Language…
19 users online:  AmperSam,  Anorakun, Courage2006, CroNo, DanMario24YT, Dennsen86, elegist, Golden Yoshi, Green Jerry, MellyMellouange, Metal-Yoshi94, mtheordinarygamer, Nemesis1407, PuffleDreemurr, signature_steve, slopcore, Sweetdude, TheXander, Tulip Time Scholarship Games - Guests: 314 - Bots: 471
Users: 64,795 (2,370 active)
Latest user: mathew

Pixi 1.40 Release Candidate (please help I need testers I'm on my knees begging)

Super Mario WorldToolWork in Progress

Soooooo... since the last Pixi release (1.32), which was almost 1 year and a half ago, there have been 138 (!) commits to the codebase.

So you might be asking, "Why make this thread instead of just release the goddamn update?", well, as you can probably tell by the huge gap between updates, I don't have a lot of time to work on the tool, and this means that while I can do basic testing, I really don't have time to test everything that I've messed with as well as it needs to be tested, so this is a thread made to hopefully gather interest and some brave people to help me test and bugfix all the new features I've added and worked on in the past year. I've asked before but with no luck, maybe this time it goes better. After the testing and the fixing of whatever bugs there may be, I'll be releasing the update in the tools section with version number 1.40.

The biggest feature in this update is that now, thanks to Lx5, you should be able to use a lot more sprite types with a lot more routines at your disposal, as was already shown in a previous thread preview of the tool in the Summer C3 2021 (that was a year ago, yikes!).

Apart from the minor sprite types, here's the (tentative) changelog with all the minor user-facing changes:

Version 1.40 (TBD)
  • (Atari2.0) Fix list.txt parsing bug when paths would get wrongly split for containing spaces.
  • (Atari2.0) Now pixi also prints warnings that asar gives instead of silently ignoring them.
  • (Atari2.0) Fixed oversight in extra byte count assignment
  • (Atari2.0) Updated circle routines to fix sign issues with large radii on LoRom.
  • (Atari2.0) Better error messages in general.
  • (Atari2.0) Fixed extended sprites cape interaction.
  • (lx5, Atari2.0) Added support for minor sprite types (minor extended, bounce, spinningcoin, etc.)
  • (Atari2.0) Fix misplaced bracket causing ExtendedHurt routine to send Yoshi always to the right.
  • (KevinM) Extended/Cluster defines update (details here)
  • (spooonsss) ExtendedGetDrawInfo: properly despawn when extended sprite is vertically offscreen
  • (Atari2.0) Add all of the LM3.30 ssc/mwt features. More details in README.md
  • (lx5) Updated cluster sprites routines
  • (Atari2.0) Added utf-8 paths support on Windows. This should fix any issues with paths containing non-ascii characters.
  • (Atari2.0) Completely overhaul the build system, use CMake, enable building pixi as a .dll, add APIs for python, c and c#.
  • (Atari2.0) Now the print statements in sprites can be substituted by labels (init: etc) and they are not case sensitive anymore (e.g. print "init", pc works)
  • (Atari2.0) A lot (and I mean a lot) of internal C++ code changes to improve the codebase and speedup the tool as well as major changes to the build system. These changes are massive but they should not be visible to external users. As such they won't be reported here but they can be found in the single commits in the repository.


You can download the preview Windows build here



A majority of the commits however, were dedicated to internal changes which are not visible to normal users of the tool, however for completeness sake (and for anyone nerd enough to want to read them), I'll list them here:


Additionally, around 6 months ago, Lx5 started working on some beatiful-looking documentation for Pixi. It is very unfinished but I decided to put it on a site and in a github repository so anyone can help complete it. Everyone is welcome to ask and help with it, I'll proofread everything of course, but PRs are welcome since I don't really have time to write it myself.

WIP Documentation: https://www.atarismwc.dev/pixi-documentation


Repository: https://github.com/Atari2/pixi-documentation



Thank you for reading this wall of text, I'll be here to hopefully gather your feedback, when C3 is over, feel free to ping me on the SMWC discord in the #asm channel if you want to report bugs and other Pixi-related things. If you know how to use Github, however, it is preferrable that you instead directly open an issue here in the repository, this way the message won't get lost and everything will be easier to handle.
Can you scale the CFG editor window so that its bigger? Or will that be a planned feature?
Originally posted by FedoraFriday
Can you scale the CFG editor window so that its bigger? Or will that be a planned feature?

The CFG Editor is in maintenance state, which means I don't plan on adding any features except for extraordinary things like things required by LM or bugfixes, so probably not a planned feature.
I don't mind the command link setup, but will there be a GUI version for windows?
Originally posted by Final Theory
I don't mind the command link setup, but will there be a GUI version for windows?

A GUI for Pixi? I don't see the need for it, it overcomplicates things and it's a lot of extra work. Other major tools on the site don't have a GUI either (GPS, UberASM)
I personally find it interesting to see support for other sprite types, considering that these are rather difficult to work with thanks to the lack of tools and reliance on patches (the only tool I know which ever did this is the abadoned Tessera 2.0).

In particular, custom bounce sprites have got the biggest potential but thanks to some weird design decisions but also notable limitations (e.g. no custom ChangeMap16 routine), it has to rely on certain hacks e.g. modifying the vanilla ChangeMap16 to allow you to change.
Thanks to the integration with PIXI, some common and important routines can be easily be integrated with them, not to mention they make expansions (e.g. bigger bounce sprites) much easier.

Conversely, that would make me a good tester for at least some of PIXI's features.
Originally posted by Atari2.0
Originally posted by FedoraFriday
Can you scale the CFG editor window so that its bigger? Or will that be a planned feature?

The CFG Editor is in maintenance state, which means I don't plan on adding any features except for extraordinary things like things required by LM or bugfixes, so probably not a planned feature.


Fair enough. Just, editing in this screen without being able to zoom in is a nightmare. As unnecessary as it is to actually fiddle with this feature, and its a great feature that I value a lot while making hacks, my only problem with it is the fact I can't see what I'm doing or else strain my eyes trying to mess with it.


Originally posted by FedoraFriday
Originally posted by Atari2.0
Originally posted by FedoraFriday
Can you scale the CFG editor window so that its bigger? Or will that be a planned feature?

The CFG Editor is in maintenance state, which means I don't plan on adding any features except for extraordinary things like things required by LM or bugfixes, so probably not a planned feature.


Fair enough. Just, editing in this screen without being able to zoom in is a nightmare. As unnecessary as it is to actually fiddle with this feature, and its a great feature that I value a lot while making hacks, my only problem with it is the fact I can't see what I'm doing or else strain my eyes trying to mess with it.




I understand the frustration but adding the ability to zoom would require some pretty substantial changes since basically the entire CFG Editor codebase assumes constant size for the window so it would break literally everything and it would be a buttload of work. If someone comes around and feels the need to implement it, they can try their hand at it, but I'm not gonna do it, it's just not a worth tradeoff amount of work <-> feature gain wise.

Super Mario WorldToolWork in Progress