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Socoder -> Nintendo Gaming -> FUZE Switch

Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 05:36
Jayenkai

FUZE Switch


My thoughts, so far..

(Mostly copy+pasted from my tweets)

-=-=-

File Size
Petit 144Mb
Fuze 3.7Gb

Petit by name..

-=-=-

Issue number one, right off the bat..
My Bluetooth keyboard’s Shift status is inverted..
Holding shift gives lowercase. Not holding shift gives uppercase. Turning on caps only gives uppercase..

Note : This is NOT an issue with my keyboard. I've written 15 games in PetitSwitch without it once having this issue.

-=-=-

Hitting F1 brings up the help file with command list, automatically jumping to the command your cursor is currently touching.
It swoops in nice and gently. .. making things a little slower than they could be, whilst you wait for the swooping to stop before you can do anything.

-=-=-

BASIC conflict
Setmode sets the screen mode
Usage
Setmode width,height

Print() prints to the screen
Usage
Print("Print this text")

That seems very wrong, to me.

-=-=-

GUI
Everything in the GUI (menus, help files, etc) swoops and swooshes and slides around.
.. and it’s annoyingly slow at doing it, too.
Takes about 5 seconds to “quickly” look up a command when you hit F1, because it too busy swooshing things around.

The onscreen keyboard seems to LOVE being onscreen. No matter how many times I've clicked the left thumb stick to get rid of it, it somehow finds a way to pop back up.
I'm using a Bluetooth keyboard..
Which isn't even working right..
*sigh*
So many issues, so far..

-=-=-

If .. then ... endif
Even single-line if's need an endif?
This is not good BASIC!!

-=-=-

I accidentally hit Escape, which swoops away your code, and swoops in the main menu.
So I then hit the “code” button on the main menu, to return to my code.

...And it crashed...

PetitCom4 NEVER crashed, even with my shit code style..
This is crashing in the menus.. https://twitter.com/Jayenkai/status/1167393459520626689/photo/1

-=-=-

I have no idea how to do multiple things on the same line.
Neither Colon, nor Semicolon will do it.
The semicolon pops up the error .. error : unexpected ";"
The colon pops up the error .. syntax error : unexpected TK_COLON

-=-=-

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu..
RND(range) returns “A random number between 0 and range-1”

…?!
They didn’t even bother to make RND work properly!!!

-=-=-

I'm going to stop, and go and get something to eat..
More ranting later..

-=-=-
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 05:42
Pakz
Be interesting to see a couple of screenshots. Does it have a sprite editor oranything like that for music maps like gamemaker.

What is performance like 2d/3d?

So far it does not sound good
Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 05:42
Jayenkai
Comma to concatenate strings..
Comma!!!??!
Print (“n=”,n,“!”)

Semicolon doesn’t work, btw, even though that's what Pakz read IN THE MANUAL???!!

-=-=-
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 05:49
Pakz
I found a 4 year old doc. There must have been changes with the windows and this later version.
Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 05:58
Jayenkai
I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse!!!
Changing the fundamental language between different versions..?
Hmmm..

-=-=-
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 07:58
Pakz
I noticed the new switch with improved battery life is now being sold. Though the fuze review so far is not really doIng it for me
Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 09:17
Jayenkai

View on YouTube

That's roughly 5.5 hours of work, and learning, and shouting and screaming!!

Working

Basic bits of framework, handling my usual chosen functions of SetCol, SetRot, SetScale, DrawImg, etc.
Figured out arrays and vaguely started to understand the shitty ways the language is set up.

I definitely wouldn't call it BASIC.
It "thinks" it's BASIC, but there enough HUGE differences that I'd want to call it something other than BASIC.


Not working
Sound
Collision
Scoring

I'll probably attempt those tonight..

-=-=-
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 11:09
rockford
I got my Backer code on Monday? - have no time to do anything right now. The Backer email did state that there is a patch coming very soon.
Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 13:12
Jayenkai
Hmmm..
I had a weird error message that wasn't even slightly related to the error, and it jogged my memory..
And then I started to notice some other things around my code.. things that I'd coded without really thinking about them..
And now I'm looking at this in an entirely different light, and I'm wondering..

..
... is this.... an offshoot of DDs PlayMyCode..?

-=-=-
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 13:31
rockford
Really?
Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 13:36
Jayenkai
I dunno...
There's no sign of DD in the credits, and it may just be a complete coincidence.

.. but ..
it's the little things, you know..
The bugs that have a familiar feel to them..

-=-=-
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019, 15:05
Jayenkai

View on YouTube

Well.... It works.. Eventually..
And, I think that'll do..
It was a long hard slog to get that working, and I learned a whole lot of stuff that I probably won't even try to remember.

If you want to play, you need to have befriended me on the Switch, and then .. apparently.. it should be in my Shared Projects..
I dunno if it is..
But it should be!!

End Verdict : I really very much prefer Petit Switch, and will be continuing to code weekly games on there.

Oh yeah, and it's a very very very quiet game, and I don't know why it's so quiet, and it feels like a bug in the language as a whole because everything sounds very quiet.

-=-=-
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Sat, 31 Aug 2019, 04:03
AndyH
I wish Petit would hurry up for the UK. Tempted by Fuze but it sounds like it's waiting an update.

-=-=-
Andy H
8-bit games at www.hewco.uk
Cartoons at awful.ovine.net
Ovine at ovine.net
Sat, 31 Aug 2019, 12:01
Jayenkai
Fuze is apparently based on "RTB"
..?
https://projects.drogon.net/rtb/

-=-=-
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Thu, 05 Sep 2019, 08:36
Jayenkai

Fuze : One week later


They appear to have fixed a number of issues.
My keyboard, for starters, is no longer annoyingly inverted.
Bravo to all involved for making a keyboard work.. :\

The GUI is still slow as a duck, and frustratingly so.
Hitting F1 to bring up "Quick Help" still takes FAR too long.
All I need is a window to pop up with the briefest of information, then go away quickly. (and not take so long that it makes me want to hit ESC a second time, inadvertently causing it to quit back to the main menu, where it may unexpectedly crash when I try to go back into the Code screen)

Navigating the menus is still horribly nausea inducing.
I know that CraigGrannell keeps complaining that some of my menus can also be nausea inducing, and my own nausea can kick in for a myriad of reasons, but .. I've never seen a menu system that makes me want to vom as much as this one does.


The volume still appears to be much lower than anything else on the Switch, and I'm pretty sure that's a bug.
The instructions for playing audio suggest volume goes from 0 to 1, whilst I can easily pump the volume numbers up beyond 1 to make them louder. I'm generally opting for 10, which sounds roughly like the volume that the sound SHOULD be playing at, when set to 1.
I imagine there's a rogue /10 somewhere in the code.


And then there's sharing, and the brokenness thereof.
You can't easily share without being friends, and even then you need to navigate another horrible (also slow) menu to find the friend in amongst your online friend list, before selecting their shared program..

I spoke to @TheMikeDX about it, last night, and he suggested it was "..Nintendo Reasons.." which is slightly annoying, especially given that PetitSwitch doesn't have to do things that way. I'm assuming that's a "trust" thing. Petit's been on DS, 3DS and there's a Japanese release of it on WiiU, too.
Fuze is new to Nintendo, so they're likely taking precautions for .. Nintendo Reasons..


And then there's the language in general.
I've learned that "Multi commands on the same line" should be "Just write the commands and ignore punctuation", and ..
Eeeeuuuwww...

It would've been nice (and I imagine really easy to code) to have had the language simply ignore rogue ;'s, and assume they're spaces.
That would make SO much more sense than simply breaking your code because of a semi-colon, especially when .. with all my coding habits.. it's really really really easy to plonk random ;'s all over my code.

The use of..
For To Loop
Repeat

Does my head in, mostly because "Repeat" is such a common keyword in other languages, with a VERY different purpose.
I'd've opted for either sticking to BASIC "For... Next", or if they need to "surround" things, then.. just use brackets!!!!
That's the point of brackets. That's their purpose in coding.
It seems really odd that they instead went for keyword combinations to do something that we've not needed keywords for, for years.

Again, this comes down to it "Not being BASIC", but at the same time, trying to be BASIC-Like.

I'm often finding it confusing, and am constantly typing "The wrong thing", which shouldn't be an issue by this point.
I'm currently simultaneously coding one set of weekly games in SmileBASIC, another set in Javascript, and a third set in PHP, and I'm easily jumping between all three and coping admirably.
FUZE's syntax seems to be, somehow, at odds with all three of those, simultaneously!!
And I'm finding that really rather irritating to cope with!

Maybe given more time, I'll settle into the groove, but I do wonder what bad habits beginners might end up learning because of all of these language differences.
It took me a LONG time to "unlearn" all of my BASIC habits, and the "wrongness" in this language appears to be much more severe than I ever remember my days of Locomotive BASIC ever being.

But this is grumbling..
And I shouldn't be grumbling this much.

It's just a language, after all, and it's a different language at that.
God knows, it sure as hell isn't BASIC!!

Given that my BIGGEST issue (the stupid inverted keyboard) is now fixed, I'm finding it a fair bit easier to code with, but that slow GUI really needs fixed. But it may be worth a try if you fancy a language on your Switch.

(I still prefer Petit)

-=-=-
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Sun, 08 Sep 2019, 15:59
Jayenkai
Inverted keyboard bug is back, tonight...
Mon, 09 Sep 2019, 09:16
rockford
So that's a bug-fix fix bug?
Sat, 15 Feb 2020, 09:16
Jayenkai
Having not touched it since, I opened it up today, to find SpikeDislike broken.
Seems that, though the language itself is case insensitive, they bizarrely changed class-functions/variables to be case sensitive.
The only place in my code that I used it was button code..
Button.A and bUTTON.RIGHT no longer worked, but changing them to Button.a and bUTTON.right worked just fine.

This is wrong..
This is very wrong.
And given my previous issues with typing, it is very very evil!!!

Having said that, the short amount of typing I was doing appears to be working properly with no nasty inverting.. so maybe it's kinda ok..
But .. no.. it isn't..
Having sudden case sensitivity where there is otherwise none, is not ok..
And it broke my code.
So god knows how many other people's code it's also broken.


Anyhoo, fixed up SpikeDislike, and submitted it for an ID. The uploader/downloaded now works via IDs, so that's handy.
I'll post the ID once I have it.. (have to wait for it to be approved, and .. it's the weekend.. so who knows when it'll appear.)

-=-=-
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Sat, 15 Feb 2020, 15:53
rockford
I've still not downloaded my copy, despite backing it! Looking back through this thread, I got my code 6months ago in August! Feck, where did that time go?
Sat, 15 Feb 2020, 18:03
Jayenkai
Spent tonight fiddling with it a bit.
Got a decent chunk of my framework up and running with all manner of artsy functions in the mix.
It's got that rubbishy slowdown thing that Blitz3D used to have, where jumping in and out of functions will slow it down a bit, so.. as a totally fictional example...
If you make a loop for 360 sprites, SetRot(angle) , Scale(angle/360), InkRot(angle as hue), Drawimage(in circle) next

.. then it'll run at about 30fps
InkRot being the major slowdown, due to the hue to rub conversion gubbins, but even still, I've found that replacing the SetRot(n) with just Rot=n will speed things up, same with the other functions.

and then, of course, it's started to crash, too.
Like a complete "Switch goes back to homescreen" kinda crash.
It only seems to crash if I have all the previously stated elements in the loop. So, I think it's probably InkRot that's doing it, but.. .. not sure..

More investigation is required, methinks!

-=-=-
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Sun, 16 Feb 2020, 09:56
spinal
How does fuze work then? any way to sell games at all?

-=-=-
Check out my excellent homepage!
Sun, 16 Feb 2020, 10:58
Jayenkai
Nah.
Neither that nor Petit allow you to sell.
.. ALTHOUGH... Fuze is currently in a state of flux, and the devs are all over Twitter.
Might be worth asking if they could look into it..?

But I think Nintendo might step in, if they tried..

-=-=-
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Wed, 19 Feb 2020, 16:04
Jayenkai
Sprite Stress Test - Fuze vs Petit Switch

Code style is horrendous, and both programs have their own ways of doing things, but the general gist of the code is this..


And that's pretty much it. There's also text alignment tests, a starfield, and a couple of boxes, on the Fuze test but that's about your lot.

The results

Fuze
> Reveal 🔎

SmileBASIC
> Reveal 🔎


Conclusion
> Reveal 🔎

-=-=-
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Thu, 20 Feb 2020, 02:47
rockford
Ouch!
Thu, 20 Feb 2020, 03:44
Jayenkai
There are some really nice videos out there, Fuze is definitely capable of some pretty things.
But it doesn't agree with me, and my crappy aged code style, so..

Yeah, I'll be sticking with Petit..

-=-=-
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