So I just went through another round of rewriting to make things work, which paved the way for some more aesthetic features.

One was my “RaceText” class, which for now is just used to notify that a car is coming in. At first I just had the text pop up on the screen, which was boring, and then I had it come in on an easing function, which was fine but I figured I might as well make things more annoying for myself.

The RaceText class takes any string in its constructor, and assigns an animator to each character and has them come in one by one. It’s fun but the kerning is completely wack because I’m not using a monospace font. One of these days maybe I’ll just make my own.

class("Asphalt").extends(gfx.sprite)
function Asphalt:init()
  local asphalt_img = gfx.image.new(600,160)

  gfx.pushContext(asphalt_img)
    gfx.fillRect(0, 80, 600, 160)
  gfx.popContext()

  local asphalt_blurred = asphalt_img:blurredImage(20, 8, gfx.image.kDitherTypeBayer8x8)

  Asphalt.super.init(self)
  self:add()
  self:setZIndex(-100)
  self:setCenter(0,0)
  self:moveTo(-100,100)
  self:setImage(asphalt_blurred)
end

The other fun thing was the ground graphic, which I decided I’d make programmatically rather than just sticking in a static image. I’m not so sure the image would have been any easier since I’d have had to get into Gimp, make the thing, add to project, compile, play, hate it, delete it, repeat. Doing it in code gives me a lot more control over the variables until I decide it looks right.

I don’t know of a more direct way of accessing the dithering functions in the SDK, so I just resorted to drawing a big black rectangle and then running it through the blur function, which allows you to specify which dither function you want to use. Since all the graphic work is done once, right on initialization, so I don’t need to worry about any performance hits.

I decided today that I didn’t really like the filenames on these markdown files for the blog. They look like this:

2022-11-22-hello.markdown
2022-11-25-pardon.markdown
2023-05-16-inspiration.markdown
2023-07-09-Devlog.markdown
2023-07-10-Devlog.markdown
2023-07-13-Devlog.markdown
2023-07-14-Devlog.markdown
2023-07-16-Devlog.markdown
2023-07-20-devlog.markdown
2023-07-21-devlog.markdown
2023-07-24-devlog.markdown
2023-08-08-eink.markdown

I wanted it to look like this:

000_22-11-22-hello.markdown
001_22-11-25-pardon.markdown
002_23-05-16-inspiration.markdown
003_23-07-09-Devlog.markdown
004_23-07-10-Devlog.markdown
005_23-07-13-Devlog.markdown
006_23-07-14-Devlog.markdown
007_23-07-16-Devlog.markdown
008_23-07-20-devlog.markdown
009_23-07-21-devlog.markdown
010_23-07-24-devlog.markdown
011_23-08-08-eink.markdown

I’m not sure if padding to 3 digit index numbers was being a bit ambitious for this blog, but I just wanted something to make the tab-completion a little easier when working with these files.

So I wrote this little thing:

i=0
for filename in $(ls *-*-*-*.markdown | sort -n); do
	newfile="$(printf "%03d" $i)_${filename:2}"
	echo $newfile
	mv $filename $newfile
	
	((i++))
done

And it did just that! Except afterwards I realized Jekyll only likes it when you format your files with the date first.

So, that script will just have to live on this little branch forever unused.

My Boox Tab Ultra C just arrived and I’m having a pretty good time with it already.

I took advantage of the “back to school” deal that included the keyboard cover.

Why not just use a laptop, you ask? Now I can sit in the backyard in direct sunlight and the e-ink display only makes the text more visible.

It took some messing around to get set up the keyboard with a grave escape, but now that that’s done I pretty much have my beloved 60% layout. I’m using Termux to get me a *nix command line and from here I can SSH out to my stuff.

Obviously the Playdate dev work won’t be happening on this but so far writing this blog post in the backyard sun has been delightful and I am getting tons of sunlight.

So I’ve finally gotten around to implementing a timer, which is sort of the point of this whole thing as the primary metric for scorekeeping. I’d been holding off on doing it because so till now I hadn’t had to do anything with dynamic text on the Playdate.

You get playdate.graphics.drawText() and not a whole lot else. If you just call that, you get this:

This happens because it’s just spitting the pixels out on the screen. What you need to do is clear them out for every frame and redraw it. There’s playdate.graphics.clear() but that clears the whole screen, which may include a good deal of pixels you don’t want to have to redraw.

This is the power of graphics.pushContext(). It’s weird how push and context together made no sense to me at first, but what is happening is that you’re switching the context of every graphics command to, for example, your sprite (by default, it’s the screen buffer itself). All of the x’s and y’s become relative to the origin of the sprite, and also, importantly, graphics.clear(). Now it only clears the bounding rectangle for the sprite you’re working on. When you’re done working in this context, you call popContext() and carry on.

Now the cars have suspensions! Sort of.