Hello, all. Jetrel and I were talking a few days ago, and... long story short, I've made a demo!

Mac Build: OPP-0.2.0.app_7_30_13.zip
Windows Build: anura-opp-0.2.0-20130713-win32.zip (Requires vcredist to run.)
Changelog



We're doing this in Anura, which was the engine we developed to run Frogatto.  We should probably explain a bit about it; I apologize for this sounding a tad like a marketing pitch:
    
Anura's a fairly modern engine with full hardware acceleration.  It runs on darned near everything (almost any computers or mobiles), and we've now had at least 6 fully-functional games written in it (at least 2 of which are completely finished).  The important thing is how flexible it is; some of these games are radically different genres - Cube Trains is an iso-3d block-based building game; Frogatto is a side-scrolling platformer.  Both of these worked with no code changes to the engine - all you have to do is edit script files, and you can make a completely different game.
    
A big thing which matters here is that the engine has a bunch of pixel-art specific features in it; we wanted to be able to do a lot of the typical pixel-art tricks you're familiar with from classic games (and emulator features like HQ2x); many of them are implemented in a radically different way, but overall they "emulate" the feel of many scanline effects from classic 16-bit games (parallax, distortion, palette-changes, etc).

I've only added a few things to the game so far, but I've collected the images I could find in the forums and the wiki. I'm sure I've missed stuff or got an old version of something, but if you let me know we'll get it in ASAP!

On to the technical dirt.

If you've downloaded the release from above, you'll find all the images in ~/modules/open_pixel_platformer/images. (Where "~" means "wherever you installed the program".) I haven't organized them very well, so if someone would care to have an organize at them that'd be great! (If you move images around, it would be nice if you could update the paths in the .cfg files by searching for the image file name in ~/modules/open_pixel_platformer/data.) Anyway, how do we want to organize the files? Oh, also, I have no idea who the authors for the works of art are atm, so if you could speak up for posterity that would be great. We'll get everything sorted in the end, but this would make it much easier. I'd like to eventually have a .txt file in each directory specifying exactly which pieces of art were by who.

Image Format and Specifications:
The Anura Engine reads .png images with full alpha channel support. In addition, it has two "magic transparent colours" available, a tan (#6f6d51) for backgrounds and a red (#f9303d) for outlining frames.  If you make any pixel exactly one of those colours, it will be treated as completely transparent.  We give you the option of either approach; both  have their own upsides and downsides, and we ourselves use both in different parts of Frogatto

There aren't many limits on sprite size; spritesheet images must be an even number of pixels wide, and be less than 1024px².  The size of an individual sprite inside such an image, has almost no limits - they absolutely do not need to be a power of two (eg, 64px², 256px², etc).  Spritesheets have a lot of flexibility for organization; individual animations can be laid out horizontally, or vertically, running forwards or backwards (or both).  Animations that are too long to fit in one row can even wrap, like words in a book (though they must have rows of equal length).  Animations must have all frames be the same size, and the same duration; we can chain animations together (i.e. starting a second animation whenever a first one is finished), and this takes care of all cases where we've needed an unusual frame duration, or needed some frames to be bigger than normal.  We have a simple key-point system to make sure animations of differing size line up correctly when switching between them.

If you open the built-in editor with ctrl-e, images will live-reload when you save the file in your editor. This makes it much quicker to see if the animation is "working". You don't have to restart the game and go hunting for the right situation where you can see the animation.

Tiles should be 32x32 pixels across, and the total sheet size should probably not exceed 1024 pixels. It won't run on the iPhone if it is too big.

Code format and specifications:
It's all text files. It's all scriptable. The entire game is completely customizable with nothing but notepad.
And it'll do this neat "live reloading" thing while you do so, so you don't have to keep exiting and restarting the game to test your scripts. The documentation for the languages is up on the Frogatto wiki on github. If you have a question, just leave it on the Frogatto forum or ask us live on IRC. (We're #frogatto on freenode.net. URL: irc://chat.freenode.net/frogatto) We like to help people! It's kind of flattering for us, as creators.

Anyway, I guess the question is – what do people think of the engine? Should we go ahead and make a game?


Edited by DDR - 31 July 2013 at 8:21pm

Doesn't work for me as well: Library not loaded: /usr/lib/ibc++..dylib

I'm on Snow Leopard


Best regards from
M.E.

Hmm. There is a possibility I can run it because I've tried to compile Anuro from sources recently and thus have all the dynlibs installed.

The tar.gz has symbolic linked files in them without the link-source: -> Versions/Current/Resources

So still can't run the demo !

Best regards
M.E.

Windows: MSVCR110.dll is missing

It works, and it is awesome! :D
Thank you so much!
Best of it, the editor is super easy to access and allows everyone to make changes on the go, whether you are going to script or not!

I will soon take action (2 weeks) to write all contributing artists personally about our plans to get this into a real game and this project will get back into running!!!


Edited by Hapiel - 30 July 2013 at 1:44pm

Unfortunately I can't run the game.
After downloading the redistributables it starts but at level loading it crashes with these details:

Problem Event Name:     BEX
Application Name:     anura.exe
Application Version:     0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp:     51f81b28
Fault Module Name:     StackHash_0a9e
Fault Module Version:     0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp:     00000000
Exception Offset:     00000000
Exception Code:     c0000005
Exception Data:     00000008
OS Version:     6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID:     1033
Additional Information 1:     0a9e
Additional Information 2:     0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3:     0a9e
Additional Information 4:     0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

Best regards from
M.E.

M.E., check the this microsoft page. Scroll down past the official Answer, it's useless. There, anand27apr writes:

right click on my computer
go to properties
click on advanced system settings
under performance, click settings
click the Data Execution Prevention tab, and then click Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select.
click Add, browse to the executable file for the program and add it.

You could, perhaps, also try running it as administrator.


Edited by DDR - 31 July 2013 at 9:30am

Holy freakin' excited... The editor is awesome! I know what I'm doing this evening!

ME: I am also running Windows 7 x64 and it runs flawlessly. Do you have IE10 installed? A few months ago MS pushed out an update for it that has caused a lot of issues, including with the stack hash module. Check and see if KB2670838 is installed, and if so, uninstall it. Also remove IE10, it's absolute garbage. Other than that, I'd try updating your video card drivers.

Edited by Noburo - 31 July 2013 at 11:43am

OK, I've added the cave world to the demo. I think I got it remarkably close to the mockup, too.





Let me know if I've broken the release, please. I'm afraid I don't have the OSs to test them on. Thanks!

DDR, I've tried the latest build and it works great so far. I'm really likeing the room transitions and that the name of the room shows on entering a new room. I'm looking forward to more :).

Edit:
I've removed the image I originally posted. Kinda hijacked the thread.

Edited by Jim16 - 04 August 2013 at 4:41pm

Just wondering, the additional windows executable file we need, is it this one ?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679

Because I'd rather download from an official location, you know, safety precautions.. 

Edited by Anarkhya - 05 August 2013 at 7:27am

Now working fine here on win7 64bits !
I kinda struggled with those redistribuable files until I decide to use the one you uploaded instead of the official one, after a reboot and granted administrator access plus winxp compatibility (dunno which one was strictly required though).

Anyway, big thanks for this tool, really  :)

Yeah - don't worry - the ones DDR or I provide are official. We are the same people who make the official ones. All these are is beta versions of the next version.

The reason we're posting them is that they contain certain things crucial to doing the OPP stuff - they're almost a year newer than the official builds on our site, and we've done colossal engine improvements since then. A few of these were bits of special code we wrote, specifically to support OPP (like allowing 32x32px tiles).

The jungle spritesheets are reorganised, check the gDrive and your email ;).
Anything else needed?

I'm not seeing anything new there... what is the file location?

Hmmm, why is the set also reorganised?
And I guess there must be a way to script that all the mini sets get combined, but stay at the same place?
Also, on the collections you made the tree, water, bridge are still missing, or is it okay for those to be on separate images?
What exactly needs to be on the same image? Every asset used in the same level?

Oh, to answer your other questions:
I could make a script to combine the mini sets, but it would just glue the images together with plenty of padding. I was hoping that the big compo I had could replace the mini-sets. I also exploded the tiles farther apart so we could add in more tiles later without having to move stuff around. I haven't done any implementation yet, so we can still move stuff around and decide how we want to organize everything.

The tree, water, and bridge are all in sets of their own and will be fine. (The water-column is maybe an edge case, but I'll deal with that later.)

OK. We can rebuild the super-padded sets from the expanded sets, too, if we want. Zealous crop on gimp already gets it down to 448x419, and then it's just a little copy/paste to get it even more compact... but, and I say this from a programmer's point of view, there's really no reason to compact the spritesheets at all. Computers are insanely powerful these days.


Edited by DDR - 09 May 2015 at 8:21pm