Howdy,

I'm still working on building a Centipede control box so here's the artwork for
the box, completely re-done and customized for my project with POV-Ray.

Kind regards,
Dave Blandston

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Attachments:
Download 'control panel artwork.png' (156 KB)

Preview of image 'control panel artwork.png'

....And here's the artwork applied to the box, also rendered with POV-Ray of
course.

By the way, thanks to Bald Eagle for telling me about the Send Cut Send metal
fabrication business. I had them make a metal plate with mounting studs for the
volcano buttons and it turned out great. Unfortunately, Send Cut Send cannot
work directly with .pov files but their clever AI thing did a very good job of
interpreting a POV-Ray generated image so that's almost as good.

Kind regards,
Dave Blandston

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Attachments:
Download 'box.jpg' (262 KB)

Preview of image 'box.jpg'

"Dave Blandston" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> ....And here's the artwork applied to the box, also rendered with POV-Ray of
> course.
>
> By the way, thanks to Bald Eagle for telling me about the Send Cut Send metal
> fabrication business. I had them make a metal plate with mounting studs for the
> volcano buttons and it turned out great. Unfortunately, Send Cut Send cannot
> work directly with .pov files but their clever AI thing did a very good job of
> interpreting a POV-Ray generated image so that's almost as good.

That's some pretty good work there, Dave!
Centipede was definitely one of my favorite games.

I'm glad that SCS was able to work something out.
They probably work better with SVG or gcode.

Maybe even meshes?

This ought to be a very cool project, even when it's half done.
How is the code coming along?

- BW

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I'm glad that SCS was able to work something out.
> They probably work better with SVG or gcode.
>
> Maybe even meshes?
>
> This ought to be a very cool project, even when it's half done.
> How is the code coming along?

Yep Send Cut Send can work with .svg files but that might only be for laser or
water jet cutting - I'm not sure. I had a metal plate made with four studs
attached so .svg probably wasn't an option but I was able to get exactly what I
wanted by using their on-line AI thing.

The code is looking good so far (in my opinion...) but I've been taking a break
from it for a while. I've gotten an intro mostly done using graphics that
generous people have shared on the internetwork (but needed a LOT of clean-up),
the sprites are mostly done, and a lot of basic infrastructure is done. There's
no sound coded yet and I'm still missing the actual sound of the mushrooms
regenerating after the player has been killed. Here's the current state of the
code: https://drive.proton.me/urls/HPK5F2HDB4#H45VQzzZxMPe if anyone is inclined
to critique it so far. There are some testing features available - the right
mouse button starts the game, [SPACE] puts it in slow-motion mode, "." and ","
adjust slow-motion speed, "l" skips ahead to the next level, and [ESC] exits.
One thing that I have to admit is strangely entertaining to me is watching the
centipede heads doing their evasive maneuvers to avoid colliding with each other
in slow motion.

After I posted the picture of the artwork I tinkered with the colors a little
and one change in the color of the blue stripes made such a dramatic and
stunning improvement that I'll post the update. The new color looks very 80s-ish
in my opinion.

Kind regards,
Dave Blandston

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Attachments:
Download 'control panel artwork.png' (156 KB)

Preview of image 'control panel artwork.png'

I forgot to mention one thing about the code in case anyone wants to look at it
- it's written with the QB64PE language which has a known issue of occasionally
generating false positives with virus checkers. I don't know if this particular
program will have this issue or not.

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I downloaded the .exe and ran it on my Lenovo Yoga laptop.
I got the introductory screen (which looks amazing)
but was unable to get any of the controls to work.

- the right mouse button starts the game,
[SPACE] puts it in slow-motion mode,
"." and ", "adjust slow-motion speed,
"l" skips ahead to the next level,
and [ESC] exits.

None of those worked for me.

I had to use [CTRL][ALT][DEL] to pull up the tsk manager and kill the process.

- BW

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I had to use [CTRL][ALT][DEL] to pull up the tsk manager and kill the process.

Oh my goodness thanks for letting me know that. That sort of thing is so
befuddling! The fact that debugging a POV-Ray scene isn't usually so mysterious
is one of the things that I love most about it. In the case of the Centipede
game, I'm using the standard keyboard and mouse functions so the fact that
they're not working is quite perplexing. One thing I did do is copy POV-Ray's
"Render Priority" feature. The program puts itself into HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS (I'm
hoping that helps guarantee smoother animation) but that *shouldn't* cause
keyboard and mouse issues. Using the highest priority level
"REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS" is known to cause system instability but I'm using the
level below that which is supposed to be safe. But we all know how goofy Windows
is so maybe that could be an issue. I'll drop it down to
"ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS" after the introduction screen is done scrolling
and hope that solves the problem. Sorry for the inconvenience Sir, but I
certainly appreciate the feedback.

Kind regards,
Dave Blandston

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