798 replies to this topic

[dan200]

Anyway, back to being mysterious...

[oeed]

dan200, on 08 October 2015 - 01:11 AM, said:

The current display specs exactly match a common display standard circa about 1990 (not saying there won't be different tiers of displays eventually though). The era i'm emulating has some truly beautiful pixel art games, and I'd like to encourage people to reproduce some of that before jumping straight to gradients, blending etc. Limitations often breed creativity.

Oh yeah, I completely agree, although we've already done that really. But hey, let's wait and see.

[Creator]

dan200, on 08 October 2015 - 01:26 AM, said:

Anyway, back to being mysterious...

Why? Can't you go back to revealing your secret?

[oeed]

Creator, on 08 October 2015 - 04:31 AM, said:

dan200, on 08 October 2015 - 01:26 AM, said:

Anyway, back to being mysterious...

Why? Can't you go back to revealing your secret?

Well there isn't much we don't already know at this point. Dan doesn't even seem completely sure what it will be yet, we'll have to just watch and wait to see what happens.

[CraftedCart]

dan200, on 07 October 2015 - 10:20 PM, said:

Limitations often breed creativity.

Alright, fair enough. I'd agree with you there

[Agent Silence]

Creator, on 08 October 2015 - 04:31 AM, said:

dan200, on 08 October 2015 - 01:26 AM, said:

Anyway, back to being mysterious...

Why? Can't you go back to revealing your secret?

A code magician never reveals his secrets.

[Creator]

Agent Silence, on 08 October 2015 - 03:34 PM, said:

Creator, on 08 October 2015 - 04:31 AM, said:

dan200, on 08 October 2015 - 01:26 AM, said:

Anyway, back to being mysterious...

Why? Can't you go back to revealing your secret?

A code magician never reveals his secrets.

Yup, you just decompile the code. That way he doesn't have to say a word.

[Xenthera]

dan200, on 08 October 2015 - 01:11 AM, said:

The current display specs exactly match a common display standard circa about 1990 (not saying there won't be different tiers of displays eventually though). The era i'm emulating has some truly beautiful pixel art games, and I'd like to encourage people to reproduce some of that before jumping straight to gradients, blending etc. Limitations often breed creativity.

I know everyone including dan has been talking/hinting about this not being another minecraft mod, but having different tier displays on anything but, wouldn't really make any sense.
Personally I would like to see something on the raspberry pi, but just in case this happens to be minecraft related, i've already made something similar for my raspberry pi 2 with cython and lua bindings.
I'll leave that to your imagination though as I don't want to advert anything on dan's forums.

Edited by Xenthera, 08 October 2015 - 05:29 PM.

[Bomb Bloke]

Xenthera, on 08 October 2015 - 04:09 PM, said:

I know everyone including dan has been talking/hinting about this not being another minecraft mod, but having different tier displays on anything but, wouldn't really make any sense.

There are quite a few possibilities as to how it could fit. One of the simpler ones is to think in terms of display modes, which could be changed with a function call - eg.

Back in the day, even if your system supported a decent colour depth, that didn't mean it had enough display memory to implement it alongside a decent screen resolution. And if you wanted to take advantage of display pages (buffers stored in VRAM), then you typically had to cut down on both.

[FUNCTION MAN!]

eg. VESA Modes. They still exist.

[oeed]

Well the way I see it is, if you want to make it simple and intuitive it'd be a bit silly to have different display options for the sake of it. Stick to one, and if that means 16 colours then so be it.

[Creator]

In one of the gifs he showed a palette editor. What is that? ☺

[Bomb Bloke]

Er, what? Is that some sort of rhetorical question?

I feel like you're making some sort of joke rather than asking for an actual explanation; but I can't tell what the punchline might be.

Edited by Bomb Bloke, 09 October 2015 - 12:43 PM.

[apemanzilla]

Creator, on 09 October 2015 - 11:08 AM, said:

In one of the gifs he showed a palette editor. What is that? ☺

There was a suggestion a while ago about keeping the same 16 color system, but allowing those colors to be changed. So one could change blue to be a lighter shade - it would then replace the blue color. This way you wouldn't need to send more packets for different colors, just one packet to tell the client what the color "bindings" are.

[oeed]

I'm still in two minds about this 16 colour palette. The benefit isn't really that big to be honest, all the colours we've got cover all the basic colours we need. Still limited to just 16 colours, being able to change them won't have that much of an effect. Just, ehhh

Annnyway... mmm.



Ben and I have some ideas for something like this... Put it this way, Dan you might have some competition

[Creator]

No, I'm completely serious. He showed a gif with a palette editor. What is a palette?

[Bomb Bloke]

It's the MS Paint icon.

Say you're dedicating four bits of memory for every pixel on your display. That allows you to store a fair number of pixels in RAM, but the catch is that four bits only offers 16 combinations per pixel. You can't really define any decent colours with such a small range.

So, you define a separate array which holds your actual colours. Here you use a decent number of bits per value - say 24 - allowing a much larger range of combinations. By using your pixel data as indexes into this array, you've greatly expanded the number of colours you can put on the screen, while still only dedicating four bits per pixel (plus an extra bit of memory for your array of colours - your palette).

ComputerCraft uses four bits for the text colour of a given character, and four bits for the background colour of a given character - eight bits in total. These two values index into a 16 colour palette, which we can't change.

A palette editor makes it possible to use a great deal more colours than is possible within ComputerCraft (somewhere around 16mill, in the case of Dan's 24 bit implementation). Catch is, you can still only use 16 unique colours at a time - as that's the size of the palette.

Back in the day, animations were often produced by drawing a static image, and then simply changing the palette stored in the display card's memory. By cycling the colours that certain indexes referred to, you could, for example, produce a simple series of waves going across an ocean surface, without actually having to directly request that new pixels on the screen be drawn.

[apemanzilla]

I was looking at this tweet by Dan again, and I noticed a few things:

• File extensions! Programs end in .lua, the palette ends in .pal, and...
  
• Zip archives! (.zip file visible in the screencap) I'm guessing that this means that he has implemented a way for us to use zip archives, which will be pretty neat!
  
• Revamped editor - the default "edit" program has a new UI and also seems to be able to edit palette files instead of just text now.
  
• boot.lua - new on-startup script?
  
• foo.image and alan.image - extensions for paint files? Or maybe a new format entirely?

Edit: Forgot these

• Improved multishell - edit program shows filename instead of "edit" in taskbar, an "X" button in the top right corner...
  
• Low-resolution, non standard mouse pointer, that looks like it's part of the system running in the video. Evidence that it's a separate project from CC?
  
• File named "google", without an extension. Not sure what it could be, maybe a dump of an http request? Possible testing of a better HTTP API?

Edited by apemanzilla, 09 October 2015 - 09:19 PM.

[Bomb Bloke]

apemanzilla, on 09 October 2015 - 09:11 PM, said:

Zip archives! (.zip file visible in the screencap) I'm guessing that this means that he has implemented a way for us to use zip archives, which will be pretty neat!

We can do that now (eg, ElvishJerricco implemented this module into GrinGet).

[apemanzilla]

Should have specified - the image contains hero (folder) and hero.zip (file) - I believe that he may have implemented a way to create and compress archives, which IIRC no one has been able to do yet because of the intensity of the currently used compression methods.