mockups for new gamebuino

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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby Zvoc47 » Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:11 pm

Wow! This reminds me of the good old days of gaming on old phones like Siemens C60 and Nokia 6610. Stack Attack, Snake, Bounce, etc..

Now, I'd like to ask. Where would the frame buffer be located? In the SRAM of the GB2's microcontroller or only in the screen?
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby Drakker » Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:43 pm

Adekto & Erico: fantastic!
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby erico » Fri Apr 28, 2017 2:53 pm

Thanks, that joust mock is quite great.
I was thinking about doing one too, but I think I will go for a "Pegasus and the Phantom Riders" type of Joust as it may fit the single screen better.
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby Drakker » Thu May 04, 2017 1:46 am

Extremely quick and rough mock up of some vampire game.

Can't wait to see what it looks like on the Gamebuino screen, because on my monitor screen, the darker colors are way too bright and don't look dark enough to be used effectively as background colors.

castle_dude.png
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castle_dude-big.png
castle_dude-big.png (2 KiB) Viewed 181418 times
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby erico » Thu May 04, 2017 2:25 am

Looking pretty great! I love pixel skeletons :)

I have uploaded my triple dragon to the pixel joint and had similar criticism...can´t space the players of the backgroung, which is something I originally noticed myself while drawing. I have attempted to split them by hue instead of brightness, but I was unsuccessful as I wanted to keep the closest look to the original arcade. Something could be done, but would require a longer time creating the images. I´d probably have less of this issue if working on an original game.

My monitor is an old samsung syncmaster 2232bw plus, which is very far away from current technology, and I get the same results here. Probably the new Gamebuino has newer technology than this. (I also own a Caanoo to test that out)

edit: according to the palette analises, we only have black, brown and blue as dark tones. The blue, which in itself is a darker tone, sits fine on the darker side. The brown spreads closely to the middle. One reason a 16 colors palette gets a bit washed is that it is trying to convey the whole spectrum and by doing so, other colors can be used to perform a brightness ramp. The fact they are a bit washed can be over run by the colors adjacent to them. In our case, we would have to rely on dithering with the full black, not a good solution to generate extra dark tones on super low res display.
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby Drakker » Thu May 04, 2017 12:24 pm

Unless.... we have a high-res display. We use it at half resolution. For background sprites, we could draw them in a checker-board dithering pattern alternated with black, but in high-resolution. It might require two passes of drawing but it could be doable.

Played some with the colors (using Grafx2, thanks Erico, it works great to play with palettes, way more user friendly than the Gimp for that task)

castle_dude.png
castle_dude.png (1.63 KiB) Viewed 181406 times
castle_dude_darker.png
castle_dude_darker.png (1.63 KiB) Viewed 181394 times


Some hard choices had to be made and it did complicate the color choice, though if the bright image looks like the darker version on an actual Gamebuino 2, it would be great.

Here's the altered palette I used:

altered_palette.png
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Note that I have absolutely no idea how it will look on the real hardware, so this palette might actually make things worse. Also, for the game mock up shown here, dark colors are desirable... but if you make the next Kirby or Mario game, the brighter palette will be vastly more desirable.

palette_analyze.png
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby adekto » Fri May 05, 2017 8:47 pm

awsome i love castlevania.

i like the "ditter" background idea, on paper its posible since you only need an aditional mask to know wich part of the image buffer is forground and wich is back, even though we we do double pixels on screen (alteast the screen i got) you basicly send data twice, so atleast on in theory its posible to just add ditter to it.
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby Drakker » Fri May 05, 2017 11:28 pm

True, and the buffer needs to be only 1 bit, ones and zeroes, so its going to be quite small, approximately the same as the buffer we currently use on the Gamebuino 1. With the buffer idea it could actually be done in one pass with some creative coding. If on even rows the pixel is in the buffer, set even pixels on the two pixels row to black, and on odd row set the odd pixels to black, so you get any pixel that's in the background buffer to be dithered at maximum resolution and the other pixels are drawn as normal at low resolution.

That also indirectly increases the color count to 32 instead of 16.

Push it a bit farther and you get all 256 possible mixed colors if you use two 4 bits buffers. If you alternate the dithering on each pass, it might even switch fast enough that flickering will be barely noticeable like gray on the Gamebuino 1. But then again, you might as well use a single 8 bits buffer in 256 colors...
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby Drakker » Sat May 06, 2017 5:24 pm

pinkpuff.png
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pinkpuff_big.png
pinkpuff_big.png (1.71 KiB) Viewed 181372 times


As expected, the palette works great for games that are a bit more cartoony and bright.
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Re: mockups for new gamebuino

Postby erico » Sat May 06, 2017 8:37 pm

That pinkpuff mock is sweet, kind of thing that makes one want to bite it. Exactly the kind of mock up I prefer.
I understand the dither high res code, it could be a way to extend stuff, but I like to see dithering because it doesn´t only "produces" more colors but because it adds texture to the image (it does not need to be a checkered one).

I´d say the palette works fine if you are working with single color elements on the foreground and they have border.
If one tries to do a non border sprite, trouble arises, you would have to keep certain colors for background only, otherwise the sprite may disappear at some places (which may not be a bad thing, could be used on purpose on some games). Now if you add shading to the sprite, things get even trickier.

I have tried to push a Pegasus/joust mock, but depicting a flying horse with its rider yielding a weapon on the new gamebuino´s resolution is quite a feat...will have to use more time to find out a proper solution. What I have made so far is total crap. :(
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