WIP: PlayerPal v2.0 Online Player Graphic Editor

kisrael · May 13, 2005

I mentioned this on [stella], but since this is in some ways a more happenin' place.

I'm giving my old 2600 player graphic editor PlayerPal

http://alienbill.com/2600/playerpal.html

a complete overhaul, including all the "missing features" like per-scanline coloring, proper painting (not per pixel clickery) and (hopefully) automatic code generation (as opposed to just dumping out the binary info)

Here's where I put the latest public alpha:

http://alienbill.com/2600/playerpalnext.html

Tested on latest IE and Firefox.

The color picker is pretty advanced already, and I think the whole thing is fun to use.

Open Invitation to 2600 Coders:

I'd welcome assistance with the source code generation, though will try to struggle through it myself if no one wants to help. (might be good de-rusting exercise for me) Basically, I'm looking for the simplest program that can cycle through all the animation frames for a single multicolor player graphic (of arbitrary height, or at least I haven't decided on an upper limit for sprite tallness) with a one line kernal. The program should have basic movement with the joystick, but wouldn't even need exact horizontal positioning. And if the sprite messes up when it nears the screen edges, fine...it's just meant to show the coder what it looks like onscreen, not to get n00bs posting binaries saying "look, my game idea is half done, won't some programmer finish it for me?"

I can't offer to much of a reward for doing that...just the honor of being credited in the making of the BEST 2600 PLAYER GRAPHICS EDITOR IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. (ok, its a short list). Oh, and links to any website you want in the editors help and credits page.

Emehr · May 13, 2005

Open Invitation to 2600 Coders:
I'd welcome assistance with the source code generation, though will try to struggle through it myself if no one wants to help. (might be good de-rusting exercise for me) Basically, I'm looking for the simplest program that can cycle through all the animation frames for a single multicolor player graphic (of arbitrary height, or at least I haven't decided on an upper limit for sprite tallness) with a one line kernal. The program should have basic movement with the joystick, but wouldn't even need exact horizontal positioning. And if the sprite messes up when it nears the screen edges, fine...it's just meant to show the coder what it looks like onscreen, not to get n00bs posting binaries saying "look, my game idea is half done, won't some programmer finish it for me?"

I can't offer to much of a reward for doing that...just the honor of being credited in the making of the BEST 2600 PLAYER GRAPHICS EDITOR IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. (ok, its a short list). Oh, and links to any website you want in the editors help and credits page.

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Here's some old code I polished up and made a bit more flexible. Note that it's completely unoptimized in the display kernal. I don't understand skip or switchdraw enough to implement it (someday I'll learn!). I'm sure there's lots of room for improvement!

Basically, you use the joystick to move SpriteMan around the screen (no, he doesn't mess up when he gets to the edge of the screen, I'm anal about that stuff and put a stop to it ). Press the fire button to cycle through the animations.

This code requires an "idle" face (can easily be modified if this isn't desirable). That is, what the sprite looks like when it's not moving. This face isn't included in the animation cycling when you press the fire button.

Here are some important constants. Change as appropriate for the individual sprite...

FACE_DURATION is the number of frames between each face update. Increase to slow down the face animation. Decrease to speed up. This could be made a variable and mapped to the second joystick. I'm just too lazy at the moment .

SPRITE_HEIGHT is self-explanatory. It's currently set to 16.

NUM_ANIMATION_FACES is the number of faces of animation (not counting the idle position). Press the fire button to cycle through these faces.

I've tested this with StellaOSX v1.4.2. My Supercharger is packed up otherwise I'd test it on real hardware. Let me know if you encounter any problems/glitches.

Hope this works for ya! I've been hoping SpriteMan would come in handy some day!

- Jason

SpriteMan.zip

kisrael · May 14, 2005

Cool! I just glanced at the code and ran the binary and it looks very much like it might do the trick....I'll need to hack at it some, the "idle" idea is interesting, but kind of hard to explain / put in a UI, so I might try to make it so it's always cycling through the frames.

Anyway, let's take this conversation to PM...

kisrael · May 16, 2005

Many thanks to Jason, he's done a great job with updating "SpriteMan" to make it REALLY easy to customize...

http://alienbill.com/2600/playerpalnext.html

Now lets you paint the first frame in color and output ready-for-DASM source code. There are a lot of limitations (like how it only does 1 frame) almost all of them my fault, I just haven't had the chance to "fill in the blanks" he made for me from the javascript. But it's still a neat milestone, going straight from editor to seeing it on an Atari.

Edited May 16, 2005 by kisrael

cd-w · May 19, 2005

Many thanks to Jason, he's done a great job with updating "SpriteMan" to make it REALLY easy to customize...
http://alienbill.com/2600/playerpalnext.html

Now lets you paint the first frame in color and output ready-for-DASM source code. There are a lot of limitations (like how it only does 1 frame) almost all of them my fault, I just haven't had the chance to "fill in the blanks" he made for me from the javascript. But it's still a neat milestone, going straight from editor to seeing it on an Atari.

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This is looking really good, and a huge improvement over the old PlayerPal! I will definitely be using this a lot in my future 2600 projects.

Chris