My game development thread

[vanpeebles]

Well I tried resizing my pic to 512 by 256 pixels and it came out at 256k and still did the same!

[thorsinclair]

The reason may is the resolution, dpi, dots per inch. Screen resolution normally is 72dpi.
You may check the resolution and set it to 72 dpi. Hope this helps ...

[polka]

To be sure :
the QL graphics offers 512x256 pix in 4 colours (black-red-green-white) coded with 2 bits/pix - needing thus a screen memory of 32Kbytes ; or 256x256 pix in 8 colors coded with 4bits/pix ( 3 R-G-B bits plus 1 Blinking bit per pix) thus in the same screen memory (1/4 of the 128K RAM in a basic QL !).

The BMP pictures may be in 4 formats :
- B/W : 1bit/pix
- 16 base colours : 4 bits/pix
- 256 indexed colours : 8bits/pix
- 3 R-G-B bytes : 24 bits/pix

A "professional" conversion program would have to :
- resize the BMP either to 512x256 or to 256x256
- reduce the colour map to 2 or 3 bits per pixel in both cases limiting the choice to the 4 or 8 base colours of the QL graphics.

In the end, the SCR file should effectively be 32Kb and load into the QL screen memory with LBYTES etc.

Paul

[midboss]

I had a chance to view some of the art design sketches for Baker Street on Friday night. Well, I say 'art design sketches', when what I really mean is 'small scruffy doodles of attempted 3D sketches of a room, in an old, lined school exercise book'. It was most amusing.

Though, there's some nice fundamental design ideas in there that will look good on screen.

[vanpeebles]

Hmph cheeky midboss, it's been a long time since I did any perspective drawing

[vanpeebles]

A quick test with the super gold card(and my perspective sketching), only trouble is the pointer flashes rapidly and sometimes goes off making it very hard to see. I've tried slug in superbasic and also go_slow utility which in some cases makes it worse and vanishes all together.

Any ideas?

[Mr_Navigator]

If you are running extensions with JOBS, RJOB etc., do you control over job priorities? If so that may be a possibility if you run more than one program while using the drawing utility.

[vanpeebles]

I've no idea how to do that, so I don't think it's that

[Mr_Navigator]

Does your set up have access to the second screen (i.e. Minerva ROM)? that may be a possible problem, perhaps it could be switched off.

It could be original programming taking in to account the one speed of the QL and that speeding the process up meant the graphic routines couldn't keep up the refresh rates.

[vanpeebles]

I think it is a refresh rate problem. I do have Minvera so it might be worth trying to turn that off? Although I'll check on my stock QL too.