Pandora Pandora Panic

[gruso]

Eagerly awaiting delivery of my MIDI toys & software. I also bought some guitar effects today, might as well dust off the old axes for sampling.

I roughed out an idea for Bad Vista last night.

 

[PokeParadox]

Eagerly awaiting delivery of my MIDI toys & software. I also bought some guitar effects today, might as well dust off the old axes for sampling.

I roughed out an idea for Bad Vista last night.

Nice! I must mention there has been a few more comments disapproving of BadVista on the YouTube video... I'm still unsure how to handle this.

 

[todd]

I roughed out an idea for Bad Vista last night.

Awesome! Thanks! FWIW, I was imagining something evocative of the Harlem Globetrotters theme song ("Sweet Georgia Brown"?). But I'm open to whatever. Should only need a short loop. I was also thinking about finding sound effects for the launch, bounces outside the goal, and bounces inside the goal. Also maybe some chimes for the faux Windows screen. If you have some available: great! If not, I'll see what I can dig up.

Nice! I must mention there has been a few more comments disapproving of BadVista on the YouTube video... I'm still unsure how to handle this.

I checked out the additional comments. I'm disappointed that they look at the game as a cheap jab at Vista. (Well, maybe it is...... not just at Vista but at Microsoft...) But "BadVista" the FSF campaign has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the performance and usability problems Vista had a launch. It has everything to do with Microsoft's policies re: updates and validating copies of Windows. All that "big brother" stuff. And, as I've mentioned before, OS X suffers from largely the same issues.

Though I admit the image itself is fairly expressive. And still humorous to me. I suppose I might lessen the offense (and the humor) by removing the "pwned" screen at the end.

But that's life. Don't sweat it, Poke. If you think BadVista reflects poorly on Pandora Panic, yank it. OTOH, some people on the intertubes have been known to be a little overly sensitive... :rolleyes:

Maybe invite whomever complains to write their own game which expresses a thoughtful criticism about Linux or whatever other OS? That way we can do the "I'm a Mac. I'm a PC." thing.


--Todd

 

[PokeParadox]

I don't want to pull the game, but maybe removing the Vista shot and crediting the website for the images in the credits is a good compromise?
I dunno, personally I also find the game funny!

 

[gruso]

I think it's hilarious. If "Bad Vista" is going to upset people, how about BasketBallmer? Nothin' but .NET!

Anyway, the idea I threw together. Just a rough draft. First, it's important that you've seen the terrible Windows 386 promo (the "rap" starts at 2:15):

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58

Vocal sample + jungle loop = http://users.tpg.com.au/pw2007/Windows386.short.4xloop.mp3

 

[todd]

I don't want to pull the game, but maybe removing the Vista shot and crediting the website for the images in the credits is a good compromise?
I dunno, personally I also find the game funny!

Yeah, one of the commenters was probably right that the big URL down there kinda' looks like a banner ad. It would be logical to move it alongside the rest of the credits.

The pwned screen can go away, too, without too much impact. I kinda' regretted the delay caused by having two "You Lost!" screens (pwned and the normal Panic one).

I think it's hilarious. If "Bad Vista" is going to upset people, how about BasketBallmer? Nothin' but .NET!

Anyway, the idea I threw together. Just a rough draft. First, it's important that you've seen the terrible Windows 386 promo (the "rap" starts at 2:15):

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58

Vocal sample + jungle loop = http://users.tpg.com.au/pw2007/Windows386.short.4xloop.mp3



BasketBallmer. That's great. Somebody started that yet? I was going to make a joke about including "xbill" in PandoraPanic. A "Whack-a-mole" game using the touchscreen with various OS logos could be good for equal-opportunity sniping.

Wow. terrible doesn't begin to describe that commercial. Wow. Somehow I missed that one back in the day! When I began my undergraduate work I was required to buy a machine running Windows 3.1.

Your track is hilarious! The "386" part might be a little anachronistic with the "Bad Vista" title... But the title could change. Or we could live with the tension. I like the short, chanty loop: it will make players eager to launch the ball and be done with it! Sorta' like distracted maths.

--Todd

 

[PokeParadox]

I think it's hilarious. If "Bad Vista" is going to upset people, how about BasketBallmer? Nothin' but .NET!

Anyway, the idea I threw together. Just a rough draft. First, it's important that you've seen the terrible Windows 386 promo (the "rap" starts at 2:15):

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58

Vocal sample + jungle loop = http://users.tpg.com.au/pw2007/Windows386.short.4xloop.mp3


I can only say LOL! at both how bad that commercial is and the sample you used for your track... funny stuff!

 

[MarkoeZ]

I think it's hilarious. If "Bad Vista" is going to upset people, how about BasketBallmer? Nothin' but .NET!

Anyway, the idea I threw together. Just a rough draft. First, it's important that you've seen the terrible Windows 386 promo (the "rap" starts at 2:15):

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58

Vocal sample + jungle loop = http://users.tpg.com.au/pw2007/Windows386.short.4xloop.mp3



:lol: love it

 

[todd]

Gentlemen,

Another build report. I think you've heard all this before! Well, there are a couple of new items.

I downloaded the latest PandoraPanic and the latest Penjin. To get them to build in CodeBlocks under Linux, I had to:

• change most (but not all!) the trabitboy includes to begin with a lower-case letter
• give one of the parameters in ScoreScreen.h::centralise a different name (they both had "b")
• comment out the "__declspec(deprecated)" string which preceeded the "printScores" method in HiScore.h
• comment out the "__declspec(deprecated)" string before the methods getTextHeight and getTextWidth in TextHandler.h

I haven't played all the games, but two problems I noticed:

• When I hit the wrong letter in the spelling bee, the "loser" sound (laughter) played. But the game got stuck at that point and never moved on
• There's still a hollow box at the end of the word displayed in the spelling bee
• That BadVista guy moves his arm way too fast, still!

FYI's.

I'll try to take care of that BadVista issue tonight... :rolleyes:

I understand the capitalization thing is difficult for you Windows guys. I'm surprised by the other Penjin problems: maybe you're using an older version of Penjin for your own Panic builds?


--Todd

 

[todd]

A question and a request:

Question: Is it still impossible to play more than one sound at a time? E.g., a sound effect playing over the music in the background?

Request: Would it be possible to have Selection Box remember the previous selection in order that the user might play the selected game more than once without having to dig it out of the menu again? I think was discussed once before, too. And of course I recognize that if it's important to me, I should do it and submit a patch to you... :rolleyes:

Thanks,

--Todd

 

[todd]

Whew... three messages in a row.

OK. I've updated BadVista. In this release, I've sought to:

• slow down the launching arm to a reasonable speed
• change the background to remove the URL
• remove the "pwned" screen
• add background music (Gruso's rough draft)
• add sound effects (which kill the background music! D'oh!)

That first item should be right since I'm using clock-time for it. But who knows?

Please let me know how these changes turn out on other platforms.

Please also be sure to add appropriate credits for the image in the game credits. The info is in the comment block at the beginning of StateBadVista.cpp.

Thanks!

--Todd

 

[PokeParadox]

• change most (but not all!) the trabitboy includes to begin with a lower-case letter
• give one of the parameters in ScoreScreen.h::centralise a different name (they both had "b")
• comment out the "__declspec(deprecated)" string which preceeded the "printScores" method in HiScore.h
• comment out the "__declspec(deprecated)" string before the methods getTextHeight and getTextWidth in TextHandler.h

I haven't played all the games, but two problems I noticed:

• When I hit the wrong letter in the spelling bee, the "loser" sound (laughter) played. But the game got stuck at that point and never moved on
• There's still a hollow box at the end of the word displayed in the spelling bee
• That BadVista guy moves his arm way too fast, still!

FYI's.

I'll try to take care of that BadVista issue tonight... :rolleyes:

I understand the capitalization thing is difficult for you Windows guys. I'm surprised by the other Penjin problems: maybe you're using an older version of Penjin for your own Panic builds?


Ack... capitalisation.. is supposed to be fixed *rolls eyes.*
Surprised at the parameter thing... thanks for pointing that out.
I'll remove the deprecation, but those functions are to be deprectated... I just need to find the cross-platform friendly way to do so it seems.

I've noticed that bug with spelling too. I can't seem to track down what causes it.
I've not seen that myself, I suspect it's trying to display a windows end of line character?
I will give you a heads up that key repeats have been disabled, since they were messing with the timings of the controls, and also not allowing simultaneous key-presses. What this will mean is that a key will register as held until input.resetKeys() is called. and then it will be limited by the game's rate.

Some of these problems you've outlined are probably since I need to upload a current penjin snapshot. I'm trying to sort a few more bugs, but I'll try to push for an update next week.

Question: Is it still impossible to play more than one sound at a time? E.g., a sound effect playing over the music in the background?

Request: Would it be possible to have Selection Box remember the previous selection in order that the user might play the selected game more than once without having to dig it out of the menu again? I think was discussed once before, too. And of course I recognize that if it's important to me, I should do it and submit a patch to you... :rolleyes:

That should be possible. just play music with a Music object(only one object can be use at any one time) and sound with a Sound object.(many can be used at the same time.)

The menu remembering thing is already done in my current code.

I've updated BadVista. In this release, I've sought to:

• slow down the launching arm to a reasonable speed
• change the background to remove the URL
• remove the "pwned" screen
• add background music (Gruso's rough draft)
• add sound effects (which kill the background music! D'oh!)

That first item should be right since I'm using clock-time for it. But who knows?

Please let me know how these changes turn out on other platforms.

Please also be sure to add appropriate credits for the image in the game credits. The info is in the comment block at the beginning of StateBadVista.cpp.


Thanks for the update, it shall be included promptly!
I'm hoping the disabled key-repeats don't break your input code, I'm guessing it will be ok, since you are using your own time limiter... We'll see. I'll try to fix it if it's indeed broken.

EDIT: Yup the multiple sounds things is because you were using Music objects for anything. Switched the effect to using the Sound class instead and concurrent sounds are working. The arm isn't broken... but now it's quite easy to get the goal
Does the difficultly scale with the stage number?

 

[todd]

I'm hoping the disabled key-repeats don't break your input code, I'm guessing it will be ok, since you are using your own time limiter... We'll see. I'll try to fix it if it's indeed broken.

I tried adding Input.resetKeys() to the bottom of my input loop. But it broke the arm movement in its current state. I guess I'll wait on the next Penjin and see how it acts with that.

EDIT: Yup the multiple sounds things is because you were using Music objects for anything. Switched the effect to using the Sound class instead and concurrent sounds are working.

Before your edit popped up, I changed my code, too. The new version uses Sound objects and I paid special attention to how they're handled in the special ending.

The arm isn't broken... but now it's quite easy to get the goal

Does the difficultly scale with the stage number?

Hmmm... When I first ran the game last night (with the version you had online), the arm moved very fast. I have poor enough hand-eye coordination that the game is difficult even when the arm moves slowly. So I changed the INPUT_DELAY to what seemed a reasonable value on my box. Since it's measure in ms, I'm assuming the speed should be the same cross-platform.

However, it was not my intent to make the game TOO easy (i.e., boring). Feel free to adjust it if needed. It sure would be nice to get somebody with a devkit to test our nearly final game for timing, etc., before it ships out. I'm quite excited about the possibility of shipping with the Pandora. I wonder if there's any chance we could make it onto the NAND!

No, I have implemented no difficulty levels. Probably it wouldn't be TOO difficult to change the size of the bucket. I'm hopeful the Pandora hardware won't get delayed long enough that I have time to sit down and do that!

Another thought I had was to change the physics of the game, making it more sensitive to user input. Or even just randomly per level (once the ball moves slower, once it moves faster, once bounces work well, once they sap all the energy out of the ball). However, since the average user won't get to play BadVista over and over until s/he gets it right, I think such changes will be more frustrating than anything. Because there'll be no clear indication of their effects except trial and error. And when the trials are separated by other games, I think it's unfair to ask the user to remember these changing parameters.

In the end I decided that this was the joy of minigames: the difficulty is found more in their quantity and variety than in the specific games, necessarily. THough it sounds like numerous games (e.g., PanicAttack) do have levels of increasing difficulty. BadVista will just be an annoying little gnat in between that peels off lives when you're not paying attention.

I still want very much to pretty-up PanicAttack. And wouldn't it be fun to have a pacman clone minigame? A great complement to panjoust! Oh, for free time!

--Todd

 

[MarkoeZ]

I still want very much to pretty-up PanicAttack. And wouldn't it be fun to have a pacman clone minigame? A great complement to panjoust! Oh, for free time!

--Todd

+1 to pacman!

(i don't have to go and build it myself right? ; )

Since i'm posting: work on the platform graphics for Pandoust (naming issue ; ) is now being done by Dragons_Slayer (from the birds!), as well as a proper ground. The level editor works better with the moving tiles now, and lots of small technical changes. Currently working on obstacles, probably some video of progress later today.

 

[cat]

Howdy y'all!
I have a few ideas for minigames in my head, but am no programmer yet.
I'd love to contribute by learning how to program and do artwork (If I'm talented :unsure, however, my meager knowledge of C++ and SDL (not zero, but pretty close) keeps me from understanding how to use the framework. :huh:
Could one of you very kindly give a rough overview which files I should look at in which order to understand the essential things (about the framework, not SDL or C++)? Or point me to the explanation I overlooked?

Thank you very much in advance.
Looking forward to playing your great games.
Yours

 

[todd]

Could one of you very kindly give a rough overview which files I should look at in which order to understand the essential things (about the framework, not SDL or C++)? Or point me to the explanation I overlooked?

Hello, cat, and welcome!

I would suggest simply looking at the source for one of the earlier games. I believe I used SpaceInvaders. So look at StateSpaceInvaders.cpp and StateSpaceInvaders.h (or whatever the names are). For my first game I literally took the Space Invaders game file and morphed it, bit by bit, into what I wanted. Thereby gaining a rough understanding of how to use the framework. I'm no C++ programmer, either (as you can tell by looking at my games!).

Also check out the Pandora Panic wiki. It has some pointers and some links to get you started.

--Todd

 

[PokeParadox]

Howdy y'all!
I have a few ideas for minigames in my head, but am no programmer yet.
I'd love to contribute by learning how to program and do artwork (If I'm talented :unsure, however, my meager knowledge of C++ and SDL (not zero, but pretty close) keeps me from understanding how to use the framework. :huh:
Could one of you very kindly give a rough overview which files I should look at in which order to understand the essential things (about the framework, not SDL or C++)? Or point me to the explanation I overlooked?

Thank you very much in advance.
Looking forward to playing your great games.
Yours

If you have any specific problems, please feel free to post in this thread. There are several people more familiar with the setup and able to help now!

As Todd said the quickest way to figure things out is to look at the other minigames.

as a quick intro there are some objects you can use to make your minigame making easier.

Sprite object
CODE

/// In the header of your mini game state
Sprite mySprite;

/// In the init function of your minigame
mySprite.loadSprite("images/myGame/mySprite.png");
mySprite.setPosition(Vector2di(320,240));

/// in the render function
mySprite.render(screen);



AnimatedSprite
CODE

/// In the header of your mini game state
AnimatedSprite myAnimSprite;

/// In the init function of your minigame
// Load an animation with 12 frames (1x12 tiles)
myAnimSprite.loadFrames("images/myGame/mySprite.png",1,12);
// Load individual frames of animation
myAnimSprite.loadFrame("images/myGame/mySprite01.png");
myAnimSprite.loadFrame("images/myGame/mySprite02.png");
myAnimSprite.setPosition(Vector2di(320,240));

/// in update
myAnimSprite.update();

/// in the render function
mySprite.render(screen);



Sounds and music
CODE

Sound sound;
sound.loadSound("sounds/myGame/mySound.mp3");
sound.play();

Music music;
music.loadMusic("music/myGame/myMusic.ogg");
music.setLooping(true);
music.play();


That's just some quick example code. which will hopefully indicate how the engine (and my brain) works!

 

[MarkoeZ]

Hello and welcome Cat

The way todd described it is exactly how i did it as well, slowly taking the code of SpaceInvaders apart and building something myself. And code::blocks with sdl and mingw can be a bit confusing in getting installed and configured, but ask me or anyone in this thread if you need help, PM me for my msn if you need quick help with installing

On PanDjoust (Djoust is the name now?) and Jumper, a small video UPDATE. New platform graphics by Dragons_Slayer and a background, jumper with the character concept (frames for animation will be added), and a small enemy blob. That level is a bit$% btw

 

[cat]

Hi and thanks for the advice and the warm welcome. Currently beginning to understand the spaceinvaders code, however time atm is limited I'll tell you about significant progress (i.e. alpha version of my first game ) Small and kind of senseless, but it is a minigame after all Still wondering whether to use code::blocks for win or linux, any advice?

Bye for now

 

[MarkoeZ]

I'll tell you about significant progress (i.e. alpha version of my first game ) Small and kind of senseless, but it is a minigame after all Still wondering whether to use code::blocks for win or linux, any advice?

Bye for now

A minigame is a minigame looking forward to your first version.

As for linux/windows, just use whatever you are comfortable with. It can be compiled anyway, so no problems there. I personally use the windows version.