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Every single game and cart in Pico-8 always has cart art which appears darkened and blurry online and only bright and sharp in Splore.

What I'd like to propose @zep do is to make this accessible. That is when you boot your cart the current state of the screen is intact with the cart art on it. This would give an advantage in many different ways.

One important advantage is you would not have to create a new boot screen, you can use the existing cart art and overlay it with new text or menu information when you run your game.

Two it could be used to hold new 8192-bytes of data internal to the cart since it could be easily read via pget() or peek(24576+index). While this would obviously defeat the purpose of "cart art" - for those especially bigger games and carts it would give that much more free data to work with.

A more intelligent method might be the following though.

Every time you run a cart from SPLORE or ONLINE in Lexaloffle or in immediate mode, .HTML, Java, Mac, or EXE, it could send a copy of your cart art to memory location 0xE000 so it could be displayed in the game via memcpy(0x6000,0xE000,0x2000) or even access the pixels manually via two new commands aset() and aget().

aset() and aget() would also open up the ability to plot pixels to a hidden page whereas currently you can only read/plot pixels to the screen and sprite table - and read map data via mget() and mset(), but that is different. That houses an 8-bit # - and aset() and aget() would access a 4-bit #, just like reading the screen or sprite data.

Obviously in the cart you can overwrite memory location 0xE000+ during and it would not affect your actual cart art as a COPY was only saved here. It is not the actual storage of your cart art which is inaccessible except via the keystroke F7 where the current screen is copied to it.

I also think we could add a new category for Pico-8 called, "Suggestions" which lets us, the users of Pico-8, write messages such as this giving topics to talk about - possible additions or changes that could be made to Pico-8.

Overall regarding cart art, what do you think ?

P#106068 2022-01-31 20:49 ( Edited 2022-01-31 22:41)

1

ermmm having labels be part of game's memory seems like.. it wouldn't too helpful for most cases and also completely broken for others, can very well see people storing map data inside of their cart labels and a incentive to make them awful.
So nah I don't think having them be another tool would really be good... I mean it's the sticker on the cart I'm not sure it really makes sense but the idea of having the image to work with is.. interesting a bit?
But ya no thanks from me

P#106105 2022-02-01 11:01

Let me think about this for a second, @SmellyFishstiks.

So you want the pictures to be inaccessible because of their artistic merit or the fact people would make logos that contain binary data - corrupting the beauty of the cart art ? I want to understand this.

How about this ? A single command that displays the cart-art. You can draw around it after that so you are not requires to make a 2nd logo, saving you from coding that, but you also cannot read its pixels, not even F1 would grab it. It is as if the screen were cls(). All black pixels. This would protect the artist.

showart() -- new Pico-8 command
print("v1.34",100,120,7)
repeat
  flip()
until btnp(5)
cls()
. . . -- rest of game

Hmm ... I'm seeing another project in mind. Later though I'm still working on something else. Story of our lives, right ? :)

P#106133 2022-02-01 17:39
1

I've wondered about this too and exactly to have the chance to display cart art as a prettier title screen without sacrificing cart space! More than this maybe would "brake" pico-8 feeling. +1 if implemented as showart() only.

P#106180 2022-02-02 03:28
2

I could understand a limited-use version of this functionality for better title screens. Give full access to an extra 8KB of data, though, and you'd see a lot of carts sporting pictures of rainbow-colored noise. 😛

P#106181 2022-02-02 04:44 ( Edited 2022-02-02 04:46)

I think so too, @TheRoboZ and @JadeLombax. Another advantage of showart() would be you can call it more than once.

For instance, the game is over, you entered your High Score, you get to see the top 10, it is all saved with DSET().

You hit a key and return to see the pretty logo again, maybe even show the #1 score on it at the top, and you can start a new game from there.

It would remove the requirement of writing code and sacrificing sprites to redraw the logo each time, and for many games they could really go all out on the art - without using any extra memory. And it still couldn't be grabbed with F1, F7, F8, memcopy(), or pget().

P#106182 2022-02-02 04:53 ( Edited 2022-02-02 07:16)

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