Category Archives: Proton SDK

Is there one among us who hasn’t fantasized about inventing evil mechanical wonders?

Perhaps a synthetic life form that can navigate to the living room and shoots nerf projectiles at a surprised spouse? Who hasn’t imagined creating an electroluminescent holiday masterpiece (like Phil Hassey did) or dreamed of becoming a kid’s hero for adding humble blinking lights to a birthday cake?

So yeah, I bought a cheapo Arduino set. It was.. ok, I guess. Some pins were bent and the .pdf I found online for it was difficult to understand.. how do I even use all this stuff? But my taste hath been whet and must be satiated so I splurged on the real Arduino starter kit ($100) which is much better for beginner fools like me.

An actual book! It’s worth the extra cost. I did about half the tutorials – made lights blink, switches switch, and a piezo whine annoyingly. No way that Zoetrope was ever going to spin right, did anybody get that working?

For my first real project, I wanted to create a stand-alone monitor for Growtopia that would show me how many users are online, alert me about errors (“SERVER IS DOWN, WAKE UP FOOL!”), and display live sales data with audio. (cha-ching, you made money! Oh, don’t pretend you wouldn’t do (or have done) the same, it’s just for fun. Unless it’s silent, then it’s more depressing than fun really)

It had to be something I could carry to bed or a restaurant and would just work.

Doing something like that is really a challenge with an Arduino. First, to play audio, I ordered the Arduino Wave Shield ($22) and was overly proud when my amateurish soldering actually worked. I can now play 12 bit .wav files, yay.

Have I mentioned I love Adafruit? They don’t just sell you stuff, they also have fantastic tutorials on how to use the thing you just bought – so buy from them!

You know what? This Arduino Uno R3 is very limited. It’s ok at doing one thing – but when you start trying to stack things together you run into limitations very quick. Does the Wifi Shield even work with the Wave Shield? Would any pins be left over for lights? Would the program to do all this fit into 32k? You can forget about decoding mp3 audio unless you add hardware.

Enter the mighty Raspberry Pi

So I set that aside and got a CanaKit Raspberry Pi set ($70 as I write this). Hey, wait a minute, it’s just a cheap, tiny computer! It’s marvelous. It can run linux, and has hardware pins to read/write to electronic things like lights and motors. You don’t need a Wifi Shield or a silly Wave Shield because it plays audio out of the box and you can just plug a USB Wifi dongle in.

First thing I did was write a simple C++ program using gcc from the ssh command line. Next, I set things up so I could write/debug in Visual Studio on Windows, then had a .bat script running in the background to constantly rsync the entire directory to the Raspberry. You can download a neat package of linux-like tools that work with ssh and run on windows here. You’ll probably want to setup SSH keys so you don’t need a password.

On the Raspberry Pi linux side, I setup a .sh file to run cmake and make in a loop for a continuous compile. I feel mean making it work so hard, but whatever.

After compiling and running it in Windows, I just had to glance over at the ssh window to verify it worked under linux as well, or what the compile error was if not.

Don’t underestimate the value of setting up scripts that allow you to be lazy like this. Workflow is everything!

To get GPIO access (read/write the pins to control lights and motors) I used a C++ library I found called Wiring PI. Naturally that part doesn’t work in Windows (could write a fake interface that mimicked it and.. nah), so I #ifdef’ed that part out for Visual Studio.

To play audio I cheated a bit and just ran a system program (called “aplay”) to play .wavs:

In the above pic, it’s working. The red light goes on for a normal Growtopia purchase (Gem’s Bag, etc), the green light flashes for a Tapjoy event. I have a little battery powered speaker connected to the Pi’s headphone jack to play audio for each event as well. The button on the breadboard toggles audio for Tapjoy.

What about portable video?

Audio and blinking lights will only get you so far, this isn’t 1950s scifi. To show the active user count of the game I need a portable screen. The easiest would be a tiny monitor with an HDMI plug (raspberry has that built in), but I didn’t really see anything for sale that was cheap, tiny, and had low battery requirements.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is a tiny two line LCD like this. Nah.. oh hey, the Adafruit PiTFT, a 320X240 screen with touch controls for $35! Perfect.

To get it going I had to install their special linux distribution for it. (they have a whole tutorial thing, it’s not hard)

Unfortunately we have no GLES acceleration. So how do we do C++ graphics without GL? I considered trying to use something like Mesa (I use that on the Growtopia servers to render images, it’s a software GL solution) but.. meh, let’s be old school here.

You just draw bytes directly to the frame buffer, like your grandparents did! I found some great info on framebuffer access and handling touch events on ozzmaker.com.

Actually I guess there might be a version of SDL that will work with this screen (?), but I’d prefer to use my own stuff anyway so I created a “Proton-Pi” lite version of Proton SDK that is modified to work with only SoftSurface instead of Surface (which is GL/GLES only) and only includes a subset of features. I could maybe make a demo app and zip it up if anybody wants it.

It has no audio or Entity stuff. RTFont can now render directly to a 32 bit SoftSurface and then to update the screen you blit to the framebuffer. I think it gets like 15 fps. Would be faster without the slow 32 bit to 16 bit conversion on the final blit… but meh, who cares for this.

So here is the final result. Thanks for the 2.2 cents, kanyakk! You just plug it in to power (I’m using a $20 7800 mAh phone charger pack) and it will run quite a while. (I left it on overnight and the battery reported half charge)

The Linux stuff has been setup with the logon info of my home wifi as well as my iPhone’s hotspot wifi, this way it can be used anywhere, as long as I remember to turn on the hotspot sharing. After boot it automatically starts running the GT monitor program.

I took it to a restaurant, it worked! But I ended up hiding it because when people logged off and the numbers ticked down the whole thing sort of looked like a homemade bomb or something and I didn’t want to creep everyone out more than usual.

Final thoughts

Well, it was fun but .. but alas, the cold hard reality hit me; I could have just written an iPhone app to do the same thing. (or as Phil pointed out, a web page, which would be the ultimate in portability) My end result has no cool physical buttons, servos, or even blinking lights.

I just fell right into the old comfortable “programmers groove” of doing it all through software.

Tips (?):

Copying a 16 GB (mostly empty) sdcard to a 8 GB for say, a second unit, is a big hassle due to linux card sizing/partition issues, so you might want to start with 8 GB microSD cards from the beginning unless you really need the space. (They are only $5 a pop)

Raspberry Pi is cheap and amazing! Most useful if you are ok with linuxy stuff.. or at least willing to learn

Tried a BeagleBone too, it’s like a Raspberry Pi, but less popular so lacking hardware add-ons/tutorials for now

Even though it sounded like I’m bagging on the Arduino in this post it’s still the perfect thing to use if you need to control something simplish with no boot times and low battery usage.

Socket City – a game I made last weekend

So Ludum Dare 24 has come to a close, it looks like 1405 games were made over the weekend, a new record. (Barely!)

In LD23 (the one before this one), I had used Flash+Flashpunk to create a little platformer. I never really felt comfortable, and as a result did not dig deep into the real “programmy” end of it, so instead focused on creating the most creepy boss in the history of games.

But this LD the flash target of Proton is now functional (that’s the true reason I did flash last time, to learn enough to write the Flash target!) so I got to use good ol’ C++ and still have a web-playable version. So less creepy, more game design.

The theme was “evolution”. My idea was what if you were presented with three alternate versions of a space town each day, and had to choose which one to use, essentially “evolving it” by choices rather than getting to build it. Each town piece has little “sockets”, new town pieces can only “grow” off of those.

To turn it into a real game, I added asteroid attacks between rounds, the concept of resources, life, and turret gun pieces that add an action element.

After I built it along far enough play, I discovered…

It’s too damn random

Only getting to choose between three plans was too limiting. To combat this, I allowed the player to “rotate” new pieces at will, so he could at least point guns the way he wants, and point sockets at the places he’d like to grow. Other ideas might have been having more plans to work with, or generating 3 new plans at some cost (1 resource?) and such.

Originally I was only going to grow the base on the bottom of the screen and have all rocks falling down, but later decided to put it in the center of the screen and grow “in all directions”. Not sure if that was the right choice or not.

What went right

Scope and difficulty of this project was about perfect for me, not too hard, not too easy

Proton and its flash target worked out of the box, no time wasted on fooling with it, and being able to test/debug in MSVC++ was very comfortable for me as compared to last LD with FlashDevelop and AS3. Also nice knowing I can pop it on iOS/droid easy enough.

Decent audio – used Garageband iOS on the iPad with a cheapo midi keyboard, and sfxr

Went with simple, abstract graphics. Was tempting to try to do something fancier but.. you know it would have turned out pretty horrible.

Added a nice goal condition of getting special win song and poem if you pass level 10. I think that’s important to give the player something to shoot for, instead of just dragging on forever

Successfully designed the interface for both mouse and touch, no keys are used

I like how I handled life/game over – little hearts represent “life support units” and if they are all destroyed, you die. Adds an extra element of needing to protect them.

Happy with the final game, it’s fairly polished for a 48 hour. My son won it and proclaimed it “great”. What more can I ask for?

What went wrong

Game difficulty is still uneven and too random, especially in the beginning

The graphics lack clarity and style, they definitely bring down the whole feel of quality of the game. I’m not sure how to deal with that…

The “sockets” are especially not clear graphically, and look almost identical to the gun barrels.

Has various issues like the asteroids spawning too close to your city, the upgrade menu covering part of your city, stuff like that. Just wasn’t really time to fix the “little stuff”.

Knowing the Flash target was 640X480 and possibly slow, I sort of designed for that. If I hadn’t, I probably would have done high rez and much larger/complex cities, really pushed everything up a notch…

Conclusion

Good experiment. If I wanted to fix this up and take it to the next level, this is probably what I’d do:

Remove the plan/growth stuff completely and just let the player buy pieces, pieces with more sockets cost more

Make turrets automatically fire, turn it more into a tower defense game

Change everything to be real-time, should be able to add additions at anytime, even during attacks. Especially during attacks.

Add a sim city element, build see tiny cars moving around, hear tiny people screaming when asteroids or aliens attack. Build entertainment buildings to keep population happy, get more resources, speed up repairs, etc.

Replace art with high tech 3d renderings of the tile pieces

Huge overall to the camera/zoom system. Should be able to pinch and move around at will on a touch device

Anyway, as always, LD was a good experience. Special thanks to Akiko for watching the kids all weekend and making this possible! Oh, and for making this:

Documentation is still, how shall we say, .. somewhat lacking, but some progress has been made and there is a working example application for everything.

Assembly Summer 2012 Proton Talk

Proton Pro and contributor Aki Koskinen will be giving a talk about Proton SDK August 2nd at 21:00 at Assembly, so check it out if you’d like the low down on what differentiates it from the millions of other frameworks out there and if it would be a good fit your project.

Tanked 1.04 coming soon, with new levels!

Here are some shots of the new maps coming in the next version:

On a side note, I almost made a horrible mistake with this level – if you pushed in the right place, you could climb the pyramid.

In a single player game this would be a funny easter egg – in a multiplayer battle this could have been used for griefing due to no vertical aiming, you’d have to follow the player up to kill him and games based on kills could take forever. I hope I fixed it!

New feature> Private games

The next version allows private games by a “room name”. Eight friends in a single room or spread out across the globe with different device types – either way you get instant, easy multi-player action.

Or don’t tick that box and the automatic match making will find a game for you. The “prefer smaller levels” option is for people who have bad connections or just like more intimate battles.