The issue with the flippers has been investigated some more. It turns out BoP is a pre-Fliptronics game, and because normally the Fliptronics board connects to P-ROC, that posed a problem. It hadn't occured to both Gerry and ourselves when we were checking to see if this project was possible with P-ROC. Anyway, Gerry thought up a quick software fix for this problem which results in the flippers working perfectly fine, except the switch hits can't be registered by the P-ROC. In order to get that working, Gerry will be modifying a new P-ROC board for us that we will then trade for our current one.
We spend friday night at work, Barry had real work to do, while I tried coding my first stuff. First of all I removed all the classes from the bop.py file to improve the overview, I like to have seperate files for all of my classes. Then I got started on the skillshot. Nothing fancy, I just put in the old skillshot rules with a bit of feedback on the DMD. Doing this, even though it was just a simple mode, gave me some insight in the pyprocgame framework. Also this was the first time I really had to write Python, which is really easy but of course I have to get used to the syntax. Then there was the issue of the ball saver staying on for as long as the first ball was in the game. This was kind of an annoying problem because it had to do with two delayed calls that were being executed just the wrong way. I set them apart 0.1 second (dirty fix, but I was tired already), and that did the trick. I think this is a bug in pyprocgame + starter.py.
Last thing I did was put a running light in the skillshot. This will make the skillshot a timed shot as well (super skillshot). Results-wise it may not have been a very spectacular night but it was something I had to go through to gain understanding of the matter at hand. This is where the fun starts!
Meanwhile Adam is looking at some 24 bit PNG sequences and why they won't play when we convert them to .dmd files. So far we only have been able to export an 8-bit version with Flash CS3, and this gives us a very bad default color palet with only +/- 6 tints of grays.
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