Pandora Pandora Panic

[bzar]

Descriptions can be added for all languages ofcourse, send them to me, post on this forum, or update yourself if you have svn acces, be original

Put the parts requiring translation here and people can pm the translations to you? I'm up for a Finnish translation.

 

[PokeParadox]

Hello, Update:

The pxml file was pretty up to date, but is now moved to the right location and updated to latest specs. im not 100% sure about the executable file, but that's up to Poke.

Descriptions can be added for all languages ofcourse, send them to me, post on this forum, or update yourself if you have svn acces, be original

I personally think that for the title there should be no translation in other languages since that is just the game name. Not sure about other character languages...

Also i made a preview folder. i just made some screenshots (yes, one of my games too ; ) , ofcourse changes/additions can be made, but we need to make sure the size of the folder does not get too big. Think about those poor 4gb cardowners

I do have a clockspeed line right now, but that might not be necessary, dunno

That's it for now, cheers

• The EXE can be called anything it only matters that it is referenced correctly by the PXML file.
• I agree that the game name is a name so doesn't need translating.
• Previews whoop! Yeah the game has become quite large with all the sound clips and images. I've tried to optimise a few images here and there but not enough to make a difference...
• I would hope it's not necessary to overclock, but it can't hurt to provide a default clock setting.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

Speaking of size, currently my music/sfx is in .wav format, I have since noticed .ogg is used elsewhere - it might be worth while replacing all .wav files with .ogg files (if that is the preferred format). Presumably that'd take the size down a bit. Also, does the engine support palletised PNG images? If so I imagine there are a lot of graphics that could be palletised with little or not loss of quality, which again can save a lot of memory - it would potentially be possible to have a script to do that (open each PNG, check if it uses <= 256 colours, if so palletises and overwrites original).

Speed wise, it has been highlighted Pang can run slow when there are quite a few things on screen, unforunately until I have a Pandora it is hard for me to do much about this, the CPU cost I imagine will be very low (like 5% of a 60HZ frame or something in that ball park). I imagine I am completely GPU bound, and probably fill rate bound - so an obvious answer will be just to draw less if required.

Finally, with regards to translation there must be quite a good array of people that coem to these forums to get all the main languages covered. One slight concern about just posting on the forum is we could end up with people translating the same text multiple times etc. but hopefully it'll be manageable.

Steve

 

[foxblock]

Speaking of size, currently my music/sfx is in .wav format, I have since noticed .ogg is used elsewhere - it might be worth while replacing all .wav files with .ogg files (if that is the preferred format). Presumably that'd take the size down a bit. Also, does the engine support palletised PNG images? If so I imagine there are a lot of graphics that could be palletised with little or not loss of quality, which again can save a lot of memory - it would potentially be possible to have a script to do that (open each PNG, check if it uses <= 256 colours, if so palletises and overwrites original).

Sound compression is a thing to consider of course. Your currently used background music is about 3MB for 20 seconds, that certainly can be reduced! I don't know what's the best way to go, but ogg seems to be the one of choice, also I can't say anything bad about that.
Additionally I have to say, that I personally find the sound effects for Pang a bit annoying (spear and ball-pop sound), the background music on the other hand is something new and also pretty good.

I don't think there is much to save with palletised PNGs, but the engine supports it and if it does not break anything it can't be bad either.
Though there seem to be some related issues, which I have not experienced myself:
http://code.google.com/p/penjin/issues/detail?id=3

Also call me in for a German translation!

There also is some progress on the P! logo, but nothing to show yet, maybe later this day - I am currently playing around with it a bit.

foxblock out

 

[PokeParadox]

Speaking of size, currently my music/sfx is in .wav format, I have since noticed .ogg is used elsewhere - it might be worth while replacing all .wav files with .ogg files (if that is the preferred format). Presumably that'd take the size down a bit. Also, does the engine support palletised PNG images? If so I imagine there are a lot of graphics that could be palletised with little or not loss of quality, which again can save a lot of memory - it would potentially be possible to have a script to do that (open each PNG, check if it uses <= 256 colours, if so palletises and overwrites original).

Sound compression is a thing to consider of course. Your currently used background music is about 3MB for 20 seconds, that certainly can be reduced! I don't know what's the best way to go, but ogg seems to be the one of choice, also I can't say anything bad about that.
Additionally I have to say, that I personally find the sound effects for Pang a bit annoying (spear and ball-pop sound), the background music on the other hand is something new and also pretty good.

I don't think there is much to save with palletised PNGs, but the engine supports it and if it does not break anything it can't be bad either.
Though there seem to be some related issues, which I have not experienced myself:
http://code.google.c...ues/detail?id=3

Also call me in for a German translation!

There also is some progress on the P! logo, but nothing to show yet, maybe later this day - I am currently playing around with it a bit.

foxblock out

That issue is for the GL rendering backend...

 

[foxblock]

(only vectors, except for the spotlight in the middle)

 

[PokeParadox]

(only vectors, except for the spotlight in the middle)

I like it. It's like a mini version of the title screen!

 

[SiegfriedCroes]

I like that one too!

 

[gruso]

Lovely!

 

[Rockthesmurf]

Speaking of size, currently my music/sfx is in .wav format, I have since noticed .ogg is used elsewhere - it might be worth while replacing all .wav files with .ogg files (if that is the preferred format). Presumably that'd take the size down a bit. Also, does the engine support palletised PNG images? If so I imagine there are a lot of graphics that could be palletised with little or not loss of quality, which again can save a lot of memory - it would potentially be possible to have a script to do that (open each PNG, check if it uses <= 256 colours, if so palletises and overwrites original).

Sound compression is a thing to consider of course. Your currently used background music is about 3MB for 20 seconds, that certainly can be reduced! I don't know what's the best way to go, but ogg seems to be the one of choice, also I can't say anything bad about that.
Additionally I have to say, that I personally find the sound effects for Pang a bit annoying (spear and ball-pop sound), the background music on the other hand is something new and also pretty good.

I've OGG'd up the music/sfx - still sounds fine and is a fraction of the size. I am unable to make any better sounds unfortunately, but I do not mind if anyone wants to replace the current ones with better ones. In fact I don't mind if anyone alters any part of Pang, it's all community spirit after all!

Steve

 

[MarkoeZ]

whoops! Double post, Can a mod delete this one?

 

[MarkoeZ]

I like that logo as well!

About the translations, there is not that much to translate really. Just the description.

<en>
      Pandora Panic! A frantic, frenetic and occasionally mind bending 
      minigame collection created for Pandora by the GP32X community.
</en>

 

[PokeParadox]

OK I converted the remaining WAVs to OGG.
Now the built folder is: 428 items, totalling 21.6 MB

If anyone knows how to automate the GFX conversion of pngs with a script like rockthesmurf suggested then please feel free! I only know how to do it manually... and it's boring...

Also aside from the help screen for the Maze game Everything is nearly ready. If you know of something that needs updating or fixing... now is the time to shout out!

Anyways good night for now!

 

[bzar]

Nice logo! I'm pleased

 

[gruso]

This might be worth a look for image processing: http://www.imagemagick.org

I'm not sure if it'll do exactly what you're after. Best suited to command line ninjas.

 

[fusion_power]

If anyone knows how to automate the GFX conversion of pngs with a script like rockthesmurf suggested then please feel free! I only know how to do it manually... and it's boring...

I have no experience with scripts but you can easily Batch-convert large ammounts of images with IrfanView for free. It has a plug-in (PNGout) for the best png-compression. I also recommend to use 256 Colour png's because this Game-Seires surely doesn't need 32 Bit Graphics and 8-Bit looks so retro-style. Of course with Photoshop you can get the best results if you want to correct some colours or use advanced Raster and interpolation modes during conversion (for adjusting 32 Bit gradients with only 8-BPP colours etc. ).

Yes and please NO .wav Format. I have a (german only)PC Adventure where the Game has over 14h of Audio Speach and everything is .wav! :lol: It has over 22.000 Audio Files and 6.8 GB.

I wonder, why nobody uses simple .midi for Pandora Panic? This would sureley reduce the filesize to a minimum and I think even midi would be good enough for this Retro-Game Compilation.

P.S.: I don't have the game yet (56K Modem!), could you post a PNG to convert just for me to test? A BG image that has alot of details and colour-gradients which never can look like that in 8BPP? I just like to experiment with some Photoshop-Settings to have the best 8-Bit Look that is possible. ^^
Here, I used the Bit-reduction a lot for my own little 2D Parallax-Scrolling- "just to see how it looks" -Demo, nearly every graphic (except Sonic and the chains ) was made by me from scratch and in 32 Bit of course, many Elements were designed in 2D with Photoshop and in 3D with Blender (middle Background for example) and heavily optimized to have a retro 8-Bit look (often Pixel-for-Pixel adjusting, I really love this! ). The goal was to have as less colours as possible but it should always look like more colours. You rarely see more than 128 Colours on one Image but I'm not good enough to reach the Megadrive-Colour-Magic of only 64 Colours and still looking like 256 Colours. :lol:

 

[SiegfriedCroes]

I wonder, why nobody uses simple .midi for Pandora Panic? This would sureley reduce the filesize to a minimum and I think even midi would be good enough for this Retro-Game Compilation.

Don't know if Penjin supports Midi files as audio, if it did I could use a midi for Arena, as I made the music in midi but converted it to OGG.

 

[PokeParadox]

If anyone knows how to automate the GFX conversion of pngs with a script like rockthesmurf suggested then please feel free! I only know how to do it manually... and it's boring...

P.S.: I don't have the game yet (56K Modem!), could you post a PNG to convert just for me to test? A BG image that has alot of details and colour-gradients which never can look like that in 8BPP? I just like to experiment with some Photoshop-Settings to have the best 8-Bit Look that is possible. ^^

Ok well I looked at a few images and was trying to find higher detailed one but in any case here is the cake background from the Birthday Cake minigame
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/1363/caket.png

We have about 10MB of music and 10MB of images so maybe it's not so bad...

 

[dflemstr]

I like that logo as well!

About the translations, there is not that much to translate really. Just the description.

<en>
      Pandora Panic! A frantic, frenetic and occasionally mind bending 
      minigame collection created for Pandora by the GP32X community.
</en>

That looks very much like you're using the old PXML specification. Please adhere to this specification (save it as .html to read it) without exception.

 

[MarkoeZ]

I like that logo as well!

About the translations, there is not that much to translate really. Just the description.

<en>
      Pandora Panic! A frantic, frenetic and occasionally mind bending 
      minigame collection created for Pandora by the GP32X community.
</en>

That looks very much like you're using the old PXML specification. Please adhere to this specification (save it as .html to read it) without exception.

Ugh, seems like you are right. Someone should get the old specs offline. Back to work then...