Catatafish [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Glitchy artefacts on first load

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 19:03:40 UTC

Hi,

This may or may not be a bug - the version of the webplayer currently on the forum (0.1.12d rc7) does something funky during the initial loading screen of my game - https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=36430.

When you see the "loading..." text the rest of the screen should be completely black, but the webplayer displays some extra blue dots in grid pattern across the screen.

At this point the cart is decompressing a px9 file to video memory (see the first four lines of _init()), so seeing artefacts appearing in the output was a little worrying :)

The data seems to be decompressed correctly though, so perhaps this is just part of the glitchy cart reset effect, but I can't really tell.

Zedwolf

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 04:40:58 UTC

A not-entirely-canon demake of the game 'Zeewolf' by Binary Asylum.

Pilot your Zedwolf chopper across 6.5 km^2 of 3d open world environment, rescue hostages and repel the enemy force's attack!

epilepsy warning: contains strobe or flash effects

Zedwolf 1.25

by Catatafish

[Click to Play]

Currently there's only one level and the cart will simply replay it once it's completed.
I hope to add another one in future, but I also wanted to get something out before the end of the decade, and I have.. 19 minutes (local time) to do that!

Controls:

Z: toggle landing gear up / down

X (while landing gear is down): throttle up
X (while gear is up): fire rockets

Arrow keys: move

Shift / W / Pause menu option: minimap & mission briefing

Repairing & refuelling
Find a repair crane and land nearby - there's one in your base!

Rescuing friendlies
You can find hostages and other folks in need of help dotted around the map. Land nearby and they will hop on board! Bring anyone you find back to your base (the yellow objective marker) to complete the rescue.

But be careful - if you are shot down or run out of fuel with passengers on board, you will not be able to rescue them! (ran out of tokens to fit that in, sorry)

Non violence mode
You will still get shot at, so it's not 100% violence free, but I wanted to include a less bloodthirsty way to complete a mission. Non-violence mode is active as long as you don't kill anything, and you don't get killed. You can complete the level by rescuing all friendlies on the map.
Once something has been destroyed, you will need to complete the main objectives to finish the mission.

And Happy New Year!

edit: I completely forgot to credit Allister Brimble as the original author of the music - the track in this game is a manual conversion of his Zeewolf 1 title track.

old versions:

Tunnel effect

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 05:40:35 UTC

(originally posted in https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=33995 - I tried to not spam the forum but it turns out you can't post two carts in one thread if you want them both to show up in splore.)

catatatunnel2

by Catatafish

[Click to Play]

Shift/tab removes the text. Setting the scale to about 10 makes the interlaced versions look sort of okay.

Based on https://lodev.org/cgtutor/tunnel.html

Plasma effect

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 05:14:39 UTC

I got hyped for Revision & tried my hand at some old demo effects :)

60 fps plasma:

catataplasma

by Catatafish

[Click to Play]

Based on https://lodev.org/cgtutor/plasma.html

edit: tunnel cart moved to https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=33998

Unwitting cart theft

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 01:01:44 UTC

Hi,
A cart is showing up in my profile here https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=8336&mode=carts&sub=0#m as being created by me, but it was not - all I did was paste someone else's cart id into this post - https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=59639#p

Is there a way to remove it from my list?
Thanks

Some carts... look a bit odd?

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 02:13:51 UTC

Following on from the 'some carts kill the browser tab' thread, those carts are no longer hanging for me, but there's still something funky going on in some of them compared to the desktop version.

It's most noticeable with https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=16351:

edit: background differences are more obvious at full res, sorry for the poor vertical alignment.

Some carts kill the browser tab

Sun, 02 Dec 2018 18:31:50 UTC

The BBS' player seems a little unstable since the update, some carts are hanging in both Firefox (63.0.3 / 64bit) & Chrome (70.0.3538.110, 64 bit) for me at least.

Here's a couple of examples:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=32380 - posted after the update (and electricgryphon also is having the same issue)
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=16351 - old cart that used to run ok

These both work fine in the PC application.

I'm not sure it's directly related to high CPU use - for example, if I move the camera inside the models in this cart to force > 100% cpu, I don't get hangs: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=46687

Wizardry (music)

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 22:31:05 UTC

Wizardry (music)

by Catatafish

[Click to Play]

Just messing around in the tracker. Music was converted from an old Amiga .mod by Jester, logo stolen from the internet. Code is an attempt at a water effect that went wrong. (edit: reflectsize=28 looks ok, ish)

(also Happy New Year!)

Compression limit in carts

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 23:39:17 UTC

Hi,

Perhaps this has been asked before, but I don't recall seeing anything about it specifically. Apologies if so.

I've just gone over the png compression limit on a cart, but have about 1128 tokens & 20,000 odd characters left to go. I'll probably use all of them.. I know I can reduce the length of my variable names, or minify the source to make it fit, but -

I was wondering if there was a technical reason why the cart file size couldn't be, say, doubled, or even left unrestricted? As long as you're within the token and character limit that is.

For the record, I think the idea of storing data directly in the image is pretty damn cool & I'm not suggesting that be changed, but if it's only restricted by image size, perhaps the 'overflow' data could be stored in a private png chunk? In theory it shouldn't interfere with how it appears or downloads in browsers or image viewers etc.

If it's a hard limit on file size or Javascript or something though, I guess I can't really argue against that one.

I guess it's no big deal, but I'd love to be able to keep the original source in the cart is all.

Cheers

edit: clarification - cart file size.

Function lists in Notepad++

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 23:08:45 UTC

I was dabbling in Npp & ended up making this. It's made navigating through source code much simpler for me, I figured others might find it useful too.

Example from one of Zep's compression carts (whose nested functions caused no end of trouble for my puny regex-fu):

NB, it requires you to edit Notepad's config files, so maybe make a backup first in case something goes wrong.

Link: Github Gist

Floating/fixed point format?

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 21:08:57 UTC

Hi,

The other thread about converting numbers to hex strings got me wondering if it was possible to do the same with fixed point data. (I did try searching here first but didn't find anything about this specifically)

I wrote a quick test to dump the bits out, but for floats I'm not sure where to find the fractional part. I figured it'd be in the top byte, but as the last test shows, it's not there (or my code is wrong). Is it possible to get at this data?

Thanks

function convert(value)
  local binary = ""
  for i=1,16 do
    local shift = shl(1,i-1)
    binary=abs(shr(band(shift,value),i-1))..binary
  end
  print("convert "..value.." to binary:")
  print(binary)

  local integerval = 0
  for k=1,16 do
    local str = shl(sub(binary, k, k),16-k)
    integerval += str
  end
  print("and back again: "..integerval)
  print("")
end

function _init()
  cls()
  convert(0xc0de)
  convert(12345)
  convert(3.14159)
end

Here's a screenshot: (ironically it's larger than the cart, but it's done now)

edit: in fact, the code to convert back is wrong, as it doesn't handle the decimal point. I think the binary conversion is correct though.