My main worry is loading content: my current idea needs a reasonably large world (not in file size however) and there’s no method to extract pixel information from a loaded image and if I remember correctly non-engine stuff shouldn’t be used.

Although actually, considering the engine, I won’t really be able to pull of my current idea. I’ve ported a line function I found on wikipedia, but text would just require too much time hardcoding arrays (since you can’t blit partial textures) or editing ~28 different images. I’ll have to start thinking raster retro, not just constraints.

Should I make one?

http://ld.orthogonalspace.ca/miniLD17/

And yes, I realize now that I could have just done a ENV = {‘PATH’ : os.environ['PATH']} instead of hardcoding. But, I’m tired, not feeling well, and lazy to begin with. So, :p

-Mic

Regarding the music, it definitely won’t play the xm. But, I did attempt to play the wav without success. I’ll try substituting an mp3 (and an ogg if I can find one) and report back the results with the patch set. If it doesn’t work, this might just have to be something we live with.

Till tomorrow. Again, sorry about the lateness…

Did you manage to get any further with this ?

I’ve had little luck at my end, but I’m not too familiar with SDL.

Thanks

-Mic

I’m going to share what I’ve done, but since it’s in C it probably won’t be any use to anyone but me. Even if someone else used C, this would have been complete within the first minute if needed. Even so, I’m going to upload it.

What I’ve made is a memory-friendly keypress manager thing that in my opinion works better for arcade games than the event model. It stores the key state and “change” value of every button in a 16-bit short. Source is main.c inside the zip.
It’s my first time making something as low-level as this, but I’m pleased with the completely unnecessary compactness of the solution.
http://www.galacticgaming.net/hosting/d/RetroKeyArrayMain.zip

This one has uses LuaJIT instead of standard lua, which is supposed to provide a near-c speed for lua scripting.

The only drawback is the LuaJIT only works on windows as a DLL, so there is now one dll required. Might be worth the trade though, if the speed is substantially improved though. Hard to tell just from the demo app.

Anyway, here it is – have fun:
http://www.bitjets.com/RetroEngine-LuaJIT.zip

I have created an exe using visual studio 2008 that has ALL dependencies statically linked (ok, that was a huge pain and way more work than I thought it would be). But now with this version there is just one exe and no dlls required to run! (I don’t know why I do these things, but figuring out dependencies and compiling issues is kinda like my version of doing the crossword puzzle I guess).

It is compiled in Release Mode with all speed optimizations turned on, so it should be pretty fast as well. It is actually reasonably sized as well.

Also, I added some argument passing, so you can create shortcuts to the exe to control window or fullscreen mode and control the amount of scaling (I like my game huge and pixellated on my gigantic screen). Just look at the existing shortcuts for details.

Anyway, now I just have to learn lua!! This should be fun!

http://www.bitjets.com/RetroEngine.zip

Is using this library required, or can we simply use some ‘retro’ design restrictions?

The easiest way is:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev liblua5.1-0-dev scons

And then run “scons” in the source directory. This will build the retro executable. I hope
If you make one succesfully, don’t hesitate to make a zip of it and I can add it to the download page. Good luck

And yes, do participate =)
I hope it’s gonna be fun.