Optional Boot Animation

[gp2.eXe]

Could you have it start up when it leaves sleep mode? That might solve most of your problems.

LOL I was gonna suggest that exactly, you beat me to it... . So yeah, a Re-animation-animation.

Edit: And perhaps being able to turn it off as an option.

 

[Trip]

Angstrom uses PSplash for the boot image and animation..
CODE
http://butterfeet.org/?p=8


Easily changed with a different background image and a bit of tweaking to the PSplash code.

If some one wants to take it a bit further, they could also edit or add to the code to make it accept gifs for the background image too I suppose?

 

[Chip]

@Chip cold you please lighten up a bit your posts are getting rediculously negative... have you ever seen what could be done on a c64 at 1 Mhz? ... surely the use of 10% of the CPU isn't gonna slow te boot that much which tends to be Disk strapped anyway
I'm not being overly negative, I'm appropriately negative. There is a long list of important things that need to be sorted out before the Pandora can ship. The boot animation (or lack thereof) is not even on that list.

The entire Pandora OS is available on the GIT. If you want to try to hack in some sort of animation, go right ahead. It may even end up included in the official distro if it's not too obtrusive. But what people should not expect is some sort of easy built-in system for changing the boot animation like you would change the wallpaper. Not right now, anyway. There is just too much else that needs to be done.

 

[cb88]

QUOTE
As was pointed out the last time this came up, flashy boot animations are not really an option. There is a tiny amount of space in the bootloader where you could load a static image or maybe an animated gif, but nothing like what has been suggested.



many demos are far smaller than your average gif 512b for a good many dos demos

QUOTE

Anything graphically complex would slow the boot process and would need to wait until the system was nearly booted, and by that point, why bother?



boot speed usually disk limited not cpu ... the boot animation would require miminal disk IO

QUOTE

I should also point out that the Pandora will hardly ever need to go through a boot process as you will never need to shut it down. Since the battery can last for months in STR mode and since resuming from STR is pretty much instantaneous, You will only actually need to shut down and boot up after major system updates. Seems a waste to spend much time trying to cram in a boot animation that you might see once a month.


this for instance (http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=52777)
requires opengl but you get the idea of how small things can be from it

how can you deny that a boot animation if withing the above requirements would not be cool? I fail to see how there can be any level of apropriate negativity on this topic

 

[urjaman]

I think (not sure), that people are talking about animations at two different stages of boot here.
Firstly u-Boot can atleast load an image (atleast the beagleboard does (haven't seen that live but emulated)) - it could be a nice "first frame" as is or could be extended but in that stage of boot I'd rather do as little as possible - just get the kernel running ASAP. This is the stage where i'd expect there to be real size limits.

Secondly after the kernel has started and while its starting all its normal linux things (udev,hal,whatever...) before X loads, there's already a basic boot animation by psplash (atleast in stock Ångström) - what i (very briefly) looked at it it can do a background image + progress bar + changing text. The basic psplash really wont hurt boot times (loads a single image, not much Disk I/O), so i assume we could have that as standard*. Personally i would just want to see the kernel & system boot messages scroll by when it boots - that way you know what its doing .

For those who want splashy / big time animated boots - go ahead and modify psplash / code something up (or wait if someone codes...), its always upto the user what she/he wants to do with her/his pandora . Even I would be interested/impressed if someone succesfully used the SGX during the boot. Another thing that comes to mind is that one could even run mplayer on the framebuffer during boot - this would be very resource heavy though, but to each its own, and couldn't convey any real progressbar. (I'm just throwin ideas here, bored)

*(I really dont know whether the "Openpandora distribution powered by Ångström, please wait"-image has been really integrated into the current distro (or if people are just playing with images), it would be ok for the stock image)

 

[valhalla]

*(I really dont know whether the "Openpandora distribution powered by Ångström, please wait"-image has been really integrated into the current distro (or if people are just playing with images), it would be ok for the stock image)

+1: as a standard psplash screen it would be nice, and it would be very easy to use it instead of the Angstrom one. IIRC it took about a morning for me to learn from scratch the working of psplash, drawing a different image and building psplash with it. If you already have an idea of what is to be done it can take even less.

Anyway, the think I wouldn't mind seeing would be a nice animation of scrolling useful text that describe exactly at what stage of the booting process we are, and what is being done now It's a shame that people have been scared away from booting diagnostics.

 

[.Gogeta§§J4BR.]

@Chip cold you please lighten up a bit your posts are getting rediculously negative... have you ever seen what could be done on a c64 at 1 Mhz? ... surely the use of 10% of the CPU isn't gonna slow te boot that much which tends to be Disk strapped anyway
I'm not being overly negative, I'm appropriately negative. There is a long list of important things that need to be sorted out before the Pandora can ship. The boot animation (or lack thereof) is not even on that list.

The entire Pandora OS is available on the GIT. If you want to try to hack in some sort of animation, go right ahead. It may even end up included in the official distro if it's not too obtrusive. But what people should not expect is some sort of easy built-in system for changing the boot animation like you would change the wallpaper. Not right now, anyway. There is just too much else that needs to be done.

I agree with cb88 here
just because it's not a priority, it doesn't mean you have to keep pushing people down, or say it's not a good feature :huh:

 

[bzar]

I remember there being talk about two loading stages. First is the uboot, that can have a static image or maybe a small animation. Second there's the actual linux booting, that can be fitted with a more flashy animation, because memory won't be an issue anymore. I even remember someone coining an idea, that the second animation should start from the uboot load screen to make it seamless. (Was this what you meant, urjaman?)

 

[Vorporeal]

To whoever was mentioning the fact that there are many tiny demos - that is irrelevant. The reason why they are so small is that they use many tricks to compress lots of data into that itty bitty space. Uncompressing a demo like that takes probably as long as it takes the Pandora to boot up with a static image background. I ran a 96k demo the other day, and it took a good 30 seconds to load on my high-end laptop.

 

[drD20]

To whoever was mentioning the fact that there are many tiny demos - that is irrelevant. The reason why they are so small is that they use many tricks to compress lots of data into that itty bitty space. Uncompressing a demo like that takes probably as long as it takes the Pandora to boot up with a static image background. I ran a 96k demo the other day, and it took a good 30 seconds to load on my high-end laptop.

You are wrong, the data isnt compressed the word is procedural generation.
games like .kkrieger dont uncompress the textures, they generate them on the fly you only have a bunch of algorithms but no compressed data or such.
Also this makes it even more irrelevant B)

 

[Vorporeal]

To whoever was mentioning the fact that there are many tiny demos - that is irrelevant. The reason why they are so small is that they use many tricks to compress lots of data into that itty bitty space. Uncompressing a demo like that takes probably as long as it takes the Pandora to boot up with a static image background. I ran a 96k demo the other day, and it took a good 30 seconds to load on my high-end laptop.

You are wrong, the data isnt compressed the word is procedural generation.
games like .kkrieger dont uncompress the textures, they generate them on the fly you only have a bunch of algorithms but no compressed data or such.
Also this makes it even more irrelevant B)


It's a _bit_ of a stretch, but procedurally generating the textures and storing them in memory instead of including pre-rendered versions could be considered one such "trick to compress lots of data into that itty bitty space".

 

[drD20]

To whoever was mentioning the fact that there are many tiny demos - that is irrelevant. The reason why they are so small is that they use many tricks to compress lots of data into that itty bitty space. Uncompressing a demo like that takes probably as long as it takes the Pandora to boot up with a static image background. I ran a 96k demo the other day, and it took a good 30 seconds to load on my high-end laptop.

You are wrong, the data isnt compressed the word is procedural generation.
games like .kkrieger dont uncompress the textures, they generate them on the fly you only have a bunch of algorithms but no compressed data or such.
Also this makes it even more irrelevant B)


It's a _bit_ of a stretch, but procedurally generating the textures and storing them in memory instead of including pre-rendered versions could be considered one such "trick to compress lots of data into that itty bitty space".

that is rather a philosophical question but i wouldnt agree with you

 

[lulzfish]

To say that the tricks kkrieger uses are 'compression' would be to also say that a handheld calculator 'compresses' the entire integer multiplication table into its memory.

Which would be really funny, but not technically accurate.

 

[Vorporeal]

(Last bit of OT, I promise.)

I'm not saying that they used compression algorithms. I'm just saying that the techniques they use assist in compressing the data into such a small space. The only reason that they're using procedurally generated textures instead of pre-rendered ones is to cut down on space. Seeing as it isn't necessary and the space "compression" is its only purpose, I see no reason why it wouldn't be called a trick.

I didn't say they used compression, I just said they used tricks to compress the data into a smaller executable. Big difference.

On topic: I'd love to at least have the ability to change the psplash image. Seeing as previous posts label it as a possibility (but still requires recompilation, for some strange reason), at least a guide on how to compile your own with a custom image would be a nice thing for the community to put together.

 

[DavidBowman]

I'm not being overly negative, I'm appropriately negative. There is a long list of important things that need to be sorted out before the Pandora can ship. The boot animation (or lack thereof) is not even on that list.

The entire Pandora OS is available on the GIT. If you want to try to hack in some sort of animation, go right ahead. It may even end up included in the official distro if it's not too obtrusive. But what people should not expect is some sort of easy built-in system for changing the boot animation like you would change the wallpaper. Not right now, anyway. There is just too much else that needs to be done.

I agree that is is frustraging to hear SO VERY MANY requests for new features *before the device has even launched*. Let's all concentrate on getting the device to a good, stable position (and in our hands) before we start talking about what new and exciting modification we'd like to request.

I agree with cb88 here
just because it's not a priority, it doesn't mean you have to keep pushing people down, or say it's not a good feature :huh:

I'm gonna have to agree with Chip. Not to start any arguments, and not because I don't want to see some nice things on the OP like a boot animation, but simply because the 97% of our community that talks about getting new features added aren't developers. It's getting beyond old to keep reading all these "I want this feature but I can't do anything to contribute to it" types of threads.

 

[PSyMastR]

On topic: I'd love to at least have the ability to change the psplash image. Seeing as previous posts label it as a possibility (but still requires recompilation, for some strange reason), at least a guide on how to compile your own with a custom image would be a nice thing for the community to put together.

Especially because the one they are showing in the demo videos is tacky as hell.

 

[cb88]

back on the topic of boot animations..

you don't need huge texture to draw nice things on screen .kkrieger uses huge procedurally generated textures... probably not idea for a boot animation since it would hog memory bandwidth...

a vector graphics like demo might look cool and was discussed iirc basically a text to 3d vector object generator would be needed and it would be displayed rotating on the screen or something with a cool looking progress bar...

/OT
@david Bowman if you don't care about the feature or care to talk about it get out of the thread and how exactly can we do anything to get the device stable and in anyones hands we are just forum members non part of the OP team you just generating flamebait? don't bother answering also guess what... most users are not developers... most customers for that matter are not developers is it wrong for them to voice thier ideas?
/OT

 

[barzoule]

let's get the fact straight. all those intros, as well as the few small-size games, are made up of HACKS and use all they can from the SYSTEM. the Win32 intros are the best example of system raping. Also plz notethat they DO use compression. In the scene we call that packing. You zip up your data and add in a small depacker that unpack the intro to memory and then runs it from there. This can be done in many ways, but many succesful depacker were not using their own depacking algorithms, but depacking functionality from the system. like the gzip utility on linux or the hidden link to zlib in the png loading functions of direct x.
now how can you hack steal and rape from a system which isn't loaded yet ?

as for your OT comment to David Bowman, no you're not a dev, i'm not a dev, and we're all not dev, apart from the devs. However the Pandora isn't Sony's PSP, or Nintendo's DS or Apple's iPhone. We have a voice because we a re a community and this project was made by earless big money marketters but by passionate dudes who want to make the best console for people like us.
We have a voice and all the big matters have been discussed with polls. Now if everyone step up together saying that "we NEED feature X to be included" they will give an ear and might do it. We have that power. But we shall not use that power to waste time asking for silly features.

so yes it's wrong to voice your ideas when it comes to delay things with unnecessary features.

As chip said, let's start by getting it done.

 

[GuSec]

I do not like the attitude against this (and many similar) threads. Nothing is impossible. I think the whole project have at least taught us that. If you think it's silly to have procedural or small image intros, just for the esthetic part of it, then you can choose to not read this thread and not take part of it. I promise you, it's all up to you and it's fine with the community. What's not fine is to try and kill peoples dreams, ideas and urge to polish non-vital things like this. Complaining about the importance of an intro isn't constructive. Sure this shouldn't be top priority, I think most of us agree there, but shouldn't it at least be allowed a tiny little discussion? If people choose to mod the bootstrap loader themselves it's their choice, so please, can we at least try to be a little nice to each and encourage all ideas?

For myself I actually would like to have the kernelmessages rolling onto the screen, to finally end up in a nice, clean and powerful terminal. But I think it would be very nice to be able to configure, customize and choose after own will!

 

[Mr.Gonzo]

I liked the one with the flying consoles. It would be a nice feature, but I can't see myself using it much.

CODE
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/464939