Jump to content
IGNORED

Yet Another Playfield Editor


gauauu

Recommended Posts

I'm sure others have made similar tools, but after using Kirk Israel's playfield pal, and wishing the "missing features" on it were finished, I decided to spend a little time recreating it with some of those features. It's sitting at http://www.tolberts.net/pf.html if anyone is interested.

 

It's pretty similar to Kirk's, but adds:

- painting by clicking and dragging

- a grid that you can toggle on/off

- you can edit the code or the graphics, and the other immediately updates (and you can paste code in, as long as the height matches what you entered).

- changing the height doesn't erase everything

 

It's still missing support for different colors though.

 

Let me know if you play with it and something doesn't work correctly (I wouldn't be surprised if the code parsing is fragile)

 

(The odd presets -- height of 23 and the left/right bars already filled are what I tend to use on the game I'm working on)

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

haha, angular, nice.

Yeah, I'm no expert with angular but I find its declarative style to be a whole lot easier to deal with than raw JavaScript or jquery for DOM manipulation.

 

yeah, all my tools were in very old school js. PlayerPal 2 got more smarter dev attention (and is generally more usable) than PF pal.

Yeah... That's why I only did the playfield editor. Your sprite editor was good enough for what I needed. (So thanks for that!)

 

You should consider a BATARI Basic mode for the output.

I assumed (without actually looking) that the batari ide thing came with a decent playfield editor. I haven't messed with batari at all... I'd have to read up on what it expects. I like the idea but I'm not sure I'll get to it soon. (Between the 4 or 5 hobby projects I'm working on simultaneously) Edited by gauauu
Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's funny, I find declarative style to be so annoying. It's very top down, and (IMO) hard to debug when things go wrong because of the distance between the code you wrote and the code that's actually running in the browser. But, it's a pretty popular style. I've been trying to figure out why I don't find it more intuitive. (One thing is, I kind of prefer thinking of the DOM as a decoupled, stable place to manipulate and read from, vs tightly coupled to shared memory. Writing code inside of tags feels very JSP like to me) ANYWAY

Batari has much less of a need of a PF editor because you basically define PFs as "ASCII art" in the code. And there's Visual BB, though I think even if I ran Windows I prefer a Unix-like do one thing, do it well. (Dragging and dropping a sprite into source code, to turn it into source code, feels strange to me, but again, other people seem to like VisualBB a lot)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's funny, I find declarative style to be so annoying. It's very top down, and (IMO) hard to debug when things go wrong because of the distance between the code you wrote and the code that's actually running in the browser. But, it's a pretty popular style. I've been trying to figure out why I don't find it more intuitive. (One thing is, I kind of prefer thinking of the DOM as a decoupled, stable place to manipulate and read from, vs tightly coupled to shared memory. Writing code inside of tags feels very JSP like to me) ANYWAY

Yeah, debugging it is a nightmare. I find that for small projects it's worth the tradeoff. For bigger projects, the inability to debug reasonably or clearly see what's going on is killer. We experimented with Angular for a larger scoped project and work and found that the tradeoffs weren't necessarily worth it, in terms of productivity.

 

 

Batari has much less of a need of a PF editor because you basically define PFs as "ASCII art" in the code. And there's Visual BB, though I think even if I ran Windows I prefer a Unix-like do one thing, do it well. (Dragging and dropping a sprite into source code, to turn it into source code, feels strange to me, but again, other people seem to like VisualBB a lot)

Yeah, I installed Visual BB once on my windows laptop just to see what it was all about (and I found the "convert an image to a splash screen" tool to be helpful). But I'm just as happy working in vim for most of my work. (Although a dasm 6502 assembly plugin for a jetbrains idea would be amazing).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, debugging it is a nightmare. I find that for small projects it's worth the tradeoff. For bigger projects, the inability to debug reasonably or clearly see what's going on is killer. We experimented with Angular for a larger scoped project and work and found that the tradeoffs weren't necessarily worth it, in terms of productivity.

 

That's really interesting to me that you find Angular-ish stuff easier for small things... based on my experience (which knows the lowlevel stuff better) I'd find angular way over kill... but I at least sipped the kool-aid is that it helps people and teams on bigger things. :-(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

(Dragging and dropping a sprite into source code, to turn it into source code, feels strange to me, but again, other people seem to like VisualBB a lot)

You can also right click and copy the data, then paste it into the program:

 

randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-vbb.html#spriteedgrab

 

There is usually more than one way to get a job done with VbB.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There is usually more than one way to get a job done with VbB.

 

I think that's one of the reasons I don't find it as comfortable ;-)

 

So, to digress (just like we had a nice little talk about angular vs other things up there)

 

People will find different tools more readily mapping their mental models. VBB has a lot of admirers, but for me it... I dunno, it has problem with the law of "leaky abstractions" because even though it sort of *feels* like you can just draw something and everything works, you still have to really know what's going on with the data. (for example, is drawing a sprite or playfield a one way trip? like once you make a player, and drag it in, it doesn't stay synched, right?)

My preference tends to be for systems that keep the low level even more exposed, and don't build a lot "on top" (mostly because I'm not great at learning too many new things, so I'd rather take the complexity that comes from making stuff out of simple pieces than the illusion of simplicity that can come from trying to make the complex stuff "look" simple. )

 

On the other hand ASM code is a bit too low level, and I love what bB puts on top of that. So take everything with a grain of salt or three

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 years later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...