Manticore - My Little Puzzler For Gp2x


skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
8,063
Website
www.codejedi.com
Manticore is a little logic-based tile-matching puzzler, akin to Vexed on Palm OS. Some easy levels, and some harder levels that'll make you think a touch.

(If you've got level ideas let me know .. it only has 10 or 15 levels included so far.)

My web host is having disk issues it appears (eep!) so I'm posting it at a temporary location.. Ah, there, aded to the gp2x archive as well!

Get it here:
http://www.vex.net/~skeezix/manticore-gp2x-002.zip

The main website is here:
http://www.codejedi.com/manticore

I'll update the main website when the web server disks are working right again...

I hope you like it :)

I wrote this gamelet as a thanks to everyone who kicked in for me to get a gp2x. Their names are posted for a second or two in the loader.

Hey Taras -- this is the game I was looking for mods for; the two build in themes so far are a little lame (toronto and a nature shot, and 80s music :) but if you want to write up some ethereal or Egyption or 'ancient mysterios' mods, I'd love it ;) (though you'd have to assign unlimited license to use them to me.)

jeff

Edit: Added to gp2x archive
 
Looks fun and yes, you do upload it to the archive. At least, that's how I've been doing it. :)

Welcome to the world of GP2X development.
 
Easiest mobile to develop for, bar none. (Palm, Pocket PC, PSP, NDS, GBA .. you name it, I've been burnt alive by it ;)

jeff
 
I'm pretty sure the mods you have now are better than anything I could do.*

*But I'll still have a go!
 
Its got some of your levels of course; I've not had time to work on it much the last month or so, but I'm working on larger graphics as all the folks I know didn't like the 16px square bricks on PDAs and such; so I may go 24px square bricks .. or maybe vary size by device. Figured I'd add levels after that, and maybe add a Vexed importer..

For now, wanted to get it out -- only had a few hours, so pop Manticore out :)

jeff
 
You either need to make levels scrollable or make sizes vary by device. 24 px would make the max level size too small on the 2X.
 
Or have some fancy SmashGP style zooming FX once you've chosen the block you want to move :)

Not that that's likely, of course lol
 
Zoom on select wouldn't be so good since then you'd not see everything... hmm..

I could just 'zoom out to fit' .. ie: scale down so levels can be arbitrary size. I've got some arbitrary scaling code I built, and eventually once I look into the h/w could perhaps do some scaling there.

So it should be doable, to scale down from 24px; course, Vexed gets by on smaller levels, but I like the option of larger ones. Keeping smaller bricks makes it lookbetter,since manually scaled is always better than softare scale-downs..

I'll fiddle. I like having one size and scaled, as it keeps the code simpler.

jeff
 
Zoom on select wouldn't be so good since then you'd not see everything... hmm..

I could just 'zoom out to fit' .. ie: scale down so levels can be arbitrary size. I've got some arbitrary scaling code I built, and eventually once I look into the h/w could perhaps do some scaling there.

So it should be doable, to scale down from 24px; course, Vexed gets by on smaller levels, but I like the option of larger ones. Keeping smaller bricks makes it lookbetter,since manually scaled is always better than softare scale-downs..

I'll fiddle. I like having one size and scaled, as it keeps the code simpler.

jeff


The problem is that scaling looks like shit quite honestly. The way that it looks best is to have actual pixels at 1:1.
 
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The problem is that scaling looks like shit quite honestly. The way that it looks best is to have actual pixels at 1:1.
I don't have a GP2X so I don't know what this looks like, but what you just said isn't true. It really depends what you scale. Sure, scaling a really small pixel *10 will look shit, but scaling slightly will make hardly any difference to the quality.
 
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It depends a lot on the algorithm used. Bilinear scaling looks ok most of the time (though DaveC seems to hate it ;) ) but if pixels are simply left out or duplicated it can look like shit fast.
Compromise: Make levels scrollable and have one button that zooms the level to screen size as long as you press it so you can get an overview. When you release the button it zooms back to where you were earlier.
 
The problem is that scaling looks like shit quite honestly. The way that it looks best is to have actual pixels at 1:1.

I dunno about that. Are we talking scaling down, or up?

I think the GP2X post-processor does an admirable job of scaling on the Video(down scaling that is).

But I don't know if we will ever have that to play with on the emulators.

'Twould be cool though.
 
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