Feature-creep

Okay, so version 1.0 is slowly taking shape. Here's a few snippets of the smaller parts that are being worked on in between a lot of the "big stuff".

Firstly, there's a couple of things that I've put in there for my own use. For instance, there's screenshot code now, although probably the only person that will use that is myself. It's BMP-only (converting to PNG using libpng just looks way too complex to bother with) and I use it to verify the drawing is correct, to build the new animated GIF's for advertising the game and things like that. Unfortunately, because it needs to be able to activate at any time, this is one of those features that can't be slowly moved into the menus like almost every other new feature and requires a dedicated key. I've put it on Stick-Click for now because most people never press it (and it doesn't even exist on later versions of the GP2X), so it won't get in people's way.

It highlights a big problem that I have - the GP2X doesn't have enough keys! Unbelievable, I know! Excluding the basic up-down-left-right (whether as a "mouse" or "cursor keys") that are common to all the games, and the key-combinations I have for "safety" (e.g. L+R to quit back to the menu etc.) the "keys" required after moving almost everything into the Pause menu are:

Left-click (required in every game)
Right-click (required in a lot of games and sometimes essential to completion / player comfort)
Middle-click (only used in a handful of the games, and not essential to puzzle completion, but convenient)
Pause / Enter Menu
Decrease Digit
Increase Digit (the only way I could make unequal, solo, filling, etc. playable without a keyboard, but still not perfect).
Enter Digit
Undo
Redo

And the buttons I have are: A, B, X, Y, L, R, Select, Start. 8 buttons for 9 functions. So before release I'll be re-jigging all the keys. I don't want to move Undo/Redo into the menus but it's an option. I also don't want to shift a common key into a "combination" (e.g. at the moment I have L+VolDown for Undo and L+VolUp for Redo). I'd also like a key to switch between input systems eventually, so that for some games where it makes more sense to use a "cursor-control" system instead of a mouse-emulation one (such as fifteen and sokoban), the user can change between them at the press of a button.

Some "hidden" combinations need to be present to. Because the user can save their favourite configuration for each game as a preset, and that preset loads by default whenever they start that game, there needs to be a way to cope with two scenarios: The config save file gets corrupted, the config describes a game which takes an inordinately long time to generate. Imagine accidentally saving a config for Net, for example, that takes an hour to generate a game. You'd have to leave your GP2X on for all that time before you'd be able to change the options and play Net normally again. In fact, the easy solution is a little hidden feature - press L or R when loading a game from the main menu and it will completely ignore your preset. You can then get into the game ultra-quickly, change the options and re-save your preset if you need to.

At the moment, the options in the Pause menu are so numerous that they are now sub-categorised:

New Game
Restart Game
Solve Game
Configure Game
- View Presets
- Load "My Preset"
- {Load Preset X}
- {Configuration Option X}
- Save As "My Preset"
Help
- General help (Keys, etc.)
- {Game X} Instructions
- {Game X} Tips and Tricks
Global Options
- Music
- Track List
- Volume (including On/Off)
- Auto-Save Game on Exit
- Screenshots
- Include cursor in screenshot.
- Include status text in screenshot.
Credits & Licenses
- Puzzle Collection
- Third-party Games
- GP2X Port
- Music
Quit to Main Menu (the list of games).

I have decided on the background music I want and got permission of the artist - by strange coincidence, they own a GP2X so they'll be able to play the game with their own music. I've gone for some plinky-plonky ambient music - gentle, relaxing, simple. I'll also retain the ability for the users to replace or remove the music if they so wish - it'll just be 10 OGG files in a music folder. If they aren't there, nothing plays. If they are, they appear on a track list that the user can edit - so even if they don't like my choices, they can choose their favourite tracks to play while they puzzle. And, of course, there's the all important "Music Off" option.

General Updates:

The main menu shows the revision of STPPC that they are based on. This is so that people can see how old the collection is and whether it needs updating to support feature X of a certain game, or indeed any new games that come about. (There's a new, much more configurable, version of Loopy in SVN and it's already in my private version of 1.0 and working perfectly.)

The main menu is now complete and allows loading any of the 30 fully-working games (yes, 30, because Mines works now). It lets you go into and come out of the games as many time as you like without quitting back to the menu and is super-fast. I tried it on my GP2X for a laugh and after 200 entries and exits from particular games without quitting back to the main menu, I was suitably satisifed that I wasn't leaking too much RAM or risking a crash by playing that many games - this test included music, games with saved presets, full games, partial games, games with timers, loading/saving games, etc. A fairly accurate measurement of memory usage says that (with music off) the games rarely go about 5Mb of allocated RAM in their default configurations, although obviously most of them can be allowed to grow to silly sizes if you play with their config options. Without going too mad, I was able to generate "virtually impossible to solve within the GP2X's battery life" puzzles in all the games and didn't once get an out-of-memory error or crash. Although some of them nearly took forever to generate puzzles of that size!

Music works but may stutter on very difficult puzzle generation. There's not much I can do about this without increasing the size of the sound buffer - at the moment puzzle generation is an inherently single-threaded process and it tends to swamp the CPU and all other threads running. When interruptible generation is implemented (a BIG task), then it will hopefully solve itself because in the same place that I put code to check if the user wants to stop, I can refresh the music buffer.

I also know that Blackbox has a configuration option that can take values of the form "4-10" meaning "anything from 4 to 10". That's totally impossible to enter in the options menu in the current state (although you can happily use a Preset or hand-edited config file to play it!), but I may well hack on the Blackbox code to convert this to two configuration options: Min and Max. If you set them to the same number N, it's the same as just "N" in the config box, and if you set them to, say, X and Y respectively, it's the same as entering "X-Y" in the config box. I'll also be on the lookout for other similar options that allow such things.

Config-options are one of those things that are really finicky to convert to a non-keyboard device because they are expecting textual input all the time - the current GP2X code has always had a special "Kludge" switch that allows entry of floating-point numbers in, for example, "Barrier Probability" in net because otherwise you'd only have barriers everywhere or none at all. At the moment, such options are hard-coded in the GP2X code but I'm trying to find a nice way for the puzzles to support telling the so-called "frontend" whether a configuration option should be floating-point or not. It looks like I might have Simon Tatham's ear on that particular issue, however.

There's been a massive reorganisation of the files that the program uses. The folder structure is currently similar to:

Configurations/ (holds the game-specific INI files)
Documentation/ (holds various information about the collection such as licenses etc.)
Help/ (holds the various help textfiles)
Images/ (holds splashscreens and "game previews" that show in the menu)
Images/Screenshots/ (holds any generated .BMP screenshots)
Music/ (hold, erm, the music?)
Saves/ (holds all the savegames)
STPPC2x.gpe

So hopefully, there will be no more hundreds-of-files-in-one-folder and even the above folders should be as empty as they can be.

Finally (for this update at least), I'm looking at making a new game to go into the collection. It won't make it into the official collection, I'm sure, but I'm looking at the possibility of a simple overhead 2D maze game - I have some code that I can use for various "types" of mazes and solvers for them and I'm hoping they'll translate well to the small screen of the GP2X. That will be probably be a post-1.0 thing, though, because believe it or not, programming for that side of the collection is new to me!