Hooptie 0.2.6 for Developers Released

[Pazolli]

Hooptie 0.2.6 has been released and is available for download now from our web site (http://inkubator.idevgames.com/). Due to substantial changes to the resources of the program, the download is not an updater but instead a self-sufficient binary. This version includes:


Improved graphics performance and storage
Improved sprite sorting (probably not noticable to most users)
An easy editing feature for Hooptie's key graphics


This version is not a milestone release so it may contain some bugs, most notably some of the graphics have become tainted in the image transformation process hence ice blocks appear duller than they should. This will hopefully be fixed before the next release. Those interested or already involved in Hooptie's development should read the message following this for further information.

[Pazolli]

Hi all,

My aim for the next few releases is to make changes to make Hooptie as an application more polished. After which we can begin focusing on more levels and game objects. First and foremost, I'd like to get Hooptie's graphics back to looking great as some (probably only the ice block) became tainted due to my use of Adobe Photoshop 3 in transforming the images to big "master" images. So if DaFalcon could download the latest changes and fix up the graphics that would be great. Otherwise, I'll begin a thread shortly listing all the changes that need to be make to get Hooptie working at its best and inviting you to add your own suggestions. We can then work together at getting these changes implemented.

A further note for DaFalcon, please feel free to fiddle with any of the graphics however you like. To help you, I've added this "easy editing feature" I mentioned above. Put simply, by going in to the Preferences dialog and pushing the button in the "Game" group box (it's called something like "Make Graphics Available") Hooptie will move some of its graphics outside its package into a directory called "Hooptie's Graphics". This allows you to edit them more easily (or at least I felt it would when I was playing around with Hooptie's graphics). To go back to the standard graphics simply delete the directory. When you feel you make an improvement to the graphics send them back to us.

Mark :)

[Kjurtyl]

The graphics used in the help screen are missing.

- Kjurtyl

[Pazolli]

Originally posted by Kjurtyl
The graphics used in the help screen are missing.

You're right, would you mind re-implementing them? First use "cvs update" to update your copy of the code. The help file "Help.plist" in the "English.lproj" directory should now be in a format ready to handle the new image storage system. It should contain 5 keys:

image - which specifies the index of the master image from which the sub-image should be taken.

column - which specifies the column of the master image from which the sub-image should be taken.

row - which specifies the row of the master image from which the sub-image should be taken.

head - which, if equivalent to "YES", means that the head of the sub-image (that is the sub-image one row above from the specified sub-image) should also be drawn. (Note: while this is "YES" for all the current images, if a pit was used this would not be case).

text - which specifies the text that should be displayed.

The help screen should be re-implemented in a similiar or better state to what it was, to re-implement it look at the code below the line "case kHelpScreenState:" in the "- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)rect" method of the GameView class, the old drawing procedure for the help screen is commented out at this location. Also note that you can draw a sub-image to screen using GameView's "- (void)drawPictonFromImage:(int)index column:(int)srcColumn row:(int)srcRow atPoint:(NSPoint)destPt transparency:(float)transparency" method. Which you can feed the above image, column and row values straight in to. The transparency you use will probably be 1.0.

Thanks in advance. Don't hesitate to contact us if you can't do this or are having any problems.

Mark.

[flipflop]

I downloaded the source yesterday and noted the new graphics file format. This will make things easier in the editor so that we don't have to keep track of a separate head and body images. Mark, which class and method is used to extract the images from the files?

Great work! :)
- John

[Pazolli]

Originally posted by jnikolai
I downloaded the source yesterday and noted the new graphics file format. This will make things easier in the editor so that we don't have to keep track of a separate head and body images. Mark, which class and method is used to extract the images from the files?

Well GameView's constructor takes the graphics from disk and puts them in memory and "drawPictonFromImage: column: row: atPoint: transparency:" takes the correct part of them from memory and draws it to screen.

BTW Kjurtyl, are you happy to take that task above?

Cheers,
Mark.

[flipflop]

Thanks for the information. Looking at 3.tiff image file, it contains 3 different versions of a rock. Level1.txt contains 2 rocks both ASCII value 7 but when running the game these rocks are different. I'm assuming that these are either selected at random during runtime or alternates one after the other.

Finally at the bottom of the same image file are black slivers progressivly growing larger and larger. What are these used for?

- John

[Pazolli]

Originally posted by jnikolai
Thanks for the information. Looking at 3.tiff image file, it contains 3 different versions of a rock. Level1.txt contains 2 rocks both ASCII value 7 but when running the game these rocks are different. I'm assuming that these are either selected at random during runtime or alternates one after the other.

The rock's look is determined by it's absolute sprite index. My suggestion is not to worry about this and just use a variety of rock looks in the editor, or alternatively, go in to Hooptie's source code and fiddle with the rock so its look is based on its position.

Finally at the bottom of the same image file are black slivers progressivly growing larger and larger. What are these used for?

For a sinking/sunken ice block. When you've got a pit in front of a sinking ice block it looks strange if the ice block sinks into a pitch black pit, so those graphics allow it to seem as if it is really is sinking from a side-on perspective. It's hard to explain, try sinking an ice block in to a pit with another pit in front of it (like in Alan's levels) to see what I'm talking about.

Mark.

[Kjurtyl]

The task sounds like a great challenge, one I would be happy to undertake. I have looked into it and am very interested in elaborating a solution.

Unfortunately, this week will be extremely busy, (3 exams,) without counting the uDevGame deadline looming, (how do I get into these things anyhow?) Therefore, I cannot take up any new commitments, (used loosely here,) until sometime near the end of November.
Of course things might clear up, and I might be able to begin tackling it as soon as we hit November..

I imagine many of us are in similar situations. If this task can wait that long or goes without attention til then, I'll happily take it up.

- Kjurtyl

[Pazolli]

November's good :)

If you're someone who is using the source code of Hooptie and you've updated to QuickTime 6.0.2, you may need to "sudo fixPrecomps" (in Mac OS X's Terminal) to avoid precompiled header warning messages.

I've just fixed two things in the CVS to hopefully improve the user experience. Firstly I've made it so the sound doesn't clash when Hooptie dies and the preparation screen begins and secondly I've made it so the mouse cursor is hidden every time you use the arrow keys while playing (this strikes me as very natural behaviour in practice despite what it may sound like). Hopefully you will get to see these soon.

As for the graphics, the darker ice blocks are beginning to grow on me, but I have very little taste :D.

I'm not sure whether the revised teleport pads 'DaFalcon did a while ago should be added, but I'll leave that up to him to decide.

Mark.

[Pazolli]

Hi all,

I'm not sure how long Alan has wanted me to implement the collection animations for the diamonds, rubys and gold bars. But they're now finally a part of the game.

Mark.

[DaFalcon]

Yay :-)

I tried downloading the latest build from the website but "The page cannot be found" ... Am I just too late? :-)

PS - I'm a huge Angels baseball fan, so by making it to the world series for the first time in club history they've basically taken me out of any possibility of being productive until the run is over. Of course, that will be either tonight or tomorrow night, so I should be back soon. But that's where I've been... Where my mind has been, that is :-)

Alan

[Pazolli]

Alright, that was entirely my fault, a typo meant the page gave the wrong URL link. The correct link is now up. Unfortunately the animated rubys, diamonds, gold bars, etc. (which work very nicely) are still in the CVS not in the latest unstable binary. But hopefully they will be soonish.

Mark.

[Pazolli]

I decided since no-one would've downloaded the last one I might as well post the latest version, so Hooptie 0.2.7u is now up on the site, there is no reason to download Hooptie 0.2.6u unless 0.2.7u doesn't work. I'm think'n of trying the "-mdynamic-no-pic" flag when compiling the next unstable release of Hooptie. I mention it here because otherwise I'll forget to do it (see here (http://www.unsanity.org/) for more info on the flag). It probably won't drastically affect Hooptie, but it may boost performance a tiny bit.

Mark.

[DaFalcon]

For those of you who didn't follow the so-called "world" series in Major League Baseball, the Angels beat the Giants and so I'm the happiest guy on earth :D :D :D And I'm also back to being able to focus on more than baseball!

Thanks for fixing the download link, Mark :-)

[Josh]

Originally posted by DaFalcon
For those of you who didn't follow the so-called "world" series in Major League Baseball, the Angels beat the Giants and so I'm the happiest guy on earth :D :D :DThere was a world series?!?!? Oh... the California series... right. :p

The new Hooptie greatly speeds things up for me and it is almost playable with music and sound on.

[Pazolli]

Originally posted by jabber
The new Hooptie greatly speeds things up for me and it is almost playable with music and sound on.

I'm not sure how much faster I can get Hooptie without being unfaithful to its Cocoa heritage. Not even I play Hooptie with the music enabled (too slow) and I'm seriously thinking of moving the in-game music switcher in to the Preferences dialog with a note about the performance hit when it is enabled (it will be disabled as it is now by default). So the thing I guess I'm really interested in is the gaming experience without the in-game music playing.

Mark.

[Josh]

Originally posted by Pazolli
I'm not sure how much faster I can get Hooptie without being unfaithful to its Cocoa heritage. Not even I play Hooptie with the music enabled (too slow) and I'm seriously thinking of moving the in-game music switcher in to the Preferences dialog with a note about the performance hit when it is enabled (it will be disabled as it is now by default). So the thing I guess I'm really interested in is the gaming experience without the in-game music playing.

Mark. That's fine. I would rather it be Cocoa and I not be able to play with music than it be something else with music. I was wondering... why was the music option not in the preferences to begin with? The gaming experience w/o the music I think is fine. Especially once jnikolai and I get the awesome level editor done :p

[ededed]

I love the hooptie music, has anyone played Prime Target one of the tracks has very similar music to level 2+3.
Is there a good level editor out yet that lets you save and load .bundles?

[flipflop]

Originally posted by ededed
Is there a good level editor out yet that lets you save and load .bundles?

In development! OK, OK, it's been in that state for the past year but we are working on it. :p

[flipflop]

Tried to compile against the latest source code this afternoon and get a lot of the following compile time warnings:

/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioUnit.framework/Headers/AudioUnitCarbonView.h:22: warning: could not use precompiled header '/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Headers/Carbon-gcc3.p', because:
/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioUnit.framework/Headers/AudioUnitCarbonView.h:22: warning: 'CarbonSound/CarbonSound.h' has different date than in precomp
/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioUnit.framework/Headers/AudioUnitCarbonView.h:22: warning: 'CarbonSound/Sound.h' has different date than in precomp


Any ideas?
Thanks!
- John

[Pazolli]

I sure do have some ideas! :-) This is what I wrote earlier about that problem:

Originally posted by Pazolli
If you're someone who is using the source code of Hooptie and you've updated to QuickTime 6.0.2, you may need to "sudo fixPrecomps" (in Mac OS X's Terminal) to avoid precompiled header warning messages.

[flipflop]

Thanks for the pointer Mark and sorry for making you repeat yourself. :o

I do have two more questions for you:

Where should we add the editor source in the Hooptie CVS? It could go at the top level hooptie/editor, it could under the obj-c directory hooptie/obj-c or it could go somewhere else. What is your preference?

How does one get CVS working in Project Builder? Looking at the documentation it should pick up the CVS info from the CVS directory but I always get the following dialog - "The CVS status operation failed because: end of file from server (consult above messages if any). Leaving CVS integration enabled may cause this dialog to reappear. Do you wish to disable CVS integration for this project while it is open?" My hunch is that I need to define my username and password to access hooptie CVS but I'm not sure where to define it in PB. With my luck it will be in the hooptie documentation somewhere... RTFD! ;)

[OneSadCookie]

To get CVS working via SSH from Project Builder, search for SSHPassKey in the Inkubator forum, I posted a link a while back.

Anyone know if you can do this without SSHPassKey in PB2.0?

[flipflop]

Couldn't find the article you were refering to but I did a google search and came up with the following link: http://www.codefab.com/unsupported/ Where you can download the latest (???) version of SSHPassKey (1.1-1).

I will wait before I install to see if PB 2.0 can be setup to do this instead. All I have seen so far is a single check-box asking if you want to enable CVS or not.

Thanks!

[OneSadCookie]

That looks like the right site. I wonder why you couldn't find my post?

Well, I can testify that SSHPassKey works fine with PB2.0. I did try (halfheartedly) at the time to get PB2.0 to do SSH integration without it, and had no success -- but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

[Pazolli]

Originally posted by jnikolai
I do have two more questions for you:

Where should we add the editor source in the Hooptie CVS? It could go at the top level hooptie/editor, it could under the obj-c directory hooptie/obj-c or it could go somewhere else. What is your preference?
I like the idea of putting it at "hooptie/editor" as you suggested. If you want I'm happy for you to mail me ( pazolli @ idevgames.com ) the code and I'll post it for you, otherwise you can post it yourself, it's up to you.

Cheers,
Mark.

[Kjurtyl]

Well, it's past mid-november right now and as promised I've begun work on fixing up the help-screen. I've got the text displaying just as it was before, didn't really change that at all. The images are being drawn as well, but not quite in the right spot(s).

One thing I'd like to know is why every entry in the dictionary is of type string. Wouldn't it make more sense to have them appropriately typed depending on the values in question? Right now we've got about three arrays of integers and one of booleans in there which appears to me as inappropriate. Is it done this way because of some dictionary-specific reason or just happenstance?

- Kjurtyl.

[Pazolli]

Originally posted by Kjurtyl
I've begun work on fixing up the help-screen.
Joy!
One thing I'd like to know is why every entry in the dictionary is of type string. Wouldn't it make more sense to have them appropriately typed depending on the values in question? Right now we've got about three arrays of integers and one of booleans in there which appears to me as inappropriate. Is it done this way because of some dictionary-specific reason or just happenstance?
Feel free to change the ditionary types to what-ever you want. Or even, do what-ever you want with the help system. In the end all I desire is a reasonable help system for our users.

Mark.

[Kjurtyl]

Well, the help screen is now revamped to take advantage of the dictionary system. I've changed some of the formatting and values of the entries which in turn is really a reflection of the changes I made in drawPictonFromImage(). Essentially that last function will now allow for heads checking.

I'll add in the comments and update the changes early tomorrow.

- Kjurtyl.

[Pazolli]

Thanks Kjurtyl,

Everything works great.

Mark.

[andrewdm]

To add a small and fine polish to the the "You have achieved a high score!" sheet, the word "Who" could be changed to "Whom," for proper grammar, yielding "Whom shall we credit with this achievement?"