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Development Progress / Getting back on track, menu-system and other inter-screens

« Last post by gumix on April 20, 2016, 09:26:03 am »

Switching to event driven model didn't hurt so much as I was suspecting previously.
As it is confirmed now that game runs very well on many mobile devices it is the time
to get back to main development thread, the menu system and inter-screens.

Below we have a static mockup of ... not the most wanted to see screen

82

General Discussion / Making fun of google

« Last post by gumix on April 15, 2016, 08:20:52 pm »

Our Big bro, has stucked on captcha puzzle when trying to register to the forum hahaha!

Below I paste part of this server's apache log:

66.249.73.242 - - [15/Apr/2016:18:48:12 +0200]
"GET /forum/Themes/default/scripts/captcha.js HTTP/1.1" 200 1393
"http://ascii-patrol.com/forum/index.php?action=register"
"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

83

Development Progress / Massive Refactoring (because of new target platform)

« Last post by gumix on April 15, 2016, 08:10:56 pm »

Bad news - regression.

happy call stack driven application logics cannot be handled by web platform, ehhh....
Ongoing refactoring requires me to switch to event driven approach.
Unfortunately such conversion is pretty heavy task and it does not deliver any fun.

... but ability to play game in browser is too tempting to leave it undone

84

Development Progress / Re: Web platform, possible?

« Last post by gumix on April 14, 2016, 12:57:09 pm »

Ok, figured out what caused problems to my BB - but still don't understand why.
So setting LLVM optimization to -O0 done the trick but why does it affect my mobile device only? All desktop browsers are fine with -O3.

Another tiny problem was with webgl shaders, they need a bit more precise control on arithmetic errors.

Summarizing everything, seams Ascii Patrol will have a web port, with requirement for desktop browser to have either canvas 2d or web-gl support while mobile browsers if one lacks of web-gl it may fall into really low frame rates because of unaccelerated 2d canvas.

85

Development Progress / Web platform, possible?

« Last post by gumix on April 14, 2016, 09:16:13 am »

I have done several experiments trying to port the game to browsers. Reasults are promising but still there are many quircks, especially on mobile platforms.

Rendering experiments, both should run well on major desktop browsers.
Test 1: canvas (2d) http://ascii-patrol.com/canvas.html
Test 2: canvas (web-gl) http://ascii-patrol.com/webgl.html

On mobile devices unfortunately:
Test1: makes too many graphics calls so framerates are rather low: 5-15fps
Test2: web-gl gives promising performance of 60fps, if only web-gl is avaliable on more devices

Porting game code to java script is another story. I gave a try to Emscripten.
Test3: http://ascii-patrol.com/test.html
It is using web-gl for rendering, desktop browsers should feel comfortable with it.
Unfortunately strange effects appear on my BB Q10 mobile.

86

General Discussion / Re: Are we gamers or developers?

« Last post by Kyzrati on April 12, 2016, 08:34:24 am »

Ha, I apparently answered the same as yourself. About 4-5 years back I would've gone with 50/50, but it's really a question of available time. I just don't have the time to play very many games anymore, that and honestly once you've spend decades playing them, much of what's out there starts to seem samey, so may as well put the effort into creating something instead

87

Development Progress / Re: Forging game menu (A.D 7.04.2016)

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 09:33:44 pm »

Now I'm thinking about possibility of keeping synchronized in game player profiles (display name, avatar, etc.) with forum accounts, seams not that hard to make it, unfortunately not with DOS-clones.

88

General Discussion / Are we gamers or developers?

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 09:15:14 pm »

Feel free to add any other polls you like.

89

General Discussion / What is this Ascii Patrol all about?

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 09:07:03 pm »

Ascii Patrol is a one guy's project who imagined to bring "Moon Patrol" arcade game developed by IREM in 1982 to text consoles in form of ascii game.

"Moon Patrol" wiki page:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Patrol

Ascii Game, (more formally: Text based game) wiki page:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_game

Some Ascii Patrol game tech specs:
- pure 7-bit ascii charset (aka oldschool ASCII Art)
- 2 modes: black-on-white & 16 color ansi palette
- resolution: anything between 80x25 - 160x50 (in characters)
- platforms: FreeDOS, Windows, Cygwin, Linux, js/html (web browsers)
- optional input handling via X11 (with ssh tunneling too)
- sound is at the moment out of the road map

90

Development Progress / Forging game menu (A.D 7.04.2016)

« Last post by gumix on April 11, 2016, 08:54:34 pm »

Most efforts are now concentrated on menu system.
It is pretty damanding part as it must behave well on all platforms, in color and in b/w modes, in lo-res 80x25 as well as 160x50.

Menu system will offer stright interface to all options on a one scrollable page.
Page contains smaller items, called modules which are layed out on page in different ways depending on current resolution.
So we can end up with 2,3 or 4 columns of modules.
Each module, once activated, behaves like separate dialog, allowing player to modify parameters, or jump into actual game.

While working on these things I've imagined a module called 'Player Profile' where user can choose his / her name, change avatar, etc.
After I've painted few avatars in REXPaint I noticed it could be cool to mix parts of these 6 faces together so player could compose his own face. In this approach instead of 6 avatars we've ended with: 1296!

Have a look how does it work:


Menu footage with avatar mixer