarily a games device. It's a multimedia device with open source ideology. It's idiotic to assume it is a viable commercial gaming platform. Having a user install base of less than 30,000, compared to the 10+ million of DS market share, plus the PSP, or the countless millions of casual users happy with their cellphone games--well, why would you ever consider it a viable competitor? I'm glad they didn't design it that way, as it would have been suicide. Witness the redesign of the XGP's original purpose. If I want to buy commercial games, I'll get a DS and buy them on that.

N-Gage and Gizmondo tried to do what you pine for, and they failed miserably, both with an avalanche more financial backing than GPH.

The GP2X does *exactly* what I want, which is exactly the reason I bought it, and it does so very, very well. If you bought the GP2X for commercial games--what were you thinking???

I dunno, all of this is sort of like buying a teapot and complaining that it doesn't make toast.

 

[DavidBeoulve]

Reality doesn't care what we think of it. Change calls the tune we dance to. Nicely put, Epicenter.

As was that little analogy. I like that saying... yours?

Reality doesn't care what we think of it = me and about a dozen other people.

Change calls the tune we dance to. = Al Swearingen from Deadwood. I hate the series after the ending to the 3rd season.

This post has been edited by Epicenter: Today, 02:25 PM

The hardware faults ARE an issue. The GP2X has 2 200 Mhz ARM9 processors. The DS has a 67 MHz ARM9 and a 32 MHz ARM7. And only a tiny fraction of the RAM the GP2X has. But which one has the better games? .. the DS, by a mile. Even meager graphics acceleration gives the DS a huge advantage, as well as being free from major engineering comprimises. The GP2X wasn't thought out well as a game console, because GPH didn't know anyone would play games on it, even though their name is GAMEpark Holdings. They were, and still are, very visibly confused about just what they are DOING in the market in the first place.

Uh, I agree with everything said here, because it highlights the issues, aside from marketing.

 

[Orkie]

How many people are actually entering the community contest? I've not heard any discussion about it for ages on the developers IRC channel (and even then it was only once when we were complaining about the rules of the official one).

 

[Ravnos]

I have a GP2X-only in development... *mysterious*

In the meantime, is there any word on your Kuru Kuru Kururin clone? The preview release showed promise, I thought you had someone doing levels for it and was looking forward to the final release.

 

[Orkie]

In the meantime, is there any word on your Kuru Kuru Kururin clone? The preview release showed promise, I thought you had someone doing levels for it and was looking forward to the final release.

Ssssh!