That demo was in Ndless, right? That was cool, but IIRC by then the GBC emulator had come out and people didn't seem to take on large RPGs or something.
I tested your "coyote demo" uploaded on TI-planet, did you made a topic for it ?
Damn that's some really old stuff (the tile map game engine thing, renamed it to Owl later). I think I had a thread here before yeah, but nobody seemed to care and I couldn't bear the responsibility of maintenance (or something) so I just deleted everything (I think I have a backup somewhere though).
Hoffa are you (still) in Australia? How's life over there? Lotsa chicks? Me too, i would like see that live-dead thread resurrected.
Time flies and I'm now in the UK doing a BSc in Computer Science. It's soon been a year, but yeah Australia was pretty cool, met and traveled with a whole bunch of interesting people (and girls), camped like a hobo everywhere, did all sorts of work and it pretty much changed the direction of my life with the whole Koreans and Korea episode (long story short found myself in Korean flat in Melbourne, had an awesome experience, made good friends and met my Korean ex, started learning the language #YOLO, made lots of Korean friends at university in the UK, visited Korea in Easter and going back in summer for 3 months to Yonsei University to study and a month to work. Have been studying the language for 6 months now and will do my graduate studies there, if not more)
I've left all calculator-related stuff behind for a while now, but seeing that there's consistently some amount of activity going on with nSDL I might blow off the dust of my Windows laptop and release an update and refresh some things a bit.
However porting SDL 2 would take quite some time and the benefits of it aren't massive as far as the TI-Nspire is concerned.
Anyway yeah if you have some suggestions for any additions to the next update, do tell and I'll think about it. Stuff on GitHub and not in nSDL 1.1.1 (have been fermenting there for 10 months ) are faster text drawing and an NSDL_DISPLAY_BPP macro (that represents the calculator's display bit depth). I'll possibly add 24-bit support for nSDL_GetPixel and make nSDL_LoadImage automatically optimize the surface for the display bit depth. I should probably also go through Lepunzlag's nSDL_CustomFonts and see if and how integration would happen.
I tested your "coyote demo" uploaded on TI-planet, did you made a topic for it ?
Damn that's some really old stuff (the tile map game engine thing, renamed it to Owl later). I think I had a thread here before yeah, but nobody seemed to care and I couldn't bear the responsibility of maintenance (or something) so I just deleted everything (I think I have a backup somewhere though).
That's weird; has apparently been working fine for others and me.
Does the function return 0? What's the exact code you're using? Not just a problem with colors that are converted into 4-bit format and happen to have same value?
Returns the pixel's color at (x, y). Assumes the surface has been locked. Does no clipping. Supports 8-, 16- and 32-bit surfaces.
I intentionally did not want to support 24-bit surfaces as they require a few extra operations, and I wanted to keep the pixel manipulation functions as fast as possible.
I just looked at the pixel manipulation code in nSDL, and apparently it should call SDL_Unsupported(), which I think IIRC calls SDL_SetError(). Did you try doing SDL_GetError() after the pixel thing?
Also you shouldn't be handling 24-bit images in speed critical code, as neither of the machines use that as their native display bit depth. You'll lose a lot of performance if you start blitting 24-bit stuff on 16-bit surfaces etc. as the conversion is done on the fly. Convert the surface as you load them.
I wish I could do that kind of traveling, how was Australia? I hope the spark returns someday, but for now it seems your future is great and I wish you the best of luck with your study and other things
Why couldn't you do that kind of traveling? What's stopping you? If it's really what you'd like to do, then work towards it, get the money, make the plans, most issues and obstacles can be dealt with, and usually the biggest obstacle is yourself. Don't just wait and regret it as time passes. The most difficult part is actually making a concrete step from the planning stage; you'll probably start questioning yourself, wondering if it's a good idea after all, stretching any tiny risk into a massive problem and overthinking everything, but that's entirely normal, that's how it feels to get out of the comfort zone. Even I felt a mix of excitement and fear when I went there as I literally went with a backpack, some cash and no plans whatsoever and I was afraid I'd be alone the whole trip. But it turned out to be one of the best decisions I could make. Met some many people and made long-term friends, experienced so many things (travelling around in a campervan, hitchhiking, sleeping on Bondi beach, learning to play harmonica, freezing my ass off in a single-layer $14 tent while it poured 8 hours, having a massive huntsman spider next to me while I was taking a dump, smoking some synthetic "spices" and being in low-earth orbit in the middle of Sydney during the night, picking apples for 6 hours and getting $30, stopping at some beautiful isolated place with a pond and a whole bunch of kangaroos, etc.).
I know this is a bit off topic, but is there any reason in particular you are considering Korea? Also, life> than calculators.
Well I've traveled relatively much and I got some kind of thirst for cultural shock. I was already interested in Korea during high school (not because of K-pop thank God) because of quite a few things (history, culture, very varied and some absolutely gorgeous landscapes, cheap booze, weird food and customs, issues with batshit insane North, weather, etc.) and was planning to go there after Australia, but 6 months wasn't enough. Down under I met a lot of Koreans while doing fruit picking, and I lived for 2 months in Melbourne with 7 Koreans (one of them even became my girlfriend until I left). I had a very positive experience with them and it just boosted my will to go there even more (plus the food they made was really good, I'm a big fan of spicy food and meat; kimchi is godlike). I've always had a desire to do somewhat "extreme" things and to do stuff the massive majority wouldn't do, Korea is still relatively uncharted territory for foreigners (compared to Japan for example). I'm also going to study Computer Science (and will take Korean courses in university), and Korea is a booming economy where IT plays a huge role and opportunities are many. I decided that if I want to do something maybe a bit crazy during my life, I better start early and I better start right away; it's a big investment. I'm going in April to Korea for a few weeks and already had offers from pretty much all of my friends to give me a bed and show me around; it's a good start.
hoffa, just to let you know, although this probably won't make you change your mind: I have been circumventing protections, patching, hacking, reversing, extending the TI-89, 92+, Voyage 200, TI-Nspire Clickpad and CX since 1997. Things were a bit more easy on the TI-68k but the page always was often rather white at the beginning and TI has never been cooperative.
I have had hundred reasons for quitting during these 16 years... but I'm still here, not as productive as I would like to be, not doing things always right, releasing things much less used that I'd like, or missing expectations. But the Ndless download stats and the kind words I sometimes receive from people around the world remind me I have at least been able to contribute to change things a little bit in a good way. And to take pleasure anyway.
I understand, and you have all of my most genuine respect and gratitude for all the things you've done. As SpiroH said, I might get that small sparkle of motivation some time in the future for old time's sake, but for the time being I got my mind on other things and I'm too busy doing other stuff (if anyone cares, working, making as much money as I can before university, doing my iOS app, also I've been studying Korean for 3 months now and hoping to do my graduate studies in Seoul).
By being demotivated and retiring from the TI-Nspire development community, don't you think that you're doing exactly what TI wanted?
And TI probably doesn't think they're losing anything like that, as they have many teachers to create TI-Nspire content.
Maybe, but I have to be honest, I don't feel like I'm "fighting" for anything, nor do I really feel like I want to. I just like the TI-Nspire system somewhat and it's fun hacking it (well it was at least in high school), but now to me it's just more like a responsibility to "finish" what I started. Calculators are pretty much irrelevant to my life post-high school anyway and my interest is slowly fading away. TI's a dick, oh well. It's not something I bother to invest my time in once the whole show reaches a certain point, and it isn't something so close to my heart that I feel like using more energy to punch back.
It uses an unreleased version of nSDL however (with shitty mouse support).
In other news, that TI downgrade block thing is really a turnoff. If I can finish one last version of nSDL that's good, but I think I'll retire from the TI-Nspire community after that (going to university, got a lot of things to look forward to, plus I've been getting into iOS development). I've been here long enough to see that not many people are that involved with the TI-Nspire (even I just look at projects' screenshots, think to myself "cool" and then switch tabs) and I could invest the time in some better stuff. I've been wanting to quit for some time already, but I hate leaving projects in the cold.
Would it be possible to somehow control the TI-Nspire's native cursor through Ndless? I don't know if it's because of some new changes in Ndless or not, but now I can see the animated clock desperetaly trying to draw itself on the screen, and it moves as I move my finger on the touchpad. That means there is some master thread running and taking care of the mouse, it would be much better if I could get access to that. I guess functions to read the coordinates and force the cursor to draw itself would be extremely welcome.
While SDL2 is a much more modern GPU-based API, it wouldn't benefit the TI-Nspire that much. There are some new useful functions and the whole library is cleaner but apart from that at the moment it's too much work (or not that much work at all, depends, haven't looked at it) and not many open source projects have been made using it, so the return on investment is so-so. I still need to update the current nSDL (I'm waiting for that tiny drop of motivation to form so I can finish it) before I can even think of the next version.
On another topic, talking about web hosting, what should differ from the existing if there is no PC-side client ? I mean what will be the differences between TI-Planet hosting and the pretty concept posted earlier ?
Hmm.. the computer side is to have a unified repo-browsing and transferring experience that also makes the whole package-with-metadata thing easier (not made by hand by the user). Concerning TI-Planet, since we'd already talked about having some API to get archive-info and whatnot (-in JSON, I believe, but that's not much the point), this would be the chance to get it done for a good/well-defined purpose.
And, the two things above are the exact same thing, just with a different layout. We would need a native client, which also handles transferring the files (libticalcs + Qt?).
I'd very much like to insist that to get as many people attracted to this project as possible, something without any external install would be better, and thus it's why I'd be thinking of a Java program which : - if running on Linux, uses libti* - if Mac or Windows, detect if TINC[L]S is installed, then use navnet, otherwise fallback on libti* if installed. On both cases, if no transfer "driver" is detected (unlikely...), well, tell the user to get either one. (But the rest of the program could still work)
You really think that would make people want to use it? Most people pretty much never hook up their calculator to their computer, it's hacky, requires to download tools and has minimal benefits (compared to the work required to implement it nicely). [rant]Plus, who uses a joke like Java anyway?[/rant]
I used to send my buddies games just by cable during classes (oh boy the hours spent during mathematics class playing Pokemon), and that's up to where the majority of people bother to go just to put some stuff on a calculator (and with the package manager at the very most two files would be required to be sent, one if it was integrated into ndless)
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