Sounds and music for chess4uzebox

[cosam]

The pieces looks awesome. One minor thing I'm not sure how it will look on a TV, but I'd increase the edge contrast on the white or white pieces as they sort of look like they are faded out.

Thanks! You were right about the contrast - I adapted the outlines of the white on black pieces and white on white looks much clearer now. Here's a screenshot from uzem, and one of the real McCoy (which I can assure you looks much better in person).

uzem.png (11.07 KiB) Viewed 7430 times

chess.jpg (100.08 KiB) Viewed 7430 times

[cosam]

Ran out of attachments in the last post, so here are the tiles. Ignore the purple splodges, they are just there to foil gconvert's duplicate detection.
Also, the hex file of the test program, should anyone like to try it.

[martinsustek]

Wow, it looks awesome!
I'll put it into my source tommorow. And dark background is better than white, I'll change it too.

@Martin: Can your source tiles be a png edited in Photoshop/GIMP instead TileStudio? The latter is a pain to work with.

I'm sorry, I've created it in TileStudio, and yes, it's not the best tool, but I learned how to work with it. I'll try to use gconvert next time.

[cosam]

Wow, it looks awesome!
I'll put it into my source tommorow. And dark background is better than white, I'll change it too.

Glad you like them! The black background was just because it was easy to do. If you have space left, I can whip up a nice dark wood effect of something, maybe even a border for around the moves?

While I was at it, I tried flashing a piece with a bright yellow (ffff00) tile with a vsync in between. Looks a bit rough in the emulator but on the TV it was OK.

[uze6666]

Ignore the purple splodges, they are just there to foil gconvert's duplicate detection.

Hmm, quick question: why would you skip duplicate detection? The source image can easily be just like the next one. The trick is to put the sequence of tile that is known to not have duplicates at the very beginning (i.e. the letters, number, cursors, etc).

3x3 maps for the pieces should be used, much easier to work with in the code and easier to rework the graphics. And it will take less memory too.

-Uze

[cosam]

Hmm, quick question: why would you skip duplicate detection?

Just laziness on my part Instead of drawing the whole lot in GIMP I used Tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/) to make a map. It however doesn't take duplicates into account, so the map was messed up. Just for a quick test, it was easier to change the tiles than the map.

I guess for production you could even just use a whole board as input and define one giant map for initialising the board. If I'd have thought of that earlier I'd have exported the map as PNG from Tiled!

[martinsustek]

why would you skip duplicate detection?

I have tiles organized by ID so position of each piece tile to first tile of given color is the same. So I save only tile "offset" and add "piece color" and "square color". That saves me some space for map for each piece/color combination.
But if Tile Studio and so removes some duplicates (in case of not visible square color, where only same part of piece is visible), it breaks my "tile arithmetics". So I must change some pixels a little to make it different and not duplicite.

This is why disabling duplicite tiles deletion should be useable. It's tile size vs map size problem.

[uze6666]

Aaah, I get it, nice trick!

[cosam]

I have tiles organized by ID so position of each piece tile to first tile of given color is the same. So I save only tile "offset" and add "piece color" and "square color". That saves me some space for map for each piece/color combination.
...
It's tile size vs map size problem.

I'm sure you know what you're doing but don't forget that a 3x3 map is just 11 bytes but a duplicate or unused tile is 48. Depending on how much reuse is possible, it may work out more efficient to use maps. I'll leave it in your capable hands

[martinsustek]

I've build my uzebox today, and saw graphics on real TV for the first time, and it overcame my expectations. It's great!
(I don't have controllers yet, so I've only watched demo)

don't forget that a 3x3 map is just 11 bytes but a duplicate or unused tile is 48

Yes, I reworked it with removed duplicate tiles and created maps, not because of memory (there were less than 5 of them), but because tile studio didn't allowed me to have duplicate tiles (it removed it automatically) and I don't want to hack it by making small modifications to tiles, that should be same (it's ugly).

While I was at it, I tried flashing a piece with a bright yellow (ffff00) tile with a vsync in between. Looks a bit rough in the emulator but on the TV it was OK.

I did the same, but with blue color, because it can be found faster than yellow on that background. It doesn't look as I expected, but nicely correspond with sound after computer move.
I also experimented with only 1px frame around same border as sqare is, but it was harder to see.
In emulator, It's not blinking anyway if I set it to blink each frame (if it's set to 2 frames, it blinks in emulator too). Maybe my computer is too slow, so emulator skips frames.

If you have space left, I can whip up a nice dark wood effect of something, maybe even a border for around the moves?

In fact, there is some space for tiles, but not on screen .