Re: [cadcdev-tiki] TikiBlap Demo 0.1

[Sam S. <sam...@gm...>]

On Nov 27, 2005, at 3:52 PM, Dan Potter wrote:

> - The graphics are really nice looking

Thanks.  The new theme only took me a few hours with Inkscape, it's a  
really nice OSS app.  The SVG images are checked into subversion if  
you're curious.

> - Whenever you die and get a new ball, the paddle resets to the  
> center. I'm not expecting this, so usually whenever I lose a ball  
> it equates to two or three lost balls (I have to make myself stop  
> moving the paddle to let it reset).

Yeah, that's been a glaring bug for years.  The ideal solution would  
be to mimic real Breakout / Pong and have the ball stick to the  
paddle so that you can release it when you're ready.

> - If you want to avoid the huge textures issue, build up the screen  
> from several drawables. I had to do this a lot in FoF (e.g.  
> building up the borders from about 8 opaques instead of just one  
> translucent). You can probably use full-res textures on both  
> platforms then.

I debated using lots of drawables instead of one giant background  
texture, but I can't find any really decent TXF fonts to use for the  
help text / titles.  I suppose I could convert Bitstream Vera Sans  
into a TXF and use that.  Is the greyscale TXF stuff working in Tiki,  
and does the ttf -> txf converter output them?

>
> - And about Drawables in lists...:
>

It's something I'll have to spend a weekend on sometime.  My object  
system is very C, but it works well enough for now.  Though, it would  
be nice to have member variables with meaningful names, instead of  
generic arg1, arg2, ..., arg8 like my struct has now :)  That's  
actually a carry-over from DreamZZT, because of the way objects are  
stored in the zzt files.  In DreamZZT, I have some things like  
"#define PLAYER_AMMO arg2" in the headers, so I can reference player- 
 >PLAYER_AMMO but that's just ugly from a C++ perspective.

> Also speaking of large textures... the texture handling in Tiki is  
> really crappy right now

Actually, texture management is one of the huge reasons I moved the  
code base over to Tiki (well, that and genmenu).  My own texture  
manager doesn't properly free textures, and I gave up trying to fix  
it.  So if you change themes too many times in DCSquares, you'll  
start to see texture corruption, and if you try to play more than 3  
consecutive games in the original DCBlap you'll run out of VRAM and  
it'll crash.

However, yes it's very heavy on RAM and VRAM.  Trying to load a  
1024x1024 image at all makes KOS panic that it's out of RAM :)

-Sam