Release White Butterfly and Excellent Bifurcation

[mcobit]

Here are two ports of games from Linley Henzell.


White Butterfly is a solid but rock hard shmup and Excellent Bifurcation is all that, but you have to split your attention and focus on two ships at the same time, while switching sides and trying not to die.


Get them on the repo:


White Butterfly:


http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=whitebutterfly

Excellent Bifurcation:


http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=EB-excellent-bifurcation-6136

 

[Link]

Just played some White Butteryfly, not an easy game, but I dig the different ships abilities. Haven't tried the other yet, but I will later today. Thanks again mcobit! You are always doing the good work!


EDIT: Just played "Excellent Bifurcation" Holy double vision Batman!


Really enjoying White Butterfly, is this developer still active, cuz these are fun! Good look Askarus!

 

[pmprog]

Not played much of it, but just tried White Butterfly. Nice little game


One quick thing though, can you let me use my selected fire buttons in the main menu?

 

[Link]

One quick thing though, can you let me use my selected fire buttons in the main menu?

4th Option down, Set Keys.

 

[pmprog]

One quick thing though, can you let me use my selected fire buttons in the main menu?

4th Option down, Set Keys.

Sorry, you misunderstood... I want to use the firebuttons to activate the menus - I currently have to press Enter, rather than the fire button

 

[Link]

Yeah, I read it quickly as well. No worries

 

[mcobit]

Yes, I tried to map it like that but due to the way it is coded, I think it won't work with assigning the firebutton to menuNavigation. What I can do is to map e.g. The A button for menunavigation, if that would help.

 

[Null]

Am really enjoying White Butterfly thanks for porting it + the person who rated it one star on the repo is a dick.

 

[ZXDunny]

the person who rated it one star on the repo is a dick.

Why? They might not like the game, or may have found the lack of specific Pandora features a detraction (I certainly do) and felt that it deserved a "1" rating.


D.

 

[Null]

Why? They might not like the game, or may have found the lack of specific Pandora features a detraction (I certainly do) and felt that it deserved a "1" rating.


D.

I just think that giving it a 1 is going a bit too far, if I didn't like it i'd give it a 3 and then only knock further stars off if it didn't run or otherwise work properly.

 

[ZXDunny]

Personally, any port that's a drive-by with no effort made to tailor it to the Pandora gets a 1, but that's just me. This one does at least use the correct resolution, but loses marks for the forced use of "enter" to select menu options.


D.

 

[pmprog]

Yes, I tried to map it like that but due to the way it is coded, I think it won't work with assigning the firebutton to menuNavigation. What I can do is to map e.g. The A button for menunavigation, if that would help.

Yes, that'd be good - I've mapped the A/X/B/Y buttons to the three fire and slow. Thanks

 

[gunni]

loving Excellent Bifurcation just now, great stuff!

 

[Esn]

Is there any way to have it display at the correct aspect ratio? Judging by the Youtube videos, the Pandora version of "White Butterfly" is extremely stretched horizontally. There should properly be black bars along the sides.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pOiDIBxYYeg?feature=oembed

 

[mcobit]

Well, the correct aspect would be 1:1. It renders at 600x600 by default, so this is indeed a compronise but I don't know if 480x480 would look good... And some people don't like black bars.

 

[Esn]

Well, it renders at 800x480 on my Pandora, not 600x600 (which I think would be impossible).


Why wouldn't 480x480 look good? That's exactly the height of the Pandora's resolution. "Garden of Coloured Lights" had black bars and I don't think anyone complained (and it looks fantastic). Notaz's emulators have black bars, I don't see many people complaining.


Maybe it would be possible to have an option before the PND starts? Some people may not like black bars, other people don't like squished aspect ratios. Especially for shooters, where a squished aspect ratio can really affect one's ability to predict where incoming fire is going.


I'm like that for widescreen TVs as well, I guess... if I'm watching an old movie or tv show that wasn't made for widescreen, I get really annoyed if it's stretched to make it take up the whole screen. I also used to own some videos that would stretch widescreen movies vertically so that there wouldn't be black bars on the top & bottom - never liked that either. I figure there's a reason that "pan and scan" eventually lost its popularity, and that's that most people are less annoyed by black bars than they are by watching a film in the wrong aspect ratio or with parts of it cut off. I figure that should probably apply to video games, too...

 

[mcobit]

No, I mean 600x600. Why would that be impossible? I changed it manually to 800x480 from 600x600.


If you like I can do another build that renders at 480x480 for testing.


480 x 480 might loose some detail while scaling, as it is a relatively big reduction.


Garden of colored lights runs at 640x480.


Edit: Yes, notaz emulators have the option to run fullscreen though.

 

[Esn]

Oh sorry, I thought you meant 600x600 on the Pandora. I didn't realize that the original resolution was 600x600. Yes... I can see that there's a definite difficulty here. There are 4 potential options I can see working:


1) stretch horizontally to 800, squish vertically to 480 (like you did)


2) squish both to 480x480, keeping aspect ratio


3) squish only vertical dimension to 480, keep horizontal unchanged at 600 (a less extreme modification)


4) keep it at 600x600, but have the camera follow the ship around the screen so that the part that's not within the Pandora's resolution becomes visible if you move the ship up or down.


#4 is most likely implausible; I think I'd probably prefer either #2 or #3, not sure which one though. Would it be a simple thing to provide a dialogue upon starting the PND to choose between options 1-3, or is it somewhat hard to do?

 

[mcobit]

No, I can do that if you like. Will try next evening and post a beta here.

 

[Esn]

Thanks! Would be much appreciated.


(thinking a bit further about option #4... the REALLY fancy way would be: when you move away from the top of the screen, the top becomes "squished" while the bottom becomes "unsquished", like the sides of something filmed by a wide-angle-lens camera. That way everything would be visible at all times even though the Pandora doesn't quite have enough vertical screen resolution. This would be really difficult to code, though)