LightWave conversion is easy with Blender, so I should be able to import my own 3D objects. Is there a specific convertor for this as well?
My guess is probably not, unless Baggers has something else that can do this. I would think that if you have an understanding of how Blender stores it's data, you might be able to write a "quick and dirty" conversion program. I haven't looked at the formats that Blender supports. My personal experience has been more along the lines of raycasting (Wolfenstein-style), and not full 3D modeling. I coiuld try to figure it out though
Sooner or later this thread will be churned under by the onslaught of daily Propeller goodness.
Trodoss and I have been maintaining a more "Gaming Specific" forum at Savagecircuits since the close of the Hydra/Gaming Forums. The "churn" rate of that forum is quit a bit slower allowing for easy conversation on these types of topics. (Not to draw folks away from this forum, but if you are excited about PropGFX, you may want to add it to you visit list.)
Thank you very much for releasing this Lite version of PropGFX.
I have only one ProtoBoard, so I just tried it with some wires to a QuickStart Board as master. Works fine
I found it a bit complicated to program the 64kB binary into the PropGFX board, so I made the attached 2 Spin files. These writes the binary in two parts to the EEPROM. The binary data is included in the DAT section. You only need to press F10, wait 20 seconds and the EEPROM is written with one half of the data.
Thank you very much for releasing this Lite version of PropGFX.
I have only one ProtoBoard, so I just tried it with some wires to a QuickStart Board as master. Works fine
I found it a bit complicated to program the 64kB binary into the PropGFX board, so I made the attached 2 Spin files. These writes the binary in two parts to the EEPROM. The binary data is included in the DAT section. You only need to press F10, wait 20 seconds and the EEPROM is written with one half of the data.
.... would you mind if I put it up as an alternative on PropGFX web site?
Coley
I would be proud if you do that ;-)
Feel free to change the initial description text to anything you want It is your code and the text should reflect your ideas of copyright, license and credits.
How would you do 3D any other way? I assumed that the only way to do it (or at least the most efficient!) was through a modeling system.
Sure, a modeling system would be the most efficient I think as long as you know how the data is being stored it would be a matter of conversion. Baggers may come up with a 3D exporter though.
@All,
Also, I thought I might mention the Parallax Semiconductor App Note 003 (http://www.parallaxsemiconductor.com/an003). It describes the use of Spin-based structures if you are finding yourselves lost in some of the examples.
@Baggers: OK, thanks!
I have some questions, though, concerning some of the Graphics and sprite functions of the engine. Specifically, what would I need to do to:
- Draw a simple line?
- Make a simple polygon?
- Display a sprite?
- Display a full screen bitmap?
- Move a sprite?
Thanks!
Microcontrolled, I'll make a demo for you that shows all these
I've build an ad-hoc setup for PropGfx, here posting some pics:
I sort of figured out how to draw shapes, but still not how to deal with colors.
If you take the time to make a specific demo it will still be greatly appreciated.
some added commands, mostly borrowing and hammering stuff from the PGFX demos:
MODE n 0=text, 1=bitmap
CLS clear the screen (text or graphics)
PLOT x,y plot one pixel at specified x,y coordinates
LINE x,y draw a line from previous command's coords to specified x,y
CIRCLE r draw a circle with radius r (xy center coords from last command)
SIN x return the value of sin from ROM table (x in radians, 16.16 fixed point)
Notes:
- The precompiled binary has the SD card @ P12..P15.
- No color support.
- Returning from gfx to text mode will thrash (sp?) text attributes.
Cool, you've done a very good job, mapping many functionalities.
This is nice for doing tests in place, using basic, without the recompilation and reload phase.
Seems we're approaching the point where the upper half of the eeprom in the application board must be used, I had to disable some stuff to try out new tokens. The font is the first candidate to be transferred there (but for the spectrum font I'm sure there must be a way to restore it from PropGFX eeprom).
(whisper) pssst... nice idea the c64 font, now maybe a blue background and cyan text and border are going to disturb bagger's ahestetic sense... to the point that he will not resist to increase the clock and number of columns (/whisper)
I can't take full credit here.. Baggers was the initial genius behind this a couple years ago when this was in beta.
I just went digging through the archives and started bending the code a bit. Stumped at getting it to display a bitmap or sprites though. I think my fault lies with my understanding of bmp8tolite.exe now.
I've build an ad-hoc setup for PropGfx, here posting some pics:
I sort of figured out how to draw shapes, but still not how to deal with colors.
If you take the time to make a specific demo it will still be greatly appreciated.
Alessandro
Hey Alessandro, this looks great.
Did you know that Baggers has already done a Femtobasic port and wrote a simple Mario Bros level.
It may be worth waiting for him to release that version, I spoke with him last night and he was going to look at making it work with this binary release.
I'll post the pre-processing code when I get home. Most of it could possibly be added to a program like bmp8tolite though there is one bit of code that uses vb.net to do a high quality resampling picture size transform.
Have run into a speed problem reading data off the sd card so for the moment this might limit things as we push the envelope further.
@Baggers, how did you manage to squeeze that 256x96 demo in to such a small code space?!
I will NOT post much as it is others thread.
BUT -- I can't see any decoupling capacitor around Propeller. Other thing -- Traces to XTal are placed very badly.
Brainstorming audio and movies (which I think is a slightly different topic to OBCs) - if the 256x92 video driver is running at maybe 7 frames a second, that is 24kx7 that is 170k a second. Not sure if the sd card can go faster than that, but assuming it can't, we could add in 8 bit audio, maybe 10,000 samples a second = an extra 1400 bytes per frame. You could accept a fractionally slower movie, or maybe leave out the odd frame here and there so the average speed is correct.
Comments
How would you do 3D any other way? I assumed that the only way to do it (or at least the most efficient!) was through a modeling system.
Trodoss, thanks for posting the link and the info help
Thanks++ I'll check this out when I get home.
@trodoss - at some stage we could think about adding the Floyd-Steinberg to the bmp8tolite program, both using the VGA and also the TV palette.
The .tv file is giraffe256.zip - I had to make it a zip to be able to upload it to the forum.
No movie file as yet but I can make one if you want.
OBC
Sooner or later this thread will be churned under by the onslaught of daily Propeller goodness.
Trodoss and I have been maintaining a more "Gaming Specific" forum at Savagecircuits since the close of the Hydra/Gaming Forums. The "churn" rate of that forum is quit a bit slower allowing for easy conversation on these types of topics. (Not to draw folks away from this forum, but if you are excited about PropGFX, you may want to add it to you visit list.)
http://www.savagecircuits.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?29-Propeller-Powered
Also, a list of tools has been kept handy which may come in handy for those in this thread.
http://www.savagecircuits.com/forums/showthread.php?547-FAQ-Game-Creation-Resources-for-the-Propeller
Thank you very much for releasing this Lite version of PropGFX.
I have only one ProtoBoard, so I just tried it with some wires to a QuickStart Board as master. Works fine
I found it a bit complicated to program the 64kB binary into the PropGFX board, so I made the attached 2 Spin files. These writes the binary in two parts to the EEPROM. The binary data is included in the DAT section. You only need to press F10, wait 20 seconds and the EEPROM is written with one half of the data.
cheers
Andy
Your .spin loader is really great, thank you.
It is much easier than using HAM, would you mind if I put it up as an alternative on PropGFX web site?
Kind regards,
Coley
@Andy
Awesome tool! Thanks for doing this!
OBC
I would be proud if you do that ;-)
Feel free to change the initial description text to anything you want It is your code and the text should reflect your ideas of copyright, license and credits.
Andy
@All,
Also, I thought I might mention the Parallax Semiconductor App Note 003 (http://www.parallaxsemiconductor.com/an003). It describes the use of Spin-based structures if you are finding yourselves lost in some of the examples.
Microcontrolled, I'll make a demo for you that shows all these
Thanks goes to trodoss for the inspiration and to Ariba for his brilliantly simple loader.
Regards,
Coley
That'll help me greatly too! Thanks Baggers!
OBC
Many thanks for sharing this!
I've build an ad-hoc setup for PropGfx, here posting some pics:
I sort of figured out how to draw shapes, but still not how to deal with colors.
If you take the time to make a specific demo it will still be greatly appreciated.
Alessandro
some added commands, mostly borrowing and hammering stuff from the PGFX demos:
Notes:
- The precompiled binary has the SD card @ P12..P15.
- No color support.
- Returning from gfx to text mode will thrash (sp?) text attributes.
Alessandro
I've been working on this today as well.. I'm coming toward your work from the opposite direction. I've got text (.C64 fonts) working so far.
http://www.savagecircuits.com/forums/showthread.php?715-PropGFX-lite-demo-released-on-Parallax-forums-(re-titled)&p=5638#post5638
OBC
Cool, you've done a very good job, mapping many functionalities.
This is nice for doing tests in place, using basic, without the recompilation and reload phase.
Seems we're approaching the point where the upper half of the eeprom in the application board must be used, I had to disable some stuff to try out new tokens. The font is the first candidate to be transferred there (but for the spectrum font I'm sure there must be a way to restore it from PropGFX eeprom).
(whisper) pssst... nice idea the c64 font, now maybe a blue background and cyan text and border are going to disturb bagger's ahestetic sense... to the point that he will not resist to increase the clock and number of columns (/whisper)
I just went digging through the archives and started bending the code a bit. Stumped at getting it to display a bitmap or sprites though. I think my fault lies with my understanding of bmp8tolite.exe now.
OBC
just hold your breath a bit longer we are working on bmp8tolite tutorials right now
Coley
Hey Alessandro, this looks great.
Did you know that Baggers has already done a Femtobasic port and wrote a simple Mario Bros level.
It may be worth waiting for him to release that version, I spoke with him last night and he was going to look at making it work with this binary release.
Coley
I'll post the pre-processing code when I get home. Most of it could possibly be added to a program like bmp8tolite though there is one bit of code that uses vb.net to do a high quality resampling picture size transform.
Have run into a speed problem reading data off the sd card so for the moment this might limit things as we push the envelope further.
@Baggers, how did you manage to squeeze that 256x96 demo in to such a small code space?!
--trodoss
I will NOT post much as it is others thread.
BUT -- I can't see any decoupling capacitor around Propeller. Other thing -- Traces to XTal are placed very badly.
Coley: Sorry for posting NOT on topic.
Any chance we can get you guys and Ahle2 to collaborate on a combined video/audio binary? Now, that would be awesome!
OBC
Brainstorming audio and movies (which I think is a slightly different topic to OBCs) - if the 256x92 video driver is running at maybe 7 frames a second, that is 24kx7 that is 170k a second. Not sure if the sd card can go faster than that, but assuming it can't, we could add in 8 bit audio, maybe 10,000 samples a second = an extra 1400 bytes per frame. You could accept a fractionally slower movie, or maybe leave out the odd frame here and there so the average speed is correct.