kittenm4ster [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

blurry canvas in macOS Chrome

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 23:45:48 UTC

The BBS PICO-8 player is showing up blurry in Chrome on macOS.

(version 76.0.3809.100)

This seems like it might be a bug with Chrome, not this site, but I'm posting it here just in case...

The other puzzling factor is that this started happening all of the sudden, without updating Chrome or anything, e.g. I had the same Chrome session running and at some point this started happening. I then tried restarting my computer and it's still happening.

Screenshot

A Workaround (as a user)

Use "inspect element" on the canvas (e.g. push Option + Cmd + I, click the hover tool thing, and then click on the canvas)
uncheck image-rendering: pixelated
check it again

That fixes it for some reason :| It makes no sense, which makes me think it's Chrome's fault.

(EDIT: actually sometimes unchecking/checking that CSS rule makes the canvas start flickering like crazy...uggh)

More Info

It works fine on the big TV player on the front page (in macOS Chrome)
It works fine in HTML exports of carts (in macOS Chrome)
It works fine in Firefox on macOS
It works fine in Chrome on Linux
It works fine in Chrome on Android

anyway this is lame and I hope it magically starts working again soon :p

Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:13:00 UTC

Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge

by kittenm4ster

[Click to Play]

feature request: page up/page down in sprite editor

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 00:42:37 UTC

feature request: a keyboard shortcut to switch tabs/pages of the sprite editor. Something like a Page Up/Down.

(if this already exists, someone please let me know!)

holding W technically works but it takes foreverrrr :)

edit: WHOAA I just discovered you can hold Shift + Q/W to go up/down which is a much better workaround! Still I think if there are tabs which are selectable via mouse, they should also be selectable via keyboard somehow.

Con Alma

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 03:05:06 UTC

The other day I listened to @Gruber's nice transcription of Giant Steps and I felt inspired, so here's another late-1950s jazz standard, this time from the great Dizzy Gillespie: "Con Alma".

My transcription is based on the version from the album Duets (1958) with Dizzy (trumpet) and Sonny Stitt (tenor sax).

I of course didn't have room for all the solos (the recording is over 9 minutes long), so I picked my favorite sections, but otherwise tried to stay faithful to their improvisations. I also made a loop out of the whole thing, so I didn't have to try to make room for the ending :)

It can be quite challenging and awkward trying to mimic the expressive, organic sound (and swung rhythm) of wind instruments with PICO-8's limited beeps and boops, but I'm pretty happy with the result, considering the medium :D

[sfx]

inconsistent behavior in selected SFX when switching from music to SFX editor

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 00:48:02 UTC

Scenario 1 (correct, IMHO)

In the music editor, use the keyboard to select a note in a channel
Switch to the SFX editor using the keyboard (Alt + left)

Result: The SFX which the cursor was in (in step 1) is selected in the SFX editor.

Scenario 2 (correct, IMHO)

In the music editor, use the keyboard to select a note in a channel
Switch to the SFX editor using the mouse (click on the SFX tab)

Result: The SFX which the cursor was in (in step 1) is selected in the SFX editor.

Scenario 3 (correct, IMHO)

In the music editor, use the mouse to select a note in a channel
Switch to the SFX editor using the keyboard

Result: The SFX which the cursor was in (in step 1) is selected in the SFX editor.

Scenario 4 (bug, IMHO)

In the music editor, use the mouse to select a note in a channel
Switch to the SFX editor using the mouse (click on the SFX tab)

Result: The SFX which the cursor was in (in step 1) is NOT selected in the SFX editor. It looks like whichever SFX was previously selected in the SFX editor is there...or something. It's not what I expect.

Summary

If the keyboard is used to select the note in the music editor, that SFX will be selected when switching to the SFX editor regardless of whether keyboard or mouse was used to switch to the editor
If the mouse is used to select the note in the music editor, that SFX is only selected if switching to the editor with the keyboard, which feels unintuitive/buggy.
this is in version 0.1.12c

[v0.1.12c] stat(26) only updates at 30 FPS resolution in 60 FPS mode

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 23:12:58 UTC

Whereas in PICO-8 v0.1.11 it was possible to run a cart at 60 FPS and get a higher sampling frequency (than at 30 FPS) when querying the value of stat(26) (i.e. number of ticks played on current pattern), it seems that in v0.1.12 this behavior has been changed so that in 60 FPS the stat(26) value still only updates 30 times per second.

What led to my discovering this was that I thought I perceived a visual difference when using v0.1.12 to run part of my "Not A Creature Was Stirring" cart that uses stat(26) ticks as the input for some easing functions, so I created a standalone test cart and ran it in both v0.1.11 and v0.1.12 and it looks like the behavior has indeed changed.

Here's a test cart. Try changing the "_update60" function to "_update" and see that in v0.1.12 the average diff between sampled ticks (only counting when there is an actual change) is the same (roughly 5.59) either way. But if you run the same cart (I had to change the cart version to 16 to do this) in v0.1.11 you can see that in 60 FPS mode, the average diff between sampled ticks is roughly half (about 2.8), which is better for syncing things to music.

demonstration of stat 26 bug

by kittenm4ster

[Click to Play]

EDIT: oh well now that I see it on the web, it seems the 0.1.12c web player does not have this bug :D (it says about 2.8 for me) so apparently the problem is only with the native (I'm using Linux btw) version?

F11 doesn't toggle fullscreen

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:19:10 UTC

The changelog for v0.1.11c (from a year or so ago) says:

> Added: F11 to toggle fullscreen

...but F11 has never actually worked in any version of PICO-8 so far, to my knowledge. Alt + Enter is still the only way to do fullscreen.

So I'm just making a bug report to track this, and as a reminder in case a fix might make it into 0.1.12b or something ;)

gui_theme 2 is actually black

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 00:50:42 UTC

found a bug in the config for the new v0.1.12: "gui_theme 2" is actually black but it looks like anything higher than 2 is grey now, as if the grey and black swapped :)

the dark blue is pretty nice as the new default btw!

"Castles of Cake"

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 20:39:07 UTC

castlesofcake

by kittenm4ster

[Click to Play]

One of my favorite hobbies of late is trying to transcribe/approximate existing music into PICO-8's tiny tracker, so here is my attempt at "Castles of Cake" from my favorite kirby game, Kirby's Dream Course :D

Technically Interesting Note: I am doing some slightly sneaky swapping of SFX after the intro so I can use a couple of different SFX instruments that are only in the intro and not used in the rest of the song

charmunch

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 20:30:06 UTC

charmunch

by kittenm4ster

[Click to Play]

I saw this tweet by Polyducks and felt inspired/compelled to make something like it in PICO-8:

https://twitter.com/Polyducks/status/1082764062998581248

EDIT 2019-05-18: added new version with refined color palette and adjustable speed (using left/right), moved out of WIP

EDIT 2019-06-13: decided I was not quite done with this :p, refined color palette again, adjusted muncher movement, added ability to add/remove munchers, switched to 60 FPS

This is like a screensaver that you can just watch, but it also has some controls:

       O/X change to a new random poop type
   up/down increase/decrease number of munchers
right/left increase/decrease speed

calendar cart not showing up in splore, and thumbnail is wrong

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:58:12 UTC

@zep
(FYI we've pinged you in the secret discord server about this, but maybe you have those notifications turned off or something, so I'm posting it here for you to see)

The Advent Calendar 2018 cart hasn't been showing up in SPLORE since sometime Thursday night/Friday morning UTC, I think (around the time I posted my Day 7 cart). I also cannot find it via the search in SPLORE. (I've only been able to get to it because my Day 7 cart has a link to it in the menu :)

Also the thumbnail that shows for the BBS thread (and in pinned posts at the top) is wrong; I think both of these things started happening at the same time, so I'm wondering if they are perhaps related?

Not A Creature Was Stirring

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 01:46:37 UTC

Not A Creature Was Stirring

by kittenm4ster

[Click to Play]

Not A Creature Was Stirring (...Except Squeaky Whiskerson and his Marvelous Musical Mice!)

This is my cart for Day 7 of the 2018 PICO-8 Advent Calendar project!

Turn up your speakers!

mobile web full screen button broke

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 16:41:32 UTC

The fullscreen button on the mobile web interface seems to have broken all of a sudden. Instead of displaying the screen, the fullscreen icon itself is displayed really big, stretched to fill the screen XD it's actually pretty funny.

(it's actually a pretty critical issue though because the mobile controls are super buggy and unreliable unless you're in fullscreen mode)

holding any button on mobile web overlay causes text-highlight vibration

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 05:43:16 UTC

Using Chrome on Android (on a Pixel 2 so this is the latest version of OS and browser) when I hold down a button (including d-pad buttons) on the mobile web button overlay (in fullscreen mode), it now causes a vibration as if I am selecting text on the page. I'm guessing it thinks it is selecting some invisible text in the overlay or something...there is no visual indication of text highlight. I can definitely say this did not happen on the previous version of the BBS.

Sorry for all the bug reports, lol. I hope the info helps :D

unlisted cart with custom ID can't be updated

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:15:10 UTC

@zep
A couple days ago, I uploaded an unlisted cart (with an all lowercase alphabetic ID). Today I tried to update that unlisted cart, and it tells me:

Upload successful!

Tag for this version is: [# sillytree-#]

(I've replaced my real cart ID with "sillytree" because the real one is still super secret :p and also put a space after the first "#" so that the BBS doesn't try to display it as a cart)

There is no number after the hyphen there (the current version is "-0" so I would expect a "-1" now) and when I go to the cart's info page, it still says there is only 1 version. And if I try going to /cart_info.php?cid=sillytree-1 it says that does not exist.

Help!

I don't know if this only happens on unlisted carts or not; all I know is what happens in this specific case. I tried a couple times just to make sure it wasn't a one-time glitch or something, and it is reliably reproducible.

BBS 4.0 logs me out frequently

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 19:53:32 UTC

WIth the previous version of the BBS, I almost never got logged out. With this version, it seems like every time I visit, I have to log back in. A couple days ago I was even sometimes getting logged out just clicking around to different pages.

Is this short login session time by design?

sfx states sometimes don't update in sync with each other

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 22:35:43 UTC

This is a really weird bug, but stat calls for pattern index, note index, and "number of ticks played" do not always sync up and sometimes one changes before the other. It was intermittent and hard to track down. In order to compensate for this, I had to write something to insulate myself from it:

function poll_songpos()
  local pat = stat(24)
  local n = stat(21)
  local ticks = stat(26)

  -- compensate for bug (!) where pattern sometimes changes before note
  if pat ~= songpos.pat and n ~= songpos.n then
    songpos.pat = pat
    songpos.n = n

    if songpos.prevticks > 0 and ticks >= songpos.prevticks then
      songpos.ticks = 0
      songpos.waitingforticksync = true
    end
  elseif pat == songpos.pat and n ~= songpos.n then
    songpos.n = n
  end

  -- compensate for bug (!) where pattern sometimes changes before ticks
  if songpos.waitingforticksync then
    if ticks < songpos.prevticks then
      songpos.waitingforticksync = false
    end
  else
    songpos.ticks = ticks
    songpos.prevticks = ticks
  end
end

(I then changed all other code to use songpos as the source of truth, rather than the stat calls)

However, this caused a big headache and was hard to track down and it would be great if this wrapper were not necessary. Also I'm not 100% sure this wrapper code is completely bulletproof; I simply wrote it out of necessity to get the issue out of the way from the specific cart I was working on.

Sorry I don't have a cart demonstrating the issue, but I will try to make one. I just wanted to get this reported sooner rather than later, in hopes that it might get addressed for the upcoming update :D

EDIT: as a reminder I also have another bug thread about stat(24) returning 0 instead of -1 which hasn't been fixed yet

PS
Thanks again, @zep, for adding these sfx state-related stat calls a while back; it is super fun to get stuff to react to music/sfx, in a way that is not easily possible on most other platforms!

BBS cart menu should pause both game and music

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 19:40:26 UTC

The new BBS 4.0 "cart menu" (the one that slides over and covers the screen and shows other carts) is really cool! However, it seems it allows music to continue playing, while not running _update on the cart. This will basically completely break some audio synchronization stuff I do with stat calls in some of my carts (I do this heavily in one which is going to be released very soon!)

You can see an obvious demonstration of the issue with this cart, which displays the notes that it sees are playing: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=28685

Until now, I did not see a way for music to play without the update method being called for so long (besides minor frame drops, which I do some work to account for), and this feels kind of like a violation of a basic assumption (at least an assumption I had) with the API so I'm hoping this web behavior can be changed so that the cart is either completely paused or completely running, and not a weird in-between state? @zep

profile image is broken on Settings page

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 07:12:48 UTC

It looks like the "/bbs" bit is missing.

For example, this is the image URL on my settings page:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/files/9551/kitty_yellow3.png

But the correct URL is apparently:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/files/9551/kitty_yellow3.png

pagination isn't working for orderby "featured"

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 07:07:34 UTC

When sorting by likes, anything past page 1 seems to display an empty page.

compare this: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7#sub=2&orderby=featured

to this: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7#sub=2&page=2&orderby=featured