Sounds and music for chess4uzebox

[martinsustek]

Hi,

I'm developing chess game for uzebox - chess4uzebox (http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Chess4uzebox), and I want to release it with it's own sound effects and music. Are there anybody, who can compose it? What I need is:

sound effects for controls:
- moving cursor around squares of board (some beep on press of button)
- some other beep when cursor cant move there (out of board)
- selecting some square (piece or it's target)
- error move (when that move is not possible)
- computer move (some beep when CPU finishes it's move)

sound effects for game events:
- capture of opponent's piece
- promotion of pawn
- check
- mate (end of game with winner/loser)
- stalemate (draw)

music:
- in menu (maybe only some intro jingle)
- in game (some long loop, but after while, everybody will turn it off)

Anything other than stolen patches from megatris will be good!

[D3thAdd3r]

What kind of flash budget do you have left? Personally I'm very excited about your project, and I think its worth doing to a polished state. I believe, if you have enough flash, you could have several background type songs (avoiding strong melody lines that cause the repetitive feeling) and not be annoying. Maybe a few different board/piece sets, I wouldn't leave any flash wasted especially how easy it is to convert chess graphics. I'll see if I can find any decent music, but definitely need sound fx. Kind of enjoy the sound stuff

[martinsustek]

Now, without sounds, program has 45776 (with megatris patches and music 48336), so nearly 15KB is free to fit 60KB limit.

Adding another graphics pack is good idea, but in-game tileset has over 250 tiles (each combination of board square (black, white, selected), and piece type and color multiplied by 3x3 tile per square - in fact some tiles are reused in multiple pieces), so it's 16KB each.
But if someone could do better graphics, I'll use it instead of my, but must handle this low-tile difficulty (at first I inteded to create 16x16 pixel tiles at mode 4 but it doesnt work), maybe sprites could help keep tile count low, but there is not a mode, which support 32 sprites at once (as I know).

Here is one of my early graphics for 16x16:

[D3thAdd3r]

Aah had assumed 2x2 tile graphics, but see its way too much space to have 2 sets. Perhaps instead of having a separate selected tile for every piece, simply flash quickly between a green tile and the actual piece tile, save about 5.3k bet it would look good too. Just a random thought

[uze6666]

Totally agree with Lee, looks very promising. I also attempted a chess game at one point, but could not find any engine, so it failed miserably.
I'll fiddle a couple sound effects this week to see if I can contribute something to your game.

-Uze

[cosam]

Hi,

Nice to see your chess game coming along! If you like the look of these pieces, let me know and I'll see if I can finish the set. Should be plenty of tiles that can be reused as most of the pieces are of course pretty similar. Might even get away with reusing the centre square regardless of the background colour...

Cheers,

Steve

[uze6666]

Nice to see your chess game coming along! If you like the look of these pieces, let me know and I'll see if I can finish the set. Should be plenty of tiles that can be reused as most of the pieces are of course pretty similar. Might even get away with reusing the centre square regardless of the background colour...

Your enhancements looks awesome Steve, nice anti-anti-aliasing and a the texture added to square is subtle, yet gives a professional touch. This will be a top chess game!

-Uze

[martinsustek]

Hi Steve,

your picture is very nice, definitely better than mine, only problem is, that I use 3x3 matrix of 6x8 pixel tiles, so your square size is too big on width. It could fit, if I remove game log in the right of screen and use 4x3 matrix, but another problem is, that kernel doesnt use square pixels (you can see it on the wiki that mode5 resolution is neither 4:3 nor 16:9). In fact 6x8 tile looks more as square in the emulator, so your pieces will look wider on 4:3 TV than in your graphics editor.

Another problem may be with palette. I don't know if you used Uzebox's palette, which is held somewhere here in forum or on the wiki, but - as Uze said - there is bug that it really doesn't represent correct 3x3x2bit colorspace. It's probably necessary to count voltages produced by D/A resistor converter, to get right ratio of generated RGB signals and their color mapping to TV colors.

If you can handle that technical problems, it will be very nice to use your tiles instead of mine. I'll need all types of pieces on three types of background ("black" and "white" and one for selected square).

[uze6666]

Hi Martin, can you post your current tileset source image? That could certainly help enhancing the graphics, while minimizing the changes to to your code by having things at the same place.

-Uze

[cosam]

your picture is very nice, definitely better than mine, only problem is, that I use 3x3 matrix of 6x8 pixel tiles, so your square size is too big on width. It could fit, if I remove game log in the right of screen and use 4x3 matrix, but another problem is, that kernel doesnt use square pixels (you can see it on the wiki that mode5 resolution is neither 4:3 nor 16:9). In fact 6x8 tile looks more as square in the emulator, so your pieces will look wider on 4:3 TV than in your graphics editor.

Ah, sorry about that. I was doing some mode 3 stuff beforehand so the old brain was kinda stuck in 8x8 too! I should be able to adapt them to 6x8 no problem - good job I didn't do the whole set yet

Another problem may be with palette. I don't know if you used Uzebox's palette, which is held somewhere here in forum or on the wiki, but - as Uze said - there is bug that it really doesn't represent correct 3x3x2bit colorspace. It's probably necessary to count voltages produced by D/A resistor converter, to get right ratio of generated RGB signals and their color mapping to TV colors.

These are made using the palette from the forum so hopefully they'll look OK, even if not exactly as you see them here. My real Uzebox just arrived today so I can always make a quick program to test.

If you can handle that technical problems, it will be very nice to use your tiles instead of mine. I'll need all types of pieces on three types of background ("black" and "white" and one for selected square).

I'll start off with the black/white combos, but I'd seriously consider Lee's suggestion to flash/flicker the selected square with some plain tile. It might look pretty cool like that. If not a "selected" set should be pretty easy to whip up.