pick a slot

I'd say "good. things are progressing" if that progress hadn't been done while I can't get due sleep, coughing and sneezing. Anyway, I'm done with some basic steps to confirm that a multi-slot palette can be loaded in AnimEDS. Much remains, that will need more lunch-thinking.

• [done] ensure multi-slot palettes are read correctly.
• [done] buttons to pick slot on skeletton-setup page.
• [done] selected slots reflect in anim edition window.
• [done] move swap bits of AnimCommands to their hardware place, to make room for palette bits.
• [done] limbs table can reflect palette slots
• [done] palette slot preference stored in animations
• [todo] frame editor that obey colour preferences
• [done] preview using real colours
• [wish] timeline using real colours
• [done] size up to 8 palette slots for pendats to come in.
• [done] dumblador using multicols and bilou's feet.
• [done] Bilou using multicols for darker foot & hand. 
• [bugfix] saving something multipal with AnimEDS kills all the palettes
• [bug] sticky palettes selection when changing sprites?
• [SEDS, done] ensure palette reorganization works in multipalette .spr files.

Multipalette de-briefing

I do want to have multi-palette in AnimEDS as well, so that you can tint your monsters and reuse e.g. the same sprite for Bilou's front and rear foot, or for Bilou and Pendats feet and hands. Right now, each foot sprite is cloned 4 times and I only have 1 monster so far ... seriously.

Allons-y: multi-palettes aussi dans l'éditeur d'animation. C'est vrai, quoi: pouvoir repeindre les bouquins dans l'éditeur de niveau, c'est bien beau, mais ça ne change en rien le fait que je suis obligé de maintenir chaque sprite de pied en 3 coloris séparés et 4 coloris pour les pieds. Vous comprenez bien que dans un contexte pareil, tenter de faire un "pendat" avec les pieds et les mains blanches (couleur règlementaire dans l'armée de Sqrt) est totalement hors de question >_<.

So it's time I track the core changes made to Level Editor so that it can benefit from multi-palettes:

• Initialisation of the Engine object needs an  (EXTENDED_PALETTES) additional argument;
• every call that sets DISPLAY_BGx_ACTIVE now also need to set DISPLAY_BG_EXT_PALETTE;
• SpriteRam should no longer be initialised with e.g. SPRITE_PALETTE but with one of the slots returned by Engine::editpal($slot,false));
• when calling SpriteSet::setpalette() to copy from/to VRAM, make sure you call  Engine::editpal($slot,true); before copying and Engine::editpal($any,false); when you're done.
• before loading a SPR file, define SpriteSet::ncolors and wrap SpriteSet::Load() with Engine::editpal calls as needed.

Now, AnimEDS will mostly require extended palettes for sprites, not for simply for tiles. So ...

• [done] make AnimEDS compile in the noswap branch
• [done] get rid of logo display.
• [done] only MAIN screen is given multi-pal capabilities. Tell GuiEngine on which screen console should be ; Window provide palette[] and layers abstract registers ?
• [done] move AnimWindow on MAIN screen; fix sprite-based widgets.
• [done] make sure a palette is initialised

Courir ?

En testant la démo "Back to School", Facet regrettait l'absence d'un bouton "RUN" dans le comportement actuel de Bilou. D'un côté, un mini-jeu comme "nuts'n'bolts" ne devrait pas avoir besoin d'un tel bouton (pas de grand trou à franchir, et un gameplay plus basé sur le timing que sur les réflexes). D'autre part, je ne suis pas encore décidé sur le mode de fonctionnement de la course.

Il faut un bouton pour courir, ça c'est assez évident. Mais sur le DPAD ou comme bouton d'action ? Est-il vraiment indispensable de le garder enfoncé tant qu'on veut courir ? A la fin d'une partie de Mario, on finit par attraper des crampes... Pourtant j'aime bien la phase "gagner de la vitesse" que ce genre d'approche permet, par rapport au mode "un coup de bouton X et ça y est, on court à pleine vitesse" dans Rayman. Au point que Peach et Shantae ont carrément un bouton "ne pas courir".

Have you felt the lack of a RUN mechanics in the latest Bilou demo too ? Facet surely did.

I was really missing a run button and the little pauses and lack of inertia take away from the fluidity. I'd like to bounce and slide more.

After I spent some time thinking about it, it becomes clear that "Bilou's adventure" will have such a RUN mechanics, where speed progressively increases, but that this would be absent of "Nuts and Bolts" (and possibly other in-between arcade games featuring Bilou).

I would like, however, to be able to release the button, and not force the power-player to keep RUN button pressed for 30 minutes if he wants to speed-run the game. Fundamentally, what I'd love to try is a sort of "cruise control" behaviour, where you press a button only when you want the DPAD to make you "accelerate". Once you release that button, you keep moving at the reached speed until you release the DPAD as well.

Mon impression, c'est que le fait d'accélérer progressivement ou non peut être découplé du mécanisme de "lecture" du gamepad. En d'autre termes, on pourrait avoir un bouton qui n'est pas "courir", mais "accélerer". Si le joueur mêne Bilou dans une direction sans enfoncer ce bouton, Bilou ne change pas d'allure. Par contre, dès que le bouton "accélerer" est enfoncé, la vitesse de Bilou augmente (plus ou moins) progressivement jusqu'à la vitesse maximale. Que celle-ci ait été atteinte ou non, Bilou conservera la vitesse acquise si on relâche le bouton d'accélération.

The poll is now open: which sort of RUN do you actually prefer ?
Mario: 62%
Rayman (PSX): 12%
Shantae: 0%
Kirby: 0%
Bilou (new): 25%

One Last Apple Assault.

Well, granted, 2 years after its initial release, there's not much more novelty I can bring to Apple Assault. I got feedback from Pierrick and his son about the latest modifications, just took the time to bring the last polish, and here's Apple Assault v1.6. At last. In appearance, not much changes since 1.5, but it's quite a strong difference in terms of rhythm and gameplay, imho. 

Voici la version 1.6b d'Apple Assault, enfin finalisée, avec juste quelques micro-règlages par rapport à la 1.6a sera mon dernier mot. 4 mois pour passer de la pré-release à la release définitive ... je vieillis, moi.

Yellowl and Redowl

I tried again, with the updated SEDS and properly charged battery. I could save a first draft (just the shadow lines), and then when I tried to save my "finished" work, the editor crashed again. That's *really* getting on my nerves, now.

Hopefully enough, I had a real camera powered up and ready-to-shoot just one floor below, this time, so I've shot pictures of my screen and did some Gimp post-processing to try to enhance and restore the picture into something that could be shown or fixed afterwards. I started the owl again, from the 'shadow lines' that were saved, using the version of SEDS I submitted to NEOflash compo. Everything went fine, and I made tons of intermediate saves. Then I thought "oh, well, that should be it for now", and clapped the lid of the DSi. As usual, I then thought of a small last improvement I could do, so I opened the lid, applied the change and tried to save again ... stalled. So this is what goes wrong: I cannot read/write to the SD media card anymore after I put the device in "sleep mode" for a while. And that happens regardless of whether I use the "1.x" or "2.0" version of my GUI engine.

owl story ...

I took the time to print out Facet's edit on my school owl so that I could train myself and draw a new one on my DSi. It was starting to come out quite nicely, but unfortunately, I've lost it. For some reason, SEDS stalled when I tried to save my new piece of pixel "art" on a new file.

Voici hélas tout ce qu'il reste de ma scéance de dessin de hibou sur la DS ... l'idée de faire d'abord uniquement les zones les plus sombres dans une "couleur stencil" avant de doubler la taille n'était (à mon avis) pas mauvaise, mais au moment de sauver mon travail sur la carte mémoire, quelque-chose a coincé sans crier gare et je me suis retrouvé (une fois de plus) avec une DS qui ne répondait plus aux commandes au moment de définir quel fichier de sauvegarde devait être utilisé. La batterie de ma console était fort faible (je n'ai même pas su la relancer), j'espère que c'était juste ça... Ce n'était pas encore la dernière mise à jour de SEDS, non plus.

Was the linker no longer able to access the media card ? Was there a bug left in that r1056 version of SEDS ? was the battery's low level critical when power was needed again by the flash hardware ? I have no idea, but that's getting troublesome ...

N'empèche, ça m'ennuie ... il serait temps que mes outils de game-making sur DS redeviennent fiables.

So many palettes!

This time, I do it the correct way: I start mapping which (hardware) palette is used where so that I can later properly track copies that goes on all over the place and figure out why I can't properly load/store palettes in that "multipal" update.

Many of the operations you can do on the PaletteWindow actually involve copies from one of the palette into the others. Ideally, they are all synchronised...

•  as soon as you start editing your palette, it differs from those of the "upper screen" which are kept static
• "okay" button copy the edited palette into SPRITE_PALETTE_SUB, allowing a preview on the current sprite page
• if you're fine, "sure" button copies the edited palette on BG_PALETTE_SUB as well. It's now officially your working palette for the grid.
• At anytime, you can undo something by clicking "oops", which copies BG_PALETTE_SUB back as the edited palette. 

There's something the multipal approach changes, however: what is now stored in the .spr file is the offscreen set of (up to) 4 palettes, which is updated every time you flip to another slot. So "okay/sure" only affects how you will draw pixels in the close future, not what is actually stored when saving. The bare minimum I can do is to ensure that onscreen->offscreen update is performed when clicking "okay" as well. 

I *could* also enforce this synchronisation when going out of the PaletteWindow, but that would break the former user interface convention (where going out without having pressed "okay" at all means you won't save your palette edits). To overcome this, and avoid data loss, I introduce an additional offscreen undopal[] where I can automatically store data, and a "lost" button that can recall what was on screen the last time you left the palette edition "window".