BennuGD for Wii RC1!

It's time to release RC1 of BennuGD for Wii.
You can seed a list of changes below:

• The code is now much easir to mantain thanks to a slightly redesigned design (more on this to come) and is fully up to date with the upstream sources and overall, the port should feel much more stable.
• Finally found the reason to why some FNT files weren't loading: seems like there's a bug in zlib for Wii that prevents it from working as documented (try to open file as gzipped, if that fails, try to open it as a raw data file). Somewhy it ends up reading from the file in incorrect places. To avoid that, always make sure your FNT files are gzipped. You can know that they're gzipped if you open them with your favourite uncompressor and they open correctly.
• Small bugs fixed here and there.

I'm calling it RC1 as I consider it to be ready for public consumption, even there's a problem triggered with multiple Wiimotes that I must fix.

To sum up, here's a full list of things that you must know when porting your existing game to the Wii.

• Make sure you've read the Getting Started page on the Google Code project site.
• Make sure your FNT files are gzipped. They'll also take less space. To be on the safe side, also gzip you FPG and your MAP files.
• OGG might work, but it's safer to use MP3. Also, recode the MP3 and WAV files @48KHz. You can use a program like Audacity to recode your music. Module tracker formats such as S3M, IT, XM... work just fine.
• The builds don't include mod_debug. If you need it and cannot compile the code yourself, send me an email and I'll send you a copy of the runtime with mod_debug enabled.
• If you need a more integrated experience, you can always use the bundled mod_wpad. That way you'll be able to query info about the controllers such as battery levels, accelerometer input, available controllers...
• You can open websites on the user's Wii.
• If something goes wrong and BennuGD crashes badly, you can send me a photo of the crash and that'll be helpful!

Get BennuGD for Wii RC1 from here.

So what now? For the next releases I'm planning on:

• Trying to fix the joystick bug in SDL. Right now SDL seems to give wrong info about the number of present joysticks and when they were pressed.
• Improving mod_wpad to support button state reading and include Wii MotionPlus support.
• Integrating mod_chipmunk into the build for reallistic physics simulations.

Hope you liked the news! Have fun.

Beta 3 released

I've uploaded some binaries I like to call beta 3. Chnages from previous beta include:

• Proper support for the Wii Balance Board (see here for a usage example). Thanks to the guys from devkitpro for fixing this in the latest libogc 1.8.6
• Default sound frequency has been changed from 32KHz to 48KHz. Had to do it because newer versions of VLC refused to resample the audio to 32KHz. Also many popular audio programs seem to handle 48KHz sound much better than 32KHz ones. Please note that as OGG Vorbis sound playback was failing, you are now encouraged to use MP3 and module music formats instead.
• Updates from upstream Bennu. I've re-sync'ed many things from upstream BennuGD. Please note that this build corresponds to revision 146 from SVN, and not the current one (190). The changes between this versions derive from the SDL 1.3 support I added to trunk to gain iOS compatibility and I most probably broke something so latest code is not working as expected. I'll fix this soon.
• Bennu can now open websites if the user has installed the (free) Internet channel.
• Some other misc bugfixing.

Hope you enjoy the changes and the proper balance board support and sorry for changing the default sound freq. it was just needed.

You can find the binaries here.

Experiencing random crashes? Use MP3!

After some debugging -using the info I mentioned the other day- some game that used to crash "randomly", I've found that all the crashes I could reproduce were related to Tremor (the library used to play OGG files) and in particular to oggpack_readinit. I believe this problem arises more on games with multiple sound sources playing at once, and doesn't seem to appear in simpler games with only one or two sound channels.
This error might well be related to this other bug or even this other one.

I'm not really sure I'll be able to fix this anytime soon, but I've made some simple tests with MP3 playback and they seem to work much better; the interpreter doesn't seem to crash anymore and I believe that both bugs mentioned above might also go away. If this is true, I'll update the transcode_music scripts so that they recode&resample your music to MP3 by default.

Just one note: You will only be able to play what smpeg can: MPEG-1 - Layer III sound files (the simplest/oldest kind of MP3 available), but hopefully the transcoding script will do all the hard work converting your files so that you don't have to.

Hope this solves stability problems, in case you found'em.

Happy coding! :)