I only just noticed how old the last post here actually is; the update-rate seems to have decreased exponentially now that exams have taken over. However, for now at least, all that is going to change. After an epic silence, I have finally returned from the Pit of Procrastination bearing news!
First, Slipslide 2. In the last post you may have noticed that it had reached a brick wall of sorts, in that it was running like Windows Vista on an Apple II. Luckily, illume was able to show me how to fix it:
"if you're on windows pygame now uses the windib (GDI) driver instead of the directx one by default.
We had to do this for compatibility with, funnily enough, vista :)
You can do the following, and it should become similar to before...
import os
os.environ['SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER'] = 'directx' "
So as a result, Slipslide is now running as it did before - well, visually at least. The sound still crackles and pops constantly, but apparently there is a fix for it:
"I think some nice people have found and fixed the sound crackling...
You can try it out with the development builds of pygame here:
http://thorbrian.com/pygame/builds.php"
I intend to try this out when I have time, hopefully it should solve the problem.
Meanwhile, a few folders away from Slipslide 2, I have been working on getting my music on the Internet. My new site, which is mostly finished now, can be found at purevolume.com/animatinator. Feel free to have a listen, although the sound quality isn't perfect due to downsampling by purevolume.com (so the files don't take up too much bandwidth).
So I recently upgraded PyGame to the new version 1.8.0 release... GARGANTUAN mistake. As it happens, 1.8.0 is to PyGame as Vista is to Windows. While Slipslide 2 previously ran like a cat wearing a rocket booster, it could now be compared with an arthritic snail wearing chainmail armour. The initial fade-in took a full 10 seconds (compared to less than 1), and the music was so crackly it was like listening to white noise. The levels were even worse; the character was seemingly incapable of moving at any more than three pixels per hour and the pause menu window lagged several frames behind the mouse's movement.
The cause for this appeared to be that the new PyGame release's blit() method (used for copying images onto the screen) is far slower than before. Thankfully, there is a solution. I only had to make it convert all the images into a pixel format that PyGame prefers, and now blits are much faster. It seems this release is much less tolerant of unconverted images, and will run incredibly slowly when given images that worked perfectly in previous versions.
I'm happy to say that it's almost completely fixed now; the music still pops occasionally but I'm gradually eliminating that. As well as converting all the images, I've also been optimising redraw methods and minimising the number of times it has to update objects. With luck, it'll soon be usable again!
I'll begin with the bad news - due to the massive volume of school exams coming very soon, progress updates here will be sparse(r) over the coming months. I'll post when I can, but there won't be much Slipslide progress to post about.
At present, Slipslide has two complete levels, one very-nearly-complete level and one that's about halfway done. A lot of the music is already in progress, with three pieces completed, and the story is 90% finished. I hope to gain more speed in the level-creation department soon as my digital painting skills improve, so it shouldn't take too long - but "Spring 2008" is unfortunately looking quite unlikely now.
However, the good news is that our blog has been rated 8.4/10 (or "Great") by blogged.com, a blog listing site (which I don't recall submitting myself to, but meh). I've even got a score badge to prove it!
Having written a few tunes, I decided that it was time to start on the rest of the levels. So, I now have a layout for level 3 (which is set in Slipsville, Dan's hometown) and have started the background (digitally painted in the GNU Image Manipulation Program). So far, I have a lone building in a vast field of grey:
As you can see I'm going for a fairly cartoony style with this. The building currently casts no shadow, but that'll be fixed as soon as there's something to cast a shadow onto.
In this level, there will be three main buildings at the front, a large square at the top-left and an airport at the back, with a runway on the right of it. The object of this level is to get Dan from his house to the airport, where he hopes to catch a flight to Antarctica. Naturally all doesn't go to plan, but that's a story for later on...
If you visit this blog frequently, you may have noticed a complete lack of anything at all over the last two weeks. Don't worry, the Slipslide 2 project is not dead. But time has been short, even more so than normal, and the exams have been coming thick and fast.
I have recently invested in Image Line's FL Studio 7 XXL for producing the game's music, which allows for much better instrument sounds and sound quality, as well as compression, stereo separation and parametric equalisation which all help make the music sound much better. The powerful synthesisers included also mean that I can use it to make the sound effects as well. With this extra power at my disposal, I have now started work on the remainder of the songs which will be required by the game - I hope to post some of these here in the near future.
The release date is, as always, still hazy. I'm estimating about a month or so, but you can never really tell with these sorts of projects. Whatever happens, I'm sure that I will still hit my "spring 2008" target which I set at the beginning of the project - "spring" gives me a good few months' leeway thankfully!
