#27208 - Mucca - Wed Oct 06, 2004 3:14 pm
Hello all
Im with a company that are looking into developing their first GBA game at the mo', and I was wondering if any experienced developers out there would be able to offer me some tips with regards to the following questions:-
How vital are GBA-specific IDE's in terms of saving time, and what IDEs are considered the best (bearing in mind all our programmers develop using Visual Studio)?
What experience have people had with licensing sound mixers? Is it worth it? What are the recommended mixers?
Is compression likely to be an issue? Say for instance we are required to go with a 4MB cart, what compression issues is this likely to raise, and what are the best methods of compression?
What are the best freely available emulators around (so far Ive only looked at BoycottAdvance), and how do they compare to the IS-AGB-Emulator for early-stage developmental purposes? Is it vital to use emulator hardware early on? How do third-party solutions (eg ProDG) rate against official packages?
Muchos grazias for your time
#27210 - Abscissa - Wed Oct 06, 2004 4:20 pm
| Mucca wrote: |
| what IDEs are considered the best? |
Visual Studio. The HAM thing is really not professional level, and CodeWarrior is overrated - the only reason anybody uses it is because they're the only ones that make "official" compilers for a lot of platforms. Eclipse is slightly clunky compared to Vidual Studio - and it's really just a Visual Studio knock-off anyway, and always a couple steps behind. And forget about anything else unless your programmers are Unix command-line junkies. Visual Studio is industry standard for pretty much the entire (professional) video game industry.
| Mucca wrote: |
| What are the best freely available emulators around (so far Ive only looked at BoycottAdvance)? Is it vital to use emulator hardware early on? |
VisualBoy Advance (There's a link to it on the main gbadev.org pages). Also, no$gba is great for debugging. Boycott Advance is horrible. I'm not sure what you mean by "emulator hardware", kind of an oxymoron, but I would not recommend making a GBA game without using a GBA emulator. ALT-TABbing over to the emulator is 100x more efficient than transferring to hardware every time you change a line of code.
#27212 - ScottLininger - Wed Oct 06, 2004 4:27 pm
| Quote: |
| Im with a company that are looking into developing their first GBA game at the mo' |
Cool! Are you with a company that develops other computer games, or are you starting fresh?
I'm just a homebrew guy, but I can offer my (limited) perspective on your questions... Bear in mind I've never worked with a larger team so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. :)
| Quote: |
| How vital are GBA-specific IDE's in terms of saving time, and what IDEs are considered the best (bearing in mind all our programmers develop using Visual Studio)? |
Not vital. Though there are people on this list who use Visual Studio, so if that's what you're comfortable with, why reinvent the wheel?
| Quote: |
| What experience have people had with licensing sound mixers? Is it worth it? What are the recommended mixers? |
I've licensed Krawall for my non-commercial projects, and it is very nice. I've never tried to write my own mixer, but I get the impression from other posts that it's not exactly a walk in the park. However, like everything on the GBA, it's not rocket science either.
| Quote: |
| Is compression likely to be an issue? Say for instance we are required to go with a 4MB cart, what compression issues is this likely to raise, and what are the best methods of compression? |
Depends on your game. There have been all sorts of discussions about this on the forum. Right now several of us are developing games for a competition where the ROM size must stay below 4MBit. It's not easy for an RPG or something with lots of fullscreen art, but it's VERY doable, and the GBA has hardware support for LZW decompression.
| Quote: |
| What are the best freely available emulators around (so far Ive only looked at BoycottAdvance), and how do they compare to the IS-AGB-Emulator for early-stage developmental purposes? Is it vital to use emulator hardware early on? How do third-party solutions (eg ProDG) rate against official packages? |
I (and many others) use VisualBoy Advance. The emulator No$GBA is also very popular and reportedly has better "high end" features like debugging, multiplayer emulation, etc.
In terms of "professional" packages I can't much say, except to offer that there have been some developers on this forum who have gotten publishers to look at their projects (sans pro-level tools) and at least one homebrew effort that actually got published. The consensus seems to be that so long as your game passes Nintendo's draconian testing rules, they don't care what you develop with.
Hope that helps. Good luck in your endeavor!
-Scott
#27217 - Miked0801 - Wed Oct 06, 2004 7:57 pm
Hello
We use Dev. Studio for our IDE, No$GBA and VBoy for emulation and quite a bit of debugging. The boat anchor hardware devkits (both Nintendo and ProDG) are fine, but I've always had reliablity issues with them and miss features like write to memory breakpoints offered by No$.
Krawall for music (a couple released titles using it now so it's plenty professional enough)
Compression. Very important. We don't use the built in ones much - we use a couple home-made hybrid RLE/LZSS compressors for most everything. Check out PUCrunch for a good starting point on this. The author's web page has a wealth of good info. If it works for a C64, it'll work for a GBA...
You do need to test on hardware quite often as no emulator is 100%. We've been burned by this a couple times.
Good luck!
#27225 - jd - Thu Oct 07, 2004 12:17 am
Hi Mucca,
| Mucca wrote: |
What experience have people had with licensing sound mixers? Is it worth it? What are the recommended mixers?
|
Personally, I rolled my own because I needed very high performance - this mixer is now part of AAS.
| Mucca wrote: |
Is compression likely to be an issue? Say for instance we are required to go with a 4MB cart, what compression issues is this likely to raise, and what are the best methods of compression?
|
That entirely depends on your project. In Payback, I used lots of different techniques, a lot of which involved making the converter automatically detect duplicated data (in maps for example). There was some RLE-style compression, although that was only used between levels.
| Mucca wrote: |
What are the best freely available emulators around (so far Ive only looked at BoycottAdvance), and how do they compare to the IS-AGB-Emulator for early-stage developmental purposes? Is it vital to use emulator hardware early on? How do third-party solutions (eg ProDG) rate against official packages?
|
Unfortunately, I can't say how the free emulators compare with the official kit as I've never used the official stuff (although Payback has now been published so it's certainly possible to do it without using expensive tools). I found both VisualBoyAdvance and BatGBA to be excellent. VBA was generally more accurate but I found BatGBA's debugging features much easier to use.
I certainly recommend using emulators most of the time as they're a heck of a lot easier to debug with. Implementing multiplayer was made 10 times harder because I didn't have an emulator that supported it so testing involved transferring the game onto 4 different GBAs each time the code was updated - not fun.
#27288 - Mucca - Fri Oct 08, 2004 11:10 am
Thanks for all the help so far.
We've just ordered an evaluation copy of ProDG, its a good bit cheaper than going with the Nintendo stuff, and as we're commited to producing a title we need to have hardware testing and debugging capabilities, so why not from the beginning.
So if anyone has used ProDG for GBA Id be interested in hearing what their opinions on it are.
#27298 - Miked0801 - Fri Oct 08, 2004 6:23 pm
Having used both, I've found that both are fine. The overall opinion in the studio is that the Nintendo stuff is a bit more stable, but the ProDG stuff runs a bit faster. I've got 2 ProDGs on my desk right now and have had almost no problems with them. Also SN System's tech support has been real good as well. That said, I still use No$ for 99% of my debugging :)
Mike