Hi everyone!
It’s time for a updated recap about what happened lately 🙂
THE GATE (AMOS Pro)
I’m still working on this game for Amiga, but I’ve to admit that I never thought that it would require so much time to build the game map… planning rooms, items, special devices, enemies, and informations the player get to advance in the story is fascinating but pretty time consuming!
In a post for only patrons I’ll post the game map as soon as I’ve completed it (missing just few rooms).
COMAL (Amiga classic)
I’ve talked about this programming language called COMAL in my previous post, and I also talked about my work to rewrite a proper documentation: well, I’ve finished the huge job of rewriting the main document and I’m revisioning the manual to fix typos and to add internal links to quickly reach related arguments.
I’ve in mind a simple but (hopefully) useful project that I want to develop using COMAL.
It’s a command line utility, similar to the famous Linux ‘man’ command.
I have always had trouble remembering the syntax of AmigaDOS commands, and even though they all contain the basic information for their use, it is often difficult to use them effectively, at least for me, but I bet it’s extremely difficult for beginners too.
What if we had something like ‘man’ instead? For example a new command called ‘help‘ ? It could be used like this:
> help dir
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a manual of all the AmigaDOS commands at hand?
In addition to including all the standard commands there should also be the possibility to allow other developers to add their own commands and related help files, so there will be several parameters to allow this, just to give you an idea, the installer of a new command could use:
> help -add <filename>
Where <filename> is a file containing the help that includes the name of the command, the version, the syntax and the help text.
I would also like to include two modes: short help and extended help:
> help dir
shows a short help of the dir command
> help -f dir
shows an extended help of the dir command
This is what I have in mind, it’s all just on paper for now but I think it could be useful.
SMARTCLOCK (Hollywood)
I’ve resumed this old project of mine featuring a programmable clock with animations and with a very high level of customization, it’s what you can see in the video attached to this post.
The project was born some years ago to build a clock for my Raspberry Pi4 with some nice anime animations running in the background, it quickly growed into something more complete, including a news reader and a weather forecast.
All the clock layouts can be created using plain text files, all resolutions are supported using a global configuration file to allow everyone to use it with any display!
In the above image you can see how a layout configuration file looks like: You see the first item (number 0) as a ’tiles’ element having its ‘offset’ animated to produce a scrolling effect.
To achieve this goal, and to let the clock use big pixels, I’ve coded the rendering part using an internal screen resolution (usually lower than the native one) and the native screen resolution (the resolution used by the device’s screen), a customizable grid can be added on top of the other layers to highlight the pixel effect.
I’m writing the documentation right now, and I’m trying to optimize a bit more the code: I want to try to build a real, physical clock using a Raspberry Pi Zero and a colour display with a 3D printed case, so that I can put it on my desk (and on the desk of interested people!) 😀
Above you can see the beginning of a global configuration file, where the most important part, the screen resolution and the internal resolution, are defined. If you move your eyes at the bottom of the image you can see that a dimmer function is already implement, it’s used to reduce the screen brightness during the nigthly hours.
The current version make use of the SDL plugin to achieve maximum rendering speed.
Here is a list of the elements you can use to build clock layouts:
- Clock
It’s used to print the current time & date using several time formats, you can use a mask to filter the time, for example to only print the hours, the minutes, and so on… - HScroller
It’s used to build an horizontal scrolling text where you can write anything or you can show weather forecast & news. It’s also possible to print the contents of a local/remote text file. - RGBBox
It’s a customizable filled box where you can animate color gradients and use as background. This box also allows to bil single color boxes and it supports the alpha channel for transparencies. - Image
You can put any image in your clock, resize them, move them, etc… - Anim
Want to see your preferred character moving on your clock layout? Well, I like to see these cute animGIFs on my clock! - Tiles
With this element you can use an image to fill an area to use as background, building scrolling background with this element is really easy!
Here are a couple of layouts to let you better understand how a clock layout is built:
Using animGIFs as background can bring life to the clock
The above layout has an image with transparency as background, a very big clock, a new reader in the bottom with an RGBBox as background and two animated GIFs showing King of Fighters characters in their idle stances.
What it’s still missing is a weather box with proper weather icons, right now you can show forecast on the HScroller (text) element, but a box with icons is a must have for a clock of this kind!
… and, ofcourse, it will be also available for Amiga-like systems 🙂
Let me know if someone is interested in a more in-depth explanation about how I coded this clock: it may be interesting for any Hollywood coders around.
Well, I think I’ve said all for now!
Patreon members, stay tuned for “The Gate”‘s map!
Thank you everyone for your support!
