FreeGameDev

Hey guys,

I did some work on again Pink Pony over the last few months. For those of you who don't know: Pink Pony is basically a Tron multiplayer game with ponies instead of lightcycles.

http://code.google.com/p/pink-pony/
https://github.com/ginkgo/pink-pony

I improved the graphics code for the most part. Hardware accelerated particles should now work with Radeons and Mesa3D rendering should be improved. I've also improved the water visuals.
I've finally gotten PP to the point where it is distributed in a few distro repositories. (First and foremost Debian sid&testing)





Now I'm considering what features should be added next. MCMic had some feature requests on Github:
https://github.com/ginkgo/pink-pony/issues/1
https://github.com/ginkgo/pink-pony/issues/2
https://github.com/ginkgo/pink-pony/issues/3

Most of these are graphics-based, but I'd also like to consider some gameplay improvements. The stuff listed at the end of LGDB's Pink Pony entry, which was never implemented might be a good start.

While adding more and more eye candy is of course always nice to have, I would like Pink Pony to keep being playable with semi-old cards. Mesa's OpenGL 2.x support has really improved over the last few years, so the game should work with the open source drivers now.

Do you have any idea for simple things to be added? I would also like to ask if anyone of you is interested in helping me maintain the game. What would be especially helpful would be someone who could help me migrate the game's project page from Google Code to Github.io. Web programming isn't really my forte.
Like mentioned here I could also need some help improving and animating the pony models.

Edit: I would also need help modelling power-up objects if I want to implement those.

Hi again,

I'd be glad to make a website on github for pink pony. Is there any content to be added in addition to what is on google code now? I already have git project access.

I can compile it on arch linux on an eeepc 1000h but it takes a minute to see the first frame and another to see the next.
A video of the performance: http://youtu.be/BSGTJU9esCM

I can also compile on the following desktop machine and performance is better but not too good and there's a bug: camera is in the horse (see video description for hardware specs): http://youtu.be/8wSvYFmsAZY - I hear the foss ATI drivers are expected to be buggy though.

Sound doesn't seem to be working.

As PP is a simple game and has - as far as I can tell - low poly count, it'd be great to have it run on simple hardware at 30-60fps performance. Should I open a ticket? Is there any hope?

Sound effects would be nice to have.

I remember that at some point, hearts happened to be overlapping or too close to each other. If that still can be the case, I'd suggest for a minimum distance to other hearts.

I'd be curious to see whether a limited jumps ability would add to the game but that doesn't seem simple to add at all.

Hi Qubodup, nice to hear from you again.

The eeepc 1000h seems to use an Intel GMA 950 chipset for graphics. That was one of the very earliest Intel GPUs to support programmable shading and is rather limited. My feeling is that the shaders in Pink Pony are too complex for the GMA 950 and Mesa falls back to software rendering.

I made a stripped down version of Pink Pony for Intel GMA way back. It's severely outdated and lacks a lot of the eye candy of the full version but maybe this works on your netbook. If it does we might be able to use it as a starting point to add fall-back graphics to the current version of PP.

The problems with the ATI drivers seem like issues with the skeletal animation shaders. Perhaps we could add a simple keyframe-animation fallback here. That would also be necessary for the Intel fallback anyway. Could you give me the specs for your desktop machine? (I've tried PP with the open source Radeon drivers and my R9 290X(overkill I know) a while ago and fixed some issues with that in version 1.4.1, so that should work)

The overlapping issues with hearts has been fixed in the current Github version.

Yeah, jumping ability seems like an obvious thing to add. The only issue I see is that you would need to assign one extra button per player for jumping.

I've fixed some compile issues in the Intel source tarball.

It would be great if you could set up a web page on Github. Something along the lines of the google code page should be enough, yeah. Some up-to-date screenshots, maybe a video. Maybe some gameplay instructions.

Since the Options menu now uses text, it may be desirable to add translations. I've only ever done something like that with Qt's translation toolkit. Does anyone of you know a simple and commonly distributed library for adding internationalization support to C++ projects?

The intel version brings an immense improvement, although it still is not playable:
http://youtu.be/AywxakXPlOs

FLARE and I believe DNT both use gettext. Perhaps this stackoverflow might help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2185 ... to-gettext

qubodup {l Wrote}:FLARE and I believe DNT both use gettext. Perhaps this stackoverflow might help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2185 ... to-gettext

Regarding gettext:
http://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/p/ma ... edgar.html -> Internationalisation:
Thought, I'd warn you to save time.

We use our own patched version of tinygettext, FYI.

It's good to know about these gettext issues. Weird that those aren't fixed in the mainline GNU lib.

Come to think of it, now that languages with non-Latin alphabets are mentioned: The font I currently use almost certainly supports only Latin letters. The choice of a proper font for the menus has been problematic from the very get go. It has to fit the style of the game, be creative commons and now should also support as many alphabets as possible..

It's a pity that the intel version still has performance issues on the eeepc. I have a small thinkpad with a similar chipset back home in Vienna, but I won't come home until the beginning of march.

ginkgo {l Wrote}:Weird that those aren't fixed in the mainline GNU lib.

According to http://utf8everywhere.org/ it doesn't seem to be trivial on Windows.

I would like to suggest an icon focused interface with angry birds as a reference example ( http://i.imgur.com/AJhI0Iq.jpg ). If you like it, let me know and I'll put making/finding icons on my schedule.

Are you aware that GitHub does not provide file hosting (unless that feature has been revived lately)? Are you planning to continue using google code as package host? Unless there are drawbacks for you in doing so, I would suggest it.

qubodup {l Wrote}:I would like to suggest an icon focused interface with angry birds as a reference example ( http://i.imgur.com/AJhI0Iq.jpg ). If you like it, let me know and I'll put making/finding icons on my schedule.

Using mainly symbolic images instead of language was the main reason why the main screen looks the way it does. I don't think that you can get rid of all language in the settings screen, though. I made the original icons/symbols using wax crayons and rough drawing paper which I then scanned and colorized in Gimp.

qubodup {l Wrote}:Are you aware that GitHub does not provide file hosting (unless that feature has been revived lately)? Are you planning to continue using google code as package host? Unless there are drawbacks for you in doing so, I would suggest it.

Github now supports releases, which are essentially downloadable tarballs for tags: https://github.com/ginkgo/pink-pony/releases
You can also attach binary packages there.

Google Code itself will stop supporting creation of downloads soon. That's the main reason why I'm going to stop using GC. There's just no point maintaining two project pages once I can't release files on google code anymore.

Oh, I had no idea about Google Code's plans.

http://ginkgo.github.io/pink-pony/ is ready. Suggestions welcome.

You could update the links on https://github.com/ginkgo/pink-pony/tree/gh-pages and the google code page. As soon as there are binary downloads on github, we could update the download link to github release pages. (or I can use separate links for source and for latest windows binary).

Inspired by Angry Birds (and many other modern mobile and casual games), I created some buttons and a mockup:


Main changes:
1. Controls are better readable as such by being different from text and the icons having own background and by having unified background are also faster identifiable as one of a kind (button you can press)
2. "back to main menu" button in settings menu is positioned at the same location where the button is that brought you here and not where you could accidentally click the exit button (you'd be surprised how many people double click all and everything)
3. Player/Computer widgets have titles now and their buttons are number-related +/-

There are quite some issues:
1. Text is still hard to read, can perhaps be fixed by adding background.
2. Element groups (text and relevant controls/icons) can easily be perceived as unrelated. Can also perhaps be fixed by adding a common background. For reference, this is related to the HTML fieldset element http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/fo ... hp/3479111
3. Exit and Settings buttons are easily confused by their icon shape.
4. Exit/Settings/Back buttons might need titles as well.
5. While fun (in my humble opinion), the icons signifying 'player-controlled' and 'computer-controlled' might not be clear at all.

The Github homepage looks great! Maybe we could add a logo or header at the top of the page?

The screenshots are quite outdated, I should probably make some new ones. The same is true for the video. Is there any good, easy to use software for capturing OpenGL video for Linux atm? I've heard there's issues with sound recording, but since PP's sound is just the background music looped, we could always just mix that back in later on.

You mentioned on the page that Pink Pony can be played on both Linux and Windows. The thing is that I sorta stopped supporting and releasing Windows builds a while ago. My main focus is to get Pink Pony into the public repositories of the large Linux distros. That's why I only released source packages recently. I guess I should release a Windows build again some time in the future..

The issues you mentioned with the menu screens are all valid. I really like the crayon look of the current stuff, but I can see why this can be confusing.
Maybe we should experiment a bit more with possible styles/layouts. Especially as it's starting to look like we're going to have to get rid of the current font again. The best font option would probably be some standard sans-serif font(because of int'l alphabet support). It's just that this would probably make the menu less whimsical.

Too bad I sorta missed the opportunity to get Joel's on board when he offered his help in 2012.