Another update on the #Scala Native Chip-8 System.

Added a game selection menu, fixed some bugs and moved everything to a Pi Zero 2W. I'm also now launching the application on boot.

I think this is in a pretty cool state and is probably as far as I'm going for now. There are a few things that I would like to do, but my motivation is waning.

One would be to improve the boot times. Ideally I would use something like a unikernel, but that's a can of worms that I don't want to open. Maybe I can get a quick win just by disabling some services on boot? Or maybe there are lighter alternatives to Rasbpian OS Lite?

The other thing is to 3d print a case for this to make a "portable console". That sounds like a fun project, but the fact that my keypad cables come in a bus out of the bottom makes the whole design a bit harder...

Let's see, this was a pretty fun project so far.

And since today is Saturday, I guess this deserves a #ScreenshotSaturday

This weekend I was playing a bit with displacement filters, with the help of https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/09/deep-dive-wonderful-world-svg-displacement-filtering/

It's actually not that hard to get some cool effects from this. However, it's a bit of a shame that nice distortions require some big gaussian blur kernel... I need to see if I can get similar effects by precomputing the blured images and just blending them with transparency.

#screenshotsaturday

Been playing around a bit with samply to fix some performance issues in Minart (especially polygon rasterization and convolutions).

Ended up making a bunch of things quite faster, so now my old 3D Stanford Bunny demo went from ~12 FPS to 20 FPS on my machine.

But, since I was able to also make convolutions faster, I can add two hackish depth of field passes while keeping the old performance numbers.

#scala #screenshotsaturday

For some reason, Youtube has been recommending me a ton of wave function collapse videos, so I decided to play a bit with it for map generation.

I think my code still has some bugs, but I'm happy enough for now. Maybe I'll pick it up in the future if I decide to use it for an actual game or demo.

#screenshotsaturday

I've been working on a collection of small minigames (inspired by 1x111) with simplistic graphics (inspired by He is Coming)

It still needs a bit more polish, and I want to add some more games before releasing it, but it's cool how easy it is to write simple games with some very basic primitives such as AABB collision. The code for some of the games is surprisingly short.

#scala #screenshotsaturday

This weekend I was playing around with defining an animation DSL.

I've wanted to play this for a while after watching @davesmith00000's interview for "Scala for Fun & Profit" and @kubukoz Playdate talk. Everyone's doing DSLs for gamedev!

It's still quite rough, but I think it's useful for things like menu animations. Maybe I'll use something like this in the next GameJam entry to add a bit more juice to the menus.

This example looks like this:

  val backgroundAnimation = {
    linear(0, 512, 10.0).loop
      .map(delta => (delta.toInt, delta.toInt))
      .translateWrap
  }

  val baloonAnimation = {
    val rotation =
      (linear(-Math.PI / 32, Math.PI / 32, 1.0) >> linear(Math.PI / 32, -Math.PI / 32, 1.0)).rotate
    val beat =
      (easeOut(1.2, 0.9, 0.5) >> easeIn(0.9, 1.0, 0.1)).scaleXY

    (rotation && beat).loop.map(asSurfaceTransform)
  }

  val textAnimation = {
    val rotation =
      (easeIn(-Math.PI / 32, Math.PI / 32, 1.0) >> easeIn(Math.PI / 32, -Math.PI / 32, 1.0)).rotate
    val beat =
      (easeIn(1.3, 0.9, 0.5) >> easeIn(0.8, 1.0, 0.1)).scaleXY

    (rotation && beat).loop.map(asSurfaceTransform)
  }

#ScreenshotSaturday

Playing around with flow fields again.

Turns out it's easier to have an image dissolving than to draw the flow field. The code for this effect was surprisingly small.

It's a shame that he video compression destroyed the effect, but I think it's good enough to imagine what it looks like.

#ScreenshotSaturday

I wanted to play a bit more with transparencies on a more game-like scenario, so I did a very small side scroller demo like a space shooter intro segment where the planet is being destroyed.

I think it turned out quite nice, almost looks like a real game.

Also, I recently played the Europa demo, and that made me really want to do something with a fade to white... I use too much fade to black.

Assets:

• Warped Space Shooter by Ansimuz
• Warped Shooting FC by Ansimuz
• Free Cyberpunk Backgrounds Pixel Art by Craftpix.net

#ScreenshotSaturday

Took a quick break from InterIm development to work on Minart.

Finally got transparencies to work, and the performance doesn't seem that bad. I can get multiple moving particles on the screen with no problems.

To be honest, I picked this up now because I spent way too much time searching for bitmap fonts without transparency for my InterIm demos. That's a thing of the past now.

#screenshotsaturday #scala

This weekend I was playing around with InterIm to try out some new features (asRefs macro) and some old ones that were not really tested (custom render ops), so I decided to build a drum machine!

The API could still use some improvements, but this is getting to an almost usable state.

Font: Spleen by Frederic Cambus (https://github.com/fcambus/spleen) Drum Samples: Free Pipe Pack by Goldbaby (https://www.goldbaby.co.nz/freestuff.html)

#screenshotsaturday #scala