Sphere Modules
Startup
WINNER OF THE SPHERICAL STARTUP GAME COMPETITION! YAY!
Description
The Sphere engine has this special concept known as a "startup" game. This one game has the sole purpose of displaying the list of available games, and also giving the opportunity for the user to pick and choose games to play. The startup game is loaded by default if you simply run the Sphere engine without any parameters.
This was an entry for a competition over at the Spherical Forums. I started after the deadline, and ended, well, after the deadline too. This only took me two days to knock together, most of which was spent procrastinating.
But seriously, it was meant to be simple and functional, and nothing more. It's actually about 10 KB smaller than Flikky's current startup game (change "smaller" to "larger" for the compatibility version), once extracted.
There's now a compatibility version, which works under the problematic sphere_dx8 and sphere_gl graphics drivers that port with the Sphere engine. I don't recommend you use this one unless you can't live without these graphics drivers, specifically because it's bigger and slower. The massive performance hit under sphere_gl is most likely due to the constant use of buffers, which I had to use to force the text to clip correctly. The sphere_gl driver uses OpenGL, which has hardware buffers, and constant hardware buffer access if slow, if Z!re from the FreeBASIC forums has taught me nothing else, and she probably hasn't.
Screenshots
Features
In the compatibility version:
- Works under sphere_gl and sphere_dx8 with no problems
- Some extra preference values inside gamelist.js
- Backgrounds are in the images directory, so you can change them to your liking
- Pressing backspace now does not affect the list view if the search term is already blank
- Fixed the menu items misalignment cursor scroll bug
- Slower, particularly in 640 * 480 mode, and in sphere_gl (still acceptable, though)
- Now has approximately a 70 KB disk footprint, as opposed to the 50 KB of the original
Newer features:
- Game info panel scales to screen width
- Slightly optimised game list drawing routine
- Some fixes make this more usable under sphere_gl and sphere_dx8 graphics drivers
- SHIFT can be used to type symbols in the search area
- Repaired the drawTextBox clipping bug, using my own in-house text wrapping module, so long descriptions no longer look as ugly as before
- Options box now resembles game info box in style
- Page up and page down now correctly scroll up and down by a page
- Ticker bar at the bottom provides help and Sphere info
Original features:
- Displays a list of installed Sphere games (duh)
- Digital corner clock
- Filter games by a search term
- View complete information about a selected game
- Switch between 320 * 240 and 640 * 480 resolutions
- Sort by game title or by author
- Shiny animations and a custom menu system with a scrollbar
- And of course, branded with the Sphere logo
Download
You'll need to put this in Sphere's games directory. Extract it and find something useful to do with it.
If you want to use this as the default Sphere startup game, simply rename/move/remove the existing startup directory in the base Sphere installation, extract this game, and rename the newly extracted folder to "startup" (no quotes).