Hello its Bimonthly Bonus blogging time again, and its personal project update time again! Because today I'm giving another quick update on SpyGames.
When we last left off, I discussed that I would be taking a break from the project due to complications and a lack of progress on my part due to personal reasons. Today Im giving some quick updates on where things are now.
So I have good news and I have bad news, The good news is I finished with the colorization of the frames and managed to make the slide show of the first animation.
The bad news is, Ive come to the conclusion that this process is just too slow and ineficient. But luckily I have a sollution and that's making my own tool for transfering video. What's the Solution you ask? The answer is Buckshot.
Created by Dagen Brock in 2016, this program can take Bitmaped Images and convert them, one at a time, into .BIN files that can be put onto an Apple ProDOS disk.
Now I know what your thinking: Ryan, this program can only take image files and not video files, how is this going to help you get these video frames into the Apple II faster? Simple, the project is open sourced and the code is availible on Github. If i could modify it to work with animated GIF imaages, I could cut the first digitization process from hours to a few seconds, THerefore speeding up the process dramatically.
Theres only one catch, I have to figure out how I can get these mods to work. So far I only got it so it just spits out the GIF frames to BMP, SLO, and BIN files, but the problem is these BIN files dont get converted to the proper format and if I import them into CiderPress, the Data length of the file is wrong and can only come out as machine language instead of an image. but i am still working to convert it properly onto a 32MB ProDOS HD file.
So, to sum up my challenges I need to fix I need to:
1). Get this modified veriosn of Buckshot (Which I call CiderFrame) working properly as intended
2). Get all of the frames into Slide Shop Slides
3). Work out the rest of the story elements that I didn't before.
4). Somehow get ahold of some more first person footage for each of these actions.
5). Work out the actual code and software more.
I'm still determined to get this the project off the ground, and I at least want to try and fail instead of letting yet another game design project slipm away due to my lack of resources to get it done. But until then that wraps it up for my entry today, as always, Thanks for reading! see you next time!