gauauu Posted May 1, 2015 Share Posted May 1, 2015 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) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CDS Games Posted May 3, 2015 Share Posted May 3, 2015 Very nice, thanks for doing this! Love the grid especially. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kisrael Posted May 7, 2015 Share Posted May 7, 2015 haha, angular, nice. 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. You should consider a BATARI Basic mode for the output. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gauauu Posted May 10, 2015 Author Share Posted May 10, 2015 (edited) 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 May 10, 2015 by gauauu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kisrael Posted May 10, 2015 Share Posted May 10, 2015 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) ANYWAYBatari 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) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gauauu Posted May 14, 2015 Author Share Posted May 14, 2015 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). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kisrael Posted May 14, 2015 Share Posted May 14, 2015 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. :-( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zarek Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 Cool cool cool! I'm sick of setting up my playfields in grids in MS Paint and then having to convert everything to text hahaha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Random Terrain Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 (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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kisrael Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Karl G Posted October 16, 2018 Share Posted October 16, 2018 I just discovered this, and it's great! Color support would be nice, of course, but I would be even happier with async playfield support. :-) Even in its current form, it is quite handy, though, so thanks for making it! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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