Dev-Blog
I’ve never blogged before, so I will probably not be very skilled at this. I suppose it will take practice before I can get myself to hack away at a computer for even another 10 min after I’ve spent hours upon hours working to get something to work.
In terms of wii development, I am still waiting for the latest release of the CVS since I can’t recompile dkPPC with my current settings.
I currently have an HID scanner for the USB that I am willing to work on for the sake of scanning my Wacom tablet input. I can’t compete with the white boards that are out there since I have such a small screen and lack the drive to find an infrared LED, but I’d like to be able to possibly do gaming/dev (height map editing of a mesh landscape) with pen and hard surface.
My latest wifi that I’d done is simply a read-and-rip of Gamecube saves. I’d thought it would be helpful in my F-Zero racing game for the GC since I had to transfer saves, only to learn that it has encryption based on the card you created it on. That might be breakable since I’m sure it isn’t too bad (and I’m writing back to the same card), but it is a deterrent in everything else I wish to do. I say that progress on this topic won’t be that hard, but I always underestimate what snags I will encounter. If there weren’t snags, what fun would there be?
In terms of 3d (one of the more fun topics, not that I don’t love wifi just as much), I’ve currently followed the Nehe tutorials, lessons 2 through 7, and converted the logic to GX. I ran my initial testing on the gamecube emulator, so it didn’t quite work on the Wii. I believe I just need to explicitly state the coloring and tev order/channels before it will display. I have a working demo of lighting and texture, so I have a pretty good PoC for the ‘standard gx init’ functions I’ve created that should hold through the rest of the demos. The current setup provides 2 or 3 functions that set up the GX screen, initial POV, and handle many of the functions that are called every iteration of the application.
I have plans to provide several perl script that will take png and convert it to one of the several available Wii texture formats for the demo or other apps. So far I have 4bit intensity mapping (i4) that allows for 2 pixels to be stored in one pixel, given in 8×8 texture blocks (64 pixels/2 = 32byte cache lines). The current RGBA script I have ignores alpha, so I’ll add an alpha channel support later that may require an alpha texture that is separate. I believe I will need alpha for one of my next Nehe lessons (blending, lesson 7) unless I just do an alpha material.
In terms of 2D development, I will need to review texture filters that are currently in place on the system. I have a tile based engine that I use currently for a console test (with goals to provide better menus than currently possible with stdio on the system), but believe this would most likely be a good thing to look into for FTP management and file navigation on the up-and-coming storage medias.
I must wake up!
