icaBlog

Well my latest release has been, uhm, released – it’s the player from last weekend’s raww.orgy demoparty. It’s a simple enough idea – a single program to both show the graphics entries for the competition, and to also play the music. For those who have seen the previous party-players, yes it’s based on the same code but this year I made a few important changes.

The build mechanism has been altered to be a bit more “streamlined”. That’s to say it’s much easier to add a new production to the player – a process which is very important considering the scattered receipt of competition entries. In fact it’s not even required to change the main code – you can just add a header file and include it prior to running the makefile and all will/should work.

The next and most impressive/pretty change was regarding the screen fades – inspired in part by the fade-in effects at the start of Stick Up Game I decided to replace the previous players’ screen fades with something a little prettier. The routine uses a 7-bit grey-scale image of values from 8 to 120 as the base for the fade. It then shifts a call-table on each frame, and for each attribute block it does a re-re-directed call to a function. The process for each attribute block (and there are 768 in a screen, for those who don’t know) is something like this:

1. Get the value of the grey-scale image at this attribute position.
2. Use the grey-scale value to look into the shifting call-table.
3. Call the function, which could do any of the following:
   1. Fade out the normal screen attribute.
   2. Copy the new screen data to the screen.
   3. Fade in the new screen attribute.

Using this system it’s incredibly easy to add a new “fade” design. As they’re based on grey-scale images rather than hand-coded, you can simply design a new wipe in a graphics editor, adjust the levels so the values are from 8 to 120, and then save it as a raw 768b file. The results can vary – at one point I had about 14 fades compiled-in to the player, so I purged the ones that didn’t work so well.

The player is available from the party-page – you should check out the “results” version as it’s got some corrected music in it, and don’t forget to check Pouet if you like it. If people are interested I’ll upload the code for the player – it’s quite a nice piece of work. But then I would say that.