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Post by tgwaste on Jul 17, 2007 1:45:55 GMT 1
ya right now tinnus is prolly thinking 'i hate features'  im sure it'll all be good in the end. |
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 2:16:17 GMT 1
You're definately right about both. Just a thought... what if we used multiple quicksave slots. Maybe 10 slots per game. Then we would only need two buttons in the ingame GUI, namely Quicksave, which always overwrites the oldest quicksave and Permanent Save, which requires the user to enter a title, but with the date set as default title unless the user changes it. Now we could add a "Save Permanently" option to the savegame browser which again would prompt the user to enter a title. That would allow users to Use the quicksame feature without thinking "d**n, I used quicksave, but I really want to keep it permanently". |
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 11:26:41 GMT 1
BTW these are my current sketches:  |
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Post by vilmos on Jul 17, 2007 13:46:26 GMT 1
If you are going to do some designing for the palm screens you really need to be doing it in actual palm resolutions!
980x1311 looks great here on the board but when it comes to actually implementing it, then the whole design will be scrapped because nothing is visible.
Try 320x320 as the minimum, and even then you get palms like the Treo 600 that can still do GB but have only 160x160.
Making a design is really easy when you have unlimited space, lets see those screens again in a palm resolution. I like the visuals and ideas so far. A few of them would be painful to implement, but nothing terrible.
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 15:03:04 GMT 1
Um.... Vilmos, this is not supposed to be a single screen... these are 10 screens at 320x320. About the Treo600... yes, I tend to ignore it, simply because I don't think it's a terribly good environment for LJP...
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 15:03:58 GMT 1
320px x 3 pannels +20px spacer= 980px |
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 15:10:05 GMT 1
Just resized it to 160x160 (per panel  ) Of course if we want to support that we'll need to redo some labels, because at half the size the current small font size is WAY too small, but the rest works fine even then:  |
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Post by countbuggula on Jul 17, 2007 15:13:01 GMT 1
Um.... Vilmos, this is not supposed to be a single screen... these are 10 screens at 320x320. About the Treo600... yes, I tend to ignore it, simply because I don't think it's a terribly good environment for LJP... Actually we got LJP working pretty well on my old 600 - and it ran GB, NES, and SNES. Anything other than GB was too blurry to read text due to the low resolution, and the framerate was too slow (especially for SNES) for anything but RPG's, which kind of made it pointless, but you could do it. It's obsolete enough though that I don't think you should even consider it now, and focus on designing for hi-res devices. (By the way if anyone's interested in a cheap used-but-still-working Sprint Treo 600 make me an offer. Better for it to find a loving home than to sit and collect dust on my computer desk, which is what it's doing now) |
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Post by tgwaste on Jul 17, 2007 17:01:57 GMT 1
hans I think its looking really good |
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Post by vilmos on Jul 17, 2007 18:39:52 GMT 1
Well there you go, I just hit properties and saw the size. I didn't notice that they are all one big picture. My screen size is enormous so I can't always immediately tell the size by looking at it. In that case your screens are greatl  160x160 will be painful, but it always is. |
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Post by setsuna203 on Jul 17, 2007 18:46:27 GMT 1
Hans, the problem is that you use a too high resolution. Not in the meaning of height and width but in dots-per-inch (dpi). So far the Tungsten T3 has the highest dpi-resolution, but even the T3 wouldn't be as good looking as your posted pictures. You may want to reduce the resoultion accordingly, but don't ask me how many dpi the Palm has. ;-) Depends on the modell... But it should be much lower then 72 dpi (PC monitor).
Besides this I really like your drawings, simple and intuitiv! Are your sure you're not a pro when it comes to digital design? ^^
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 18:48:16 GMT 1
Here's a take on the main screen in lowres... I've drawn all characters manually and Tinnus certainly could create a font-engine but I think we could just stick with plain old bitmaps... I mean even if we'd plaster the whole screen with it, including 30 sub-screens and low-res images, without compression, we'd still end up below 600k. Only question remaining: How will we do the savegame titles and so on? Seems like we still need a rudimentary font engine...  |
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 19:22:23 GMT 1
About the resolution issues.... DPI and so on... well, actually the Zodiac (480px for 8,2cm=0.17mmx0.17mm per pixel) has more DPI than my PC (1440px width for 36.5cm=0.25mmx0.25mm per pixel) but that's not the point... The point is that DPI don't matter... you're closer up to your PDA screen than you would ever be to your PC screen which makes the whole comparison moot. Sure the images end up 26% or so smaller on your Palm, but you can still make out the pixels more clearly than you can on your PC.
About scaling them to give a more accurate representation... that would simply result in a blurry mess and not a fair comparison.
And before anybody starts pointing out that I scaled the picture I posted last by 2: The 600's screen might or might not have half the resolution of your screen, but fact is that you can make out the pixels VERY clearly and that's what I'm trying to get across. And a scaling factor of 1.3 or something like that is out of the question because that would destroy the whole pictures with strange doulbled rows.
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Post by tgwaste on Jul 17, 2007 19:31:25 GMT 1
650, 680, 755, etc are hires palms baby so in reality it would probably look like somewhere in the middle of your first posts and your last one. also remember if you do an icon view you have to do a list view |
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 19:45:08 GMT 1
Nope... it will look exactly like the first images, just slightly smaller, because HiRes PDAs have more DPI than PCs, that's all... but it will definately not look like the last one because that is an entirely different image where I tried to get maximum CONTRAST, as in COLORS, not RESOLUTION.
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 19:47:46 GMT 1
But before I start shouting... why don't you simply save it to your Palm and look at it there...
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Post by vilmos on Jul 17, 2007 19:53:42 GMT 1
I have adapted the simple font engine in the Tapwave SDK to work on all palms and it just uses a bitmap, so you can hand draw the font in a bitmap and still have it draw the text. Best of both worlds. |
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Post by tgwaste on Jul 17, 2007 19:56:34 GMT 1
I have adapted the simple font engine in the Tapwave SDK to work on all palms and it just uses a bitmap, so you can hand draw the font in a bitmap and still have it draw the text. Best of both worlds. just relax now.. you're gonna give yourself a heart attack |
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Post by tgwaste on Jul 17, 2007 19:56:58 GMT 1
I have adapted the simple font engine in the Tapwave SDK to work on all palms and it just uses a bitmap, so you can hand draw the font in a bitmap and still have it draw the text. Best of both worlds. excellent idea. |
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Post by _Em on Jul 17, 2007 20:38:38 GMT 1
...or, you could use FontSmoother and the Palm font system for the launcher You could also borrow the font engine from an open source project like PalmFiction, which does a great job of placing aliased fonts or reverting to bitmapped. |
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 20:38:49 GMT 1
Sorry, but it was a long day with almost two hours spent over an incorrectly configured PHP installation (no, not mine). And sometimes when you're working with somebody and this person doesn't tell you about a warning message because he feels it's not important when a) it's the ONLY warning message and b) It describes exactly the problem, it can really stress your patience.
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Post by tgwaste on Jul 17, 2007 20:47:42 GMT 1
Sorry, but it was a long day with almost two hours spent over an incorrectly configured PHP installation (no, not mine). And sometimes when you're working with somebody and this person doesn't tell you about a warning message because he feels it's not important when a) it's the ONLY warning message and b) It describes exactly the problem, it can really stress your patience. fire them |
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Post by _Em on Jul 17, 2007 20:51:29 GMT 1
Sadly, IT staff can't generally make that call.
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Post by vilmos on Jul 17, 2007 21:11:55 GMT 1
Heh what is it with people ignoring the warning and error messages?!
I get clients that tell me "it just doesn't work." Of course 2 hours later after getting there in person to fix the problem I find that the error is that the database is missing because he gave his SD card to his wife to take pictures with! Well guess where the DB was... argh!
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 21:12:49 GMT 1
And if you're a student during internship even less...
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 21:14:29 GMT 1
And it's not a client... it's somebody I'm supposed to be working with... guess who has done the whole server setup and 95% of the code...
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Post by hansschmucker on Jul 17, 2007 21:16:23 GMT 1
He's working on XAMPPlite because he can't be bothered to install apache2, PHP and MySQL manually.
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Post by _Em on Jul 17, 2007 21:40:25 GMT 1
Welcome to Industry |
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Post by vilmos on Jul 18, 2007 2:23:34 GMT 1
I need to get me an intern!
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Post by Tinnus on Jul 18, 2007 4:10:31 GMT 1
My idea is just to use PalmOS UI for everything. I wonder how that'd work in the emulator modules (ARM). Probably I'd just call back to 68k and draw the buttons and stuff there. This also means I can reuse all of the interface code from the launcher! I want to avoid reinventing the wheel, basically to avoid bugs and reduce memory usage. A plus on that is people recognizing the UI as Palm-like instead of the current "different" feel. |
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