Void Stranger

[dim star]

I just used your zip

[rugged maple]

no worries, just thought about it

[dim star]

With all gamefiles

[rugged maple]

okay cool including the splash

[dim star]

Okay its working, just needed a chmod for the splash

Scales properly

Its not stretched so all good👍

Ill give this a go on amber without sound

[rugged maple]

dang it, I didn't push the script revision with that in there sorry

[dim star]

its fine, i think the pm installer does this for all files anyway

Just for manual installs its required

[rugged maple]

should I add it into the script just in case?

[dim star]

yeah i would

[rugged maple]

$ESUDO chmod +x "$GAMEDIR/lib/splash"

ty

[dim star]

dammit my portmaster on amber is too old

Dont have lzma enabled xdelta on here yet

Let me just copy a patched one to amber :p

[rugged maple]

yeah just grab a game.droid

do you have 2 tsp's? lol

[dim star]

Ones from my mom and sister haha

stardew machine

Couldnt let it slide for 40 euros on sale

Looking good on amber👍

Cant test the sound properly but i can faintly hear the music through the speaker. Id say shes ready for a pr🎉

[blissful raptor]

[rugged maple]

last potential test before final pr is 720x720 res

[rugged maple]

otherwise, repo is prepped and good to go

[rugged maple]

And I’ll just keep adding stuff unless I complete this pr haha

[dim star]

https://tenor.com/view/scope-creep-gif-6487636563097951973

[charred dawn]

exec > >(tee "$GAMEDIR/log.txt") 2>&1 change to > "$GAMEDIR/log.txt" && exec > >(tee "$GAMEDIR/log.txt") 2>&1, the new log method

RGB30/Arkos Boot logo with the patching splash screen appears and then it goes black (is this normal behaviour?)

Will test more soon*

[blissful raptor]

Did it go black with no sound? if so, for how long?

looks like it scales pretty well with that resolution

[charred dawn]

Goes black with no sound for about a minute or 2 (probably the patching)

[blissful raptor]

that's a shame

[rugged maple]

Yes

Normal behavior

So the splash will appear until gmloader takes over and controls the screen

Did the patching splash last 7ish seconds?

Nothing I can do once gmloader takes control unfortunately, unless I change Johnny’s source code

[rugged maple]

Also expected… would be good if I could make the splash stay the whole time but 🤷‍♂️

I’m taking this as confirmation that 720x720 is good to go 🙏 ty Frax

[rugged maple]

Yeah the scaling looks awesome, would like to see more pictures

[calm palm]

Excellent port, just completed it. Took alot out of me, I thought I was gonna have a stroke around 217ish.

[blissful raptor]

completed, you say...

tell me ||what was the ending like?||

[rugged maple]

Also what hardware were you on?

[blissful raptor]

also yeah B217 sucks, it's burned into my eyes

[rugged maple]

Ah yeah b217

Yeah damn that one is like, remake the entire level

[rugged maple]

||Matty going full spooky credits mode rn||

[blissful raptor]

bad news matty...

[calm palm]

Hey I'm ok with it if I didn't reach the true end, I read an article about animal well once. Shit got crazy, then back to square 1. I did take a few screenshots but don't want to spoil anything

[blissful raptor]

all i'll say is the full exhaustive test was brutal, and if you enjoyed what you played already you'll enjoy what's coming

also what hardware and firmware?

[calm palm]

353p/Final jelos

[charred dawn]

Will only have more time after my presentation tomorrow :/

[blissful raptor]

good luck!

[rugged maple]

Have a good presentation! I’ll take a look at that updated logging process, I don’t really understand the difference but if it still logs properly for me I can change it.

[charred dawn]

From my rudimentary understanding this new method creates a new log.txt with each start up of the launch script so if things crash… you wouldn’t have accumulated the old logs

[dim star]

Looks like it scales well 🙂

Also clean your damn screen frax

[charred dawn]

i eat and play, what can i say? :p

[dim star]

https://tenor.com/view/shame-on-you-how-dare-you-smh-tisk-tisk-disappointed-gif-15929394

[dim star]

Oh my..

[fleet egret]

well loved

are those two SPs?

[nocturne cradle]

Yes. I bought one and Anbernic sent me one. I sent it on to another PortMaster member to use. 🙂

I also sent the 35xx plus to another member.

[rugged maple]

okay updating a few small things, I'll test the updated script methodology, then we are doing a PR today

[rugged maple]

I kind of want another device just to help test other OSs at this point lol

but all three of my devices are running muos

[rugged maple]

so there appears to be no functional difference between these logging methods as far as I can tell; they seem to be behaving the same

but I can use the new one

[charred dawn]

i agreee with you haha but u need to PR to Cebion's standards :p

[rugged maple]

for sure

making the change now

thanks for testing 720x720 Frax 🙏

Hope the presentation went well

[blissful raptor]

thanks everyone for testing, it was really fun making this port with nate and i'm excited to see this game played on these devices it belongs on

[rugged maple]

okay I submitted the PR for review

please ping me or dm me if there are issues

[ornate sparrow]

Mark thread as finished tag 🙂

[blissful raptor]

finnish tag...

[rugged maple]

Rohkea rokan syö

[ornate sparrow]

Good job on this one, I left a review for you

[rugged maple]

very cool I've never done github collaboration like this

[ornate sparrow]

Not everything I wrote is demanding a change btw

They’re mostly optimization suggestions

[rugged maple]

oh okay

taking a look at the ut yellow code

@dim star do we still need the 32-bit export in

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib:/usr/lib32:/$GAMEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

I believe this had to do with some Ark incompatibility otherwise

but maybe it was just for troubleshooting

[dim star]

No this is fully 64bit so that wont do anything good 🙂

[ornate sparrow]

If your checksum code gets to be too long you can put it in an external file and source it like in https://github.com/JeodC/PortMaster-ShipOfHarkinian/blob/main/Ship of Harkinian.sh

[rugged maple]

I like how the checksum code is because it's straightforward to read; however, for future support it will get more difficult

planning to add support for future major patches but keep compatibility with this game version, so it could get even longer for sure

[ornate sparrow]

When you add a new commit reviews will turn outdated, you can also mark comments as resolved

[rugged maple]

I’ll need to test out the script to make sure nothing is broken real quick

[ornate sparrow]

https://tenor.com/view/portal-chel-valve-gif-25141693

[rugged maple]

that's nicer lol

is there a reason to do chmod 777 instead of chmod +x?

777 is full read/write access and +x just makes it executable right?

[ornate sparrow]

Yep

You can do +xwr too

[rugged maple]

I think the md5 check code ended up being like this because of all the patching and debugging during the testing process

but rereading it, probably everything could be packed into one startup function like ut yellow

I'm clearly just worried about people using the incorrect data files lol

[ornate sparrow]

As long as your instructions are clear it’s just “read the manual”

If you try to cover every niche case it’ll be endless

[rugged maple]

I combined all startup code into one if statement; it's still pretty hefty because the MD5 checking still needs to happen in order to determine if a user has added steam or itch files

[dim star]

Some amount of failsave is nice to avoid every single user that has problems ask about it here

[rugged maple]

I'm still dumping the patched game md5 on startup though

that will be such a useful troubleshooting tool

like when a user runs the game, we will instantly know "is their game patched correctly"

from the log

[dim star]

Yes thats good to keep

[rugged maple]

any thoughts about this? still 115 lines, lol

[ornate sparrow]

https://tenor.com/view/reaction-hideous-ugly-abominable-appalling-gif-16574744

Jk I’m on mobile everything is hideous

I’ll check it out when I’m home and can use notepad++. At a glance I spotted a potential syntax error.

[rugged maple]

I have not ran this yet

trying now

it defintely works

also the first time splash screen stayed for the entire initial patching process for me 🙏

[blissful raptor]

nice!

[rugged maple]

it looks so good also, thanks for creating it

[blissful raptor]

[rugged maple]

basically the fallback here is that "if patching didn't happen or you don't have audio, start from square 1 on the instructions please"

patching and audio packing are now tied together

[ornate sparrow]

It passes shellcheck

It’s a preference but for an if block that long I like to source it in a separate file

Makes troubleshooting easier

Changes look good 🙂

[rugged maple]

like a separate script? like

if installed then
run
else
setup_script_run()

[ornate sparrow]

See the Harkinian example I linked above

If no otr files it sources otrgen.txt which itself is just another sh file disguised as a .txt so PortMaster doesn’t complain about it at upload time.

https://github.com/JeodC/PortMaster-ShipOfHarkinian/blob/main/soh/assets/extractor/otrgen.txt

Pretty sure if I had all this in the launch script cebion would have an aneurysm.

[rugged maple]

ah I see

yeah this would make long-term version support much more viable

so you call it with ./assets/extractor/otrgen.txt if no otr is found

damn I think I did this part myself, did you just update soh?

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah just source ./path-to-script

[ornate sparrow]

No that was last week

[rugged maple]

nice

that case structure probably isn't necessary for it rn because there are only two cases

but next time we update this it will be 4

just takes a lot of visual space in the script

[ornate sparrow]

Nothing wrong with futureproofing

[rugged maple]

looks a lot better than if/else

[rugged maple]

did you not need to chmod +x the otrgen script?

[ornate sparrow]

PortMaster should do that for you when installed through the gui

[rugged maple]

it's a lot prettier

idk if this works tho

[ornate sparrow]

Yoo that looks clean my man moppin that floor

https://tenor.com/view/mr-clean-dancing-cleaning-mopping-sway-gif-9643872

[rugged maple]

am I OK to export controlfolder so that I can still get xdelta patching into this script?

like

if [ -d "/opt/system/Tools/PortMaster/" ]; then export controlfolder="/opt/system/Tools/PortMaster" elif [ -d "/opt/tools/PortMaster/" ]; then export controlfolder="/opt/tools/PortMaster" elif [ -d "$XDG_DATA_HOME/PortMaster/" ]; then export controlfolder="$XDG_DATA_HOME/PortMaster" else export controlfolder="/roms/ports/PortMaster" fi

[ornate sparrow]

What do you mean? That’s in the header of the launch script.

You don’t need to do it twice

[rugged maple]

it's not normally exported

[ornate sparrow]

Idk I didn’t export it in Harkinian and it works

Then again I don’t think otrgen did anything needing controlfolder

[rugged maple]

yeah reviewing it

I don't see any calls to it

[ornate sparrow]

I think you’re fine though, sourcing a script means adding the sourced to your session

Shouldn’t run into any issues

Harkinian otrgen has access to GAMEDIR for example but that isn’t set twice

[rugged maple]

hmm

yeah weird

okay

I get this

./game_patching.txt: line 24: /xdelta3: No such file or directory

(changed the name to game_patching.txt)

[ornate sparrow]

If export doesn’t work you could do the patching line right after source based on what the function returns.

You can get specific with it too

[rugged maple]

export works fine!

okay I need someone besides myself to test this two-script setup before I update the PR

I have it working on my end though

[ornate sparrow]

I would if I owned the game and wasn’t at work

[rugged maple]

lol no worries we have testers

[ornate sparrow]

Upload the zip or link to repo or whatever

[rugged maple]

is there a way that I can see if my new script has exited early?

I could just add a variable, export, set to true when exiting the other script, then check that variable in the main script

but is there some inherent "return"-like value?

[ornate sparrow]

You have to catch early exits with returns

Sourced scripts only return once

[rugged maple]

ok ty

export scr_err=false ./game_patching.txt if [ $scr_error ]; then exit 0 fi

pretty jank

[ornate sparrow]

Usually “if error return 1”

In source you use “retval=$?” then check its status

So if retval > 0 then you had an error

You can return different error levels this way too to show where it failed.

[rugged maple]

it's not a function though; I can still use return?

[ornate sparrow]

Yep

[rugged maple]

ok cool

[ornate sparrow]

The sourced script acts like a big function

[rugged maple]

I got this

./game_patching.txt: line 32: return: can only `return' from a function or sourced script

okay had to do

. ./game_patching.txt

then it works

sorry new to bash lol

[ornate sparrow]

Nate gonna join muos team after this

[rugged maple]

this also means I don't need to export controlfolder

@blissful raptor @dim star sorry to ping y'all, but just want to make sure this actually works for someone else before I pr again

doesn't need to be tested this second or anything

It’s up on the GH

Functionally identical to before except now it will not allow you to finish the patching process if it doesn’t find both audio groups

Also with the new script it should be way easier to add new patch revisions in the future

[ornate sparrow]

I can ping the navigators if you want

[blissful raptor]

testing it right now!

the splash does look pretty good on this screen

boots up perfectly

[ornate sparrow]

Ngl thought that was a progress bar

[blissful raptor]

if it's too confusing i can use another promo image

https://vxtwitter.com/System_erasure/status/1685349720263372800

[ornate sparrow]

Nah but it did get me wondering how I might do progress bars for soh

[rugged maple]

haha this rules!

[ornate sparrow]

Hooray for organized scripts!

[rugged maple]

take a look if you're wondering

way nicer for sure

[ornate sparrow]

Much cleaner

[rugged maple]

did it stay up for a bit?

[blissful raptor]

stayed up for 5 mins, then 10 seconds black before the game started

upon reboot the normal splash shows until the game starts like on PC

[rugged maple]

https://tenor.com/view/supa-hot-fire-gif-4972452

let's go

[blissful raptor]

you did it, you got an image to display for enough time

[rugged maple]

Lmao

I think it actually wouldn’t be too bad to add the code from splash into a splash function in gmloadernext. Johnny stripped the existing code because it created bugs though

However, gmloader would not even be able to splash until it runs. That means we couldn’t make it do a “first time setup” splash

[ornate sparrow]

You could petition Kloptops to add it to PortMaster app so it can be called in general

[rugged maple]

Next or splash?

[ornate sparrow]

Splash

[rugged maple]

Hell yeah

[ornate sparrow]

Nice replacement for tty0

And some cfws don’t have that

[rugged maple]

So I think kloptops actually has a pretty advanced splash app called imageshow that can do all kinds of stuff

Splash just takes in a path to an image and a timer haha

[ornate sparrow]

Idk I favor simplicity

[rugged maple]

Same

[ornate sparrow]

Imageshow might be too advanced for a simple png

But who knows

Just ask

[rugged maple]

But if you want a progress bar, splash won’t help you

[ornate sparrow]

True

Unless it’s a controlled gif

[rugged maple]

That could be cool

Looks like there is a GIFLIB

Probably not standard on most cfws

[calm palm]

You fellas want peak splash, check out mreader or mcli. Also I find it strange seeing people use color palettes other than zero ranger.

[rugged maple]

Splash is doing its job for now (rendering a static texture) besides a weird quirk with muos on startup.

Yeah gooey made that palette it’s rad

I really like the portmaster palette that someone from the SE discord made

Also the GB GREEN is perfect for the rg35xx+

[rugged maple]

Would you potentially like to test the latest version on GH? You can copy over your save files pretty easily

Gooey and I confirmed it’s good on muos

Then I can move forward with the pr 🤞

[calm palm]

I can, but it probably won't be for a few hours

[rugged maple]

I wish I had a device compatible with like one other cfw that wasn’t Knulli lol

[nocturne cradle]

What device?

[rugged maple]

Just for testing- I have three rgxx style devices running muos

+,h,40

[rugged maple]

Hey unrelated but how far along would you say gptokeyb2 is? Is it being distributed with any ports currently?

[nocturne cradle]

Use muOS? 😄

[nocturne cradle]

A few. It needs some work.

[rugged maple]

Yeah I’m running it on all three

[nocturne cradle]

Mainly a few weird edge cases and fix the text input.

[rugged maple]

I was trying to compile my own version of gptokeyb because of an interesting quirk with this game’s control scheme; basically the “Select” button maps to ESC but for in-game functionality to work as expected, the button must be held down for a couple seconds. Default gptokeyb will only send an input from start/select when you lift up off of the button, so holding select doesn’t really work like you’d expect.

I “fixed” this in a custom version of gptokeyb but of course I broke all force quit functionality! lol

Just wondering if this could be a toggle in gptokeyb2, where a user could specify if start/select/guide needed to send inputs like abxy

It’s definitely a niche use case

[nocturne cradle]

Yeah well that’s one of the edge cases I need to fix. Select and start send key codes like abxy.

That breaks other things.

[rugged maple]

Yeah I can tell at least for gptokeyb-classic haha

Sure it’s similar in 2

[rugged maple]

To be clear we get a pass on this with this port because gmloader-next will see holding select as a controller input instead of a keyboard input, so we can still use the button as expected- with the quirk that you have to touch any other button when a room first loads before holding select will be recognized

It’s fine for the most part

Just would be nice to be able to toggle this in gptk

[nocturne cradle]

I can 100% for sure say that’s not how it works on gptokeyb2.

All button presses use the same code.

[rugged maple]

Oh interesting

Ok cool

[nocturne cradle]

For better and worse. 😄

[rugged maple]

I may play around with it at some point

Do you want any test feedback or not yet

[calm palm]

Latest is all good on rg353p/jelos, patching splash, subsequent run splash

Everything looks good

[nocturne cradle]

I can send you a newer build later. 🙂

[rugged maple]

Thanks matty!

[rugged maple]

Sounds good

[rugged maple]

Updated PR

[ornate sparrow]

I left comments! Please don’t hate me.

[blissful raptor]

huh, didn’t know about Ash, interesting

[ornate sparrow]

I learned about it when I was helping fix some of my ports on tsp when it came out.

They’re niche systems so we don’t demand compatibility, but it seems GitHub took my comments to mean I requested changes.

https://github.com/JeodC/PortMaster-Descent3/commit/05e4d8c1faeafabe1e749cc845832067691cea46

Ah yes

Though idk if any of them actually still use ash

@dim star might be up for testing it

Since he owns the game

ANYWAY feel free to ignore the ash thing, it was meant to be simple commentary not a request for changes

[dim star]

I didnt have issues on the tsp

What needs testing?

[ornate sparrow]

Tsp knulli doesn’t use ash anymore?

Just try the latest and see if it boots up

[rugged maple]

doesn't look too bad, I had a question about the log though

I originally had the log you are suggesting, but Frax recommend I change it to what's in there now

going to be honest I have never heard of Ash before today

https://tenor.com/view/pokemon-ash-ketchum-hat-turn-gif-5634813

unless you mean

[rugged maple]

we did change the way the log file is created per Frax

I think after you tested last

[dim star]

Okay ill give it a go tonight

[rugged maple]

I'll just make the edits to ensure compatibility, nbd

@charred dawn @shut stirrup any thoughts about the log file generation?

Ash does not support process substitution.

Replace > "$GAMEDIR/log.txt" && exec > >(tee "$GAMEDIR/log.txt") 2>&1 with exec > "$GAMEDIR/log.txt" 2>&1

any issue using exec > "$GAMEDIR/log.txt" 2>&1 to ensure ash compatibility?

[charred dawn]

I don’t haha

But I have no approval permissions for PR

[rugged maple]

because I'm pretty sure that's what I had in there from before

[ornate sparrow]

@nocturne cradle What still uses ash?

[nocturne cradle]

muOS and TrimUI

[ornate sparrow]

Thanks guess that’s not changing anytime soon

[rugged maple]

Muos definitely ran both versions of the logging code

[ornate sparrow]

It might just be fine as is

[rugged maple]

I’m going to make the changes just in case

[ornate sparrow]

Maybe don’t commit them until Jan has the chance to test

[rugged maple]

Ok sounds good

Updating splash rn anyway to ensure if it’s writing status or errors to the log they are formatted properly

Right now it just dumps the resolution randomly into the log script, so improving that

[rugged maple]

quick question for you, changing "return" back to "exit" in the source script seems to break my $? != 0 logic

is there something similar to see what a source script exited with?

[ornate sparrow]

Don’t think so. You can try keeping return there and see if it works with ash.

If it doesn’t you can set an error variable just before the exit

Use that instead of $?

[rugged maple]

so this one basically

[ornate sparrow]

Kinda, but you I don’t think you have to init the variable first.

[rugged maple]

I'll see what happens in testing here first

[fleet egret]

just noticed the screenshot included in for this port, lol

interesting room

||is that from the O room from the reveal trailer?||

||Gooey, did you take that screenshot? lol||

[blissful raptor]

|| ||

[fleet egret]

such a good palette

[fleet egret]

btw, you can change the screen size from inter to fit in order to fill most of the screen

love the first time setup splash screen

it's great to let people know everything is working as it should when the screen stays black for longer than expected

oops!

why is my copy crashing now, haha

odd

game.droid is indeed missing

[rugged maple]

I would say do everything from scratch

and add your saves in after

assuming you updated to the newest, splashiest version?

I'll call this one "the mav"

[fleet egret]

yeah, i had deleted everything but my saves basically

[rugged maple]

can I see what files are present right now?

[rugged maple]

you shouldn't have the "installed" file in there without game.droid

can you do the install process again? delete "installed," re-add all game data to the gamedata/ directory?

and lmk what happens/send the log

[fleet egret]

Yeah, i actually removed everything now. backed my save up to my PC and do the install process from Zero

i did think the patching process finished oddly quick, lol

[rugged maple]

yeah that's what I was worried about

weird that you got passed through though

it should have kicked you out if something was wrong

[fleet egret]

not sure what would make my fresh install different from other fresh installs on muOS with the same chip (eg. yours) anyway

[rugged maple]

let me see your install log this time

it should be on that first-time splash for a while

[fleet egret]

is the install log a separate file?

[rugged maple]

no, just the log from the first time you ran basically

[rugged maple]

patching fails

[fleet egret]

i forgot which symbols to use for discord code blocks haha

Loading APK /mnt/mmc/ports/voidstranger/game.apkJust before strdup
CommandLine: -game game.droid
MemoryManager allocated: 95753
Could not look up method getPackageManager, NULL class.
Class RunnerJNILib does not have field ms_context.
Could not look up method hasSystemFeature, NULL class.
android.software.leanback = 0
Finished Init
Create Error Form

but this doesn't sound good

[blissful raptor]

` three of these

[rugged maple]

xdelta up top is the issue

I never tested this new patcher with the itch version

thank you mav lol

[rugged maple]

I cancatch this error if it does happen in the future

[fleet egret]

well, i sure am glad i decided to try the latest version after all, haha

[rugged maple]

yeah like hours from release lol

[rugged maple]

here is the new mav section lol

at least to catch the issue

but it's probably just a dumb syntax thing, give me a moment

missing a semicolon lol

[fleet egret]

the classic!

[rugged maple]

okay wow

that was like three issues

semicolon, if statement syntax, and windows line endings for the version I posted here somehow

@fleet egret culprit was the game_patching.txt file; grab it from the GH or start from scratch. lmk if you have issues. https://github.com/EzDzzIt/vsaarch64/blob/main/voidstranger/game_patching.txt

[fleet egret]

everything's working now

Thanks!

[ornate sparrow]

Tiny Best Set style art

[blissful raptor]

tall stranger

[ornate sparrow]

I mean, it looks great

[rugged maple]

[ornate sparrow]

What?

Is this better? Lol

[dim star]

Yes haha

Stretching = evil

[blissful raptor]

Are you sure...

[blissful raptor]

this is hilarious

[blissful raptor]

would it be able to use the screenshot in the repo?

just since the default palette is grayscale

@ornate sparrow

or is this just for your own thing, i did provide a cover.png

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah, you can do this yourself easily. I only showed off my own.
https://github.com/JeodC/EmulationStation-ImageMaker

[blissful raptor]

👍

https://github.com/EzDzzIt/PortMaster-New/blob/Void-Stranger/ports/voidstranger/port.json are these descriptions and install instructions good for on-device and md?

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah I think so, I approved the pr

[blissful raptor]

thanks!

[fleet egret]

this is what my ES-DE page for Void Stranger looks like

[rugged maple]

Ys1+2 chronicles

Would be amazing to port natively… like I know it’s a psp game but still

[fleet egret]

you would never believe me when i tell you i'm still in the middle of an YS 2 playthrough

[rugged maple]

In the last dungeon?

That takes half the game? lol

[fleet egret]

actually in the village just after someone got abducted

i died and lost like 2 hours of progress after remembering that this game doesn't have autosaves

i will continue once my emotional wounds have healed

[fleet egret]

the screenshot was just taken from the itch.io page. love that the screenshots on the games page are just ||taken from the very end of your first playthrough||

[rugged maple]

Oh shoot lol

At least that’s not obvious at a glance

[fleet egret]

i noticed something similarly funny when rewatching the reveal trailer

[rugged maple]

It’s like when movie trailers will throw quick 1s clips from random parts of a pivotal scene

Only after you watch it you go back to the trailer and it’s like WTF

[blissful raptor]

looks nice!

[blissful raptor]

i think the smaller screenshot is from a puzzle that doesn't even end up being used in-game--found this out from someone else who was making a GBA demake of the game

[fleet egret]

oh i meant the smaller one. The background thing is a little preview video i recorded of the first few rooms

[fleet egret]

https://system-erasure.itch.io/void-stranger
||all three are the first few rooms of the voided ending||

if anyone is using a frontend that also takes preview videos (like Emulation Station on Knulli) and is looking for a preview video since Screenscraper doesn't have one, here it is:

i should figure out how to post stuff on screenscraper, haha

look at me totally pretending to play like a newbie to sell the early game illusion. I definitely didn't record this when i barely had any experience with the game

[dim star]

https://tenor.com/view/cat-jam-cat-jam-head-bounce-kitty-gif-17946989

[fleet egret]

eebro's music is something else, man

[dim star]

Still works on tsp @rugged maple

Ram is really close to the max im noticing now, seems to be fine with it though

[rugged maple]

What’s it at?

[dim star]

0.91/0.95

[rugged maple]

Oof

Okay hovers below 0.8 on muOS

[dim star]

I played the game for an hour or so on vacation and didnt notice anything

So probably fine to ignore.

[rugged maple]

Maybe I should look at audio compression after all

Just in case

[dim star]

Or texture compressing

[rugged maple]

We could pr for now though assuming it’s not leaking

[dim star]

Yeah for sure

Its stable there

[rugged maple]

Audio is 200mb of ram

Rn

[dim star]

Textures are usually the culprit

Ill compress them tonight and see if its worth doing at all

This will take some time😄

[rugged maple]

Does the gpu not have dedicated vram??

[dim star]

Nope its all shared system memory

[rugged maple]

Oh shoot

[dim star]

Unlike consoles like the vita

Btw tina linux uses 0.28gb on idle, thats prob why haha

Not terrible but not muos either

[rugged maple]

So check it out, if you go in to ssh and run the script from there, watch the ram usage on mobaxterm you can see it spike when the audio groups get loaded about 200+mb

At least I assume it’s from the audio

The textures in this game should be so basic lol

[dim star]

Yeah i think youre right

Textures are the big one for gmloader though, and i actually dont know if utmt just packs it more effiently or if compressing actually helps

[rugged maple]

I compressed the audio already and it saves about 100mb of ram

[blissful raptor]

not that it's relevant but i think when i checked data.win's chunks the TXTR chunk ended up being smaller than the ROOM and CODE chunks, which is just hilarious

[dim star]

Thats a decent amount

[rugged maple]

The problem is to rebuild the audio groups, it’s from scratch in utmt. The scripts included don’t repack automatically into external audio groups, only internal audio

So I have to go through song by song

And add them manually

[dim star]

Its not possible to open the audiogroup itself in utmt?

[rugged maple]

Like 150 sounds/songs

[rugged maple]

It is but not dynamically repack it

That’s how you’d have to do it actually

[dim star]

Well that sucks😄

[blissful raptor]

there isn't a repack script for it?

[rugged maple]

There’s one for the data.win

For embedded audio not external

[blissful raptor]

i see

[rugged maple]

I could write one in c#

But that would take me as long as doing it manually lol

[dim star]

But then we could use it too hehe

[rugged maple]

Then like if one track was messed up out of 100s it would potentially be a nightmare to debug

[rugged maple]

lol

I will send my bash scripts for compressing oggs and wavs if you want that

[dim star]

Im lazy and just use tools for that lol

"mass ogg compress pls"

[rugged maple]

Oh gotcha yeah I couldn’t find a tool that wasn’t a scammy website

But luckily it’s a basic script

[dim star]

pnggauntlet is good for textures

Im sure theres something for audio

[blissful raptor]

i usually end up importing them all into Audacity and exporting the tracks back out with whatever compression/format

[rugged maple]

Each one at a time??

[blissful raptor]

you can import them all at once

[rugged maple]

Or through a script

Oh nice

[blissful raptor]

ctrl+a the folder and it loads them all as tracks

[rugged maple]

Well audacity is really good at handling compression and all audio formats

So that’s cool

I just used ffmpeg

But yeah I got all the audio compressed just need to re-pack

Could add an audio patch to a future update

[dim star]

Textures are halfway. Thats usually an easier shave

Ive gone from 1.1gb to 0.7 once lol

[rugged maple]

Oh that’s nice

I had no idea we didn’t have dedicated vram

I actually don’t know why VS experiences slowdown at this certain part then

Because it’s not cpu or ram limited

[dim star]

Yeah thats why im always a bit worried with high ram usage as it will immediately tank performance if you go over

Tsp doesnt use swap either afaik

[rugged maple]

Do you know if the rgxx mali g31 uses vram

I assume not if the tsp doesn’t

[dim star]

Thats rk3326 right?

None of the pm handhelds have vram

[rugged maple]

Well good to know

Well our pr should be ready to rock and roll

Thanks for testing as always Jan

[dim star]

Yup🎉

Gongrats on your first port 🙂

120mb save

Patch grows about 10mb

[rugged maple]

Oh wow for VS it saves 120mb?

How does it look in-game?

[dim star]

Exactly the same since this is lossless compression

The only cost is patch size😄

[rugged maple]

I’ll dm you

[dim star]

oki

[blissful raptor]

by the way, the PR is still marked as unable to merge but the changes requested by Cebion were made, should be ready to merge and release

[rugged maple]

Yeah probably just waiting on folks to review, I think Jeod approved it but I don’t know the whole process

[blissful raptor]

[dim star]

You dismissed his review with the latest commit :p

Cebion is on vacation, so its all a bit slower than usual

[blissful raptor]

i think it automatically dismissed it after i edited the .json

[dim star]

True

[nocturne cradle]

Just checked it over, looks alright. 👍

[stark ember]

Thank You for porting this over. I'll test the last two.

[rugged maple]

No problem! Definitely grab the latest from the GitHub if you want to test-

[ornate sparrow]

Tomura Shigaraki?!

[blissful raptor]

not particularly

[blissful raptor]

it says the last thing on the PR is for Cebion to approve the requested changes, so i guess that will wait until they're back? sorry if i sound impatient, just curious about what's going on

[ornate sparrow]

Nah just had to dismiss him

[rugged maple]

Thanks Jeod!

@blissful raptor I'm building out a support workflow for future patching; UTMT can export all code so it's as simple as exporting from the base/updated file then running a script to log diffs

should make it much easier to support new versions and I won't forget changes I've made this way lol

[blissful raptor]

i can put together a few save files at some point for quickly testing the main fixes

like that mid-game NPC despawning and the enemy direction fix

[rugged maple]

heck yeah!

you can post a folder of saves into the vsaarch64 main in a separate dir and then they're stored there also; just need to modify the .gitignore

I can store diffs somewhere probably as long as it's my code changes and not entire original game code

[ornate sparrow]

You two are adorable haha

[rugged maple]

it's a team effort to get ensure support into the future haha

https://tenor.com/view/high-five-top-gun-gif-13858524

also it's pretty exciting to do a pr, never done this before so

[blissful raptor]

ditto, now i'm just waiting for the next PM release...

[rugged maple]

same lol

going to re-download and hope it all installs

[blissful raptor]

also at least 2 people in the System Erasure discord have bought anbernic handhelds since this port started development

[rugged maple]

I'm hoping there are some people who will buy the game for this, so just want to make sure their experience is good

running my diff script takes 10+min lol

[ornate sparrow]

I bought it

[rugged maple]

heck yeah!! hope you enjoy

it can get tough but it's doable

and it's completely packed to the brim with content...

like way, way, more than it would appear

[ornate sparrow]

Art reminded me of Link's Awakening.

Gameplay reminded me of Zelda but just the puzzles.

Guess it's not going to be so simple the more I play huh?

[rugged maple]

it's very simple gameplay but the complexity comes from some of the puzzle solving and meta puzzles, etc

think like Tunic or something

gooey runs the SE discord, you can always check that out for help

but be careful googling

just because spoilers are such a big deal in this one

[ornate sparrow]

Help?

Imagine asking for help with video games, that ruins the experience!

I'm an old soul. I missed out on the early days where kids would meet up on the playground to compare notes for Zelda NES.

These days anyone can look up a guide on a whim. Pfft.

[rugged maple]

Have you played Tunic? That was another amazing blind playthrough I'm so glad I didn't look up guides for

especially if you like Zelda

[ornate sparrow]

I have Tunic on switch. Haven't played through it. Got stuck.

[rugged maple]

the combat is not the best

[ornate sparrow]

I suppose there are times where you need a little nudge.

[rugged maple]

not really well balanced

I played through while my daughter sat with me and watched so it was one of those awesome shared experiences

[dim star]

I played tunic, had good fun the first couple hours but lost interest towards the end of the game

Solid 7/10 for me

[rugged maple]

yeah somehow I never lost momentum

testing RoR rn btw

just had to move over to the H

[fleet egret]

i bought the game after Nate invited me to test it, haha

and i've overtaken Nate since

[blissful raptor]

yeah, that'll happen

[fleet egret]

haven't joined the SE discord but i think Minish brought me up there indirectly.
||i fell into Mon's hole during my first (/second?) Gray playthrough with infinite locusts turned on|| (Spoilers for Nate i think. You're kind of around that part right now) and Minish asked over there if there was any way for me to get out of that situation. (There isn't and it was incredibly funny)

[rugged maple]

it's a pretty cool community they have some good emotes and really helpful modders

[rugged maple]

pr should be moving forward soon so I'm jumping back in today/tonight

[fleet egret]

im taking a break after ||an ending you don't have yet|| and going back to my ZeroRanger grind

I'm so close to getting the run

[blissful raptor]

pff good luck!

and if anyone here wants to join: https://discord.gg/system-erasure

[rugged maple]

I kinda want to boot it up also now seeing y'all discussing it

but gotta stay focused on actually finishing VS

too deep to quit now haha

[fleet egret]

you'll get a good break point soon

[fleet egret]

lol

[blissful raptor]

get your role

[fleet egret]

Amity kind of kick-started ZeroRanger back into life haha

[rugged maple]

SE's next game is going to be "Spoilers: The Game"

[rugged maple]

yeah I saw, nice reshade btw

[blissful raptor]

someone shows up every few weeks playing one of the two games for the first time and then everyone comes out of the weeds again

[fleet egret]

your Void Stranger port brought more life into the SE thread on a server Nate and me share than there was even during the VS release

[earnest delta]

I just saw the announcement bot on the portmaster-news (#portmaster-news message)
🔥 Void Stranger is now on PortMaster! 🔥
Congrats! You did a great job

(I am gonna send everybody digital beers to celebrate the good news)

[rugged maple]

Thanks! I need to remove the “experimental” tag from it to get the game to show up on the PM app unfortunately, but so close now lol

[charred dawn]

Awesome port nate! much better than anything I could've done

[blissful raptor]

thank you 🍻

[charred dawn]

And @blissful raptor too!

[rugged maple]

It's now available through the app!

thanks to the crew for getting it pushed through so fast

[rugged maple]

Install works at least on muos-

[fleet egret]

uuuh you got the 40H?

how are the analog sticks?

[dim star]

Like all the other switch sticks

Pretty good

[fleet egret]

i had heard the sticks on the regular h were pretty useless

[dim star]

In what way?

They still snap to the 8 directions, but that will be fixed soon

[fleet egret]

not super responsive, feels more 8-way than 360°, that kinda stuff

[fleet egret]

ah, i see

[rugged maple]

my screen is busted

looks like an old dsi

[dim star]

What a shame :/

[rugged maple]

yeah they're like 8-ways but better than nothing for sure

[fleet egret]

nooooo

[little drift]

wait, what? how so?

[dim star]

The sticks snap like a dpad. Gamma reverse engineered the kernel to fix it

[rugged maple]

Yeah it wouldn’t be so bad if the sticks had octagonal gates

But with normal circle gates you’d expect true analog

[fleet egret]

what an odd choice to make

[ornate sparrow]

@blissful raptor Here's a new void stranger port for 1.1.2, it uses the newest gmloadernext and audio compression, all it's missing is a patch which may or may not be needed.

Just needs 1GB testing to see if xdelta is still necessary.

[blissful raptor]

Appreciate it! i'll test it shortly

the fixes implemented before were related to slowdown in a late part of the game as well as issues with gmloader not saving properly on exit (this game exits a lot)

[ornate sparrow]

Well, it appears to save. But not the global options like color palette.

[blissful raptor]

yep, it's still patching on my RG35XX+ but if that's the case then the xdelta is probably gonna be needed, we moved a lot of the save_game script around to ensure it saves everything before gmloader kills it

[ornate sparrow]

It's a decent AP measure anyway.

[blissful raptor]

shouldn't be too much of a hassle, but i did the PR for the instructions since i'm not sure when Nate and I will have the chance to copy over those changes

[ornate sparrow]

Hope you kept your patch notes.

[blissful raptor]

we've got em all 👍

[ornate sparrow]

Executing runnable script end_game, page: 0
MoveTaskToBack called.
###game_end###0
/storage/roms/ports/Void Stranger.sh: line 52: 197072 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) ./gmloadernext.aarch64 -c gmloader.json

I wonder if this is something gmloadernext needs to handle. Is saving the global options a part of the game_end loop?

[blissful raptor]

i think it's part of a separate script that gets run at the same time, but gmloadernext doesn't run it in the same order as on PC or something? so it was a race condition, some things saved and some things did not. but it's been a while so i'm not sure if that's all true

[ornate sparrow]

If you can point me to it I can dig around

Ideally we eliminate the race conditions on gmloader's side.

[blissful raptor]

did a cursory look at the code diffs between the current PM version and the new one and a lot of the race condition stuff is changes like this, where the function game_end isn't guaranteed to save the game properly so the script exit_game is called first

@rugged maple knows better about it than i do though

[ornate sparrow]

Ah, it doesn't do "live" saving so alt-f4 (what gptokeyb hotkey is to close the game) wouldn't save anything correct?

[rugged maple]

Right

Yeah exit game calls ensure saving

[ornate sparrow]

The weird thing is, that should be happening when we exit the game from the normal menu and it doesn't seem to be the case??

I am using the newest ver without the patch fyi for testing purposes.

[rugged maple]

So much of the patch is duct tape to ensure saving works because it's so critical to gameplay

[ornate sparrow]

Global stranger: 0
Player spawned!
Player spawn position: 120 x 72
Floorswitches: 0
Grid path created!
Music is playing: 1
Lev statues in the room: 0
Locust dummy value updated
Final surface created
Number of chests: 1
Controller count: 1
Current controller number/slot: 0
Current controller count: 1
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Executing toggle script change_window_mode with arguments 0, page: 2
Executing toggle script change_fullscreen_scaling with arguments 0, page: 2
Executing toggle script change_border_fill with arguments 1, page: 2
Executing toggle script toggle_vsync with arguments 1, page: 2
VSYNC should be OFF
Final surface created
Executing toggle script change_flicker with arguments 0, page: 2
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Executing toggle script change_palette with arguments 4, page: 2
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Enemies, act!
Grid path updated!
Dead end value = 2
Enemies, act!
Grid path updated!
Dead end value = 3
Enemies, act!
Grid path updated!
Dead end value = 2
Enemies, act!
Grid path updated!
Dead end value = 3
Enemies, act!
Grid path updated!
Dead end value = 2
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Executing toggle script change_palette with arguments 5, page: 2
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Controller in use
Keyboard in use
Controller in use
Executing runnable script end_game, page: 0
MoveTaskToBack called.
###game_end###0

See here where I would expect to see the debug messages about save confirmation

[rugged maple]

Oh you ended through the menu?

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah

[rugged maple]

Yeah it doesn't save that way haha

Like in the original

[ornate sparrow]

How does this game normally save without the xdelta then?

[rugged maple]

It saves every time you hit a new floor

And for some other stuff

[ornate sparrow]

That's just bad game design, it should at least save the settings whenever the player changes something.

[rugged maple]

Oh it should save settings when you modify them though

[ornate sparrow]

It doesn't

[rugged maple]

Got a sec to hop on vc?

[ornate sparrow]

I don't do vc :p

In v1.1.2 it appears savesettings only gets run in the exit_game func.

[rugged maple]

No problem

Just doing too much at one time here haha

[ornate sparrow]

Then exit_game gets called in 3 separate objects, but I don't know how the Other scripts get called.

[rugged maple]

Talking solutions out is easier than typing them for me sometimes

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah I get it, I just have a noisy family and no closed office space

[rugged maple]

So we will definitely need to update the xdelta

Gooey is working on it rn

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah unfortunately looking like there's no way around needing an xdelta for this one

The audio compression seems to get it below 1GB mem usage but the code additions needed...

The SE discord could probably tell you how game settings get saved. All I can say is if I enter the game, go to settings, and change my palette color or some other stuff, then quit via menu, it doesn't take.

[rugged maple]

Yeah man that's why I had to patch it originally haha. Well one reason

Was hoping the new gmloader would fix some of the issues though

Glad you tested it

[ornate sparrow]

Can't fix poor game design especially with custom functions.

Stuff built into gms we can catch and do reimplementations. Code the dev creates is untouchable by gmloader afaik and not worth trying to touch since we have xdeltas for that.

[rugged maple]

Interesting so you added some compression?

It only ever peaked at 700mb for me but compression wouldn't hurt

[ornate sparrow]

Yeah kdog designed a script for audio compression a while back

https://github.com/cdeletre/gmtools

[rugged maple]

Nice

[blissful raptor]

testing it with almost all the changes now, except for one performance thing that i wanted to see if audio compression helped with

i'll also check how much memory it uses with htop to see if the audio compression is really worth it in this case or not--it already runs without issue on 1GB devices without it, and takes like half an hour to compress, so unless it reaches the threshold for 512MB devices i don't really think it'd be of much benefit

[blissful raptor]

seems like the audio compression makes the dialogue sfx stutter? maybe because it's playing it several times very quickly

probably worth it though

[blissful raptor]

patching it one more time with all the changes, if it works i'll share the new zip here for others to test before making a PR

[blissful raptor]

okay, new zip file. this one applies an xdelta patch, and requires the Steam version. i included an xdelta for the itch version as well, but i'm not sure how to check if the user added the itch data.win or the steam data.win. in testing, this takes about 30 minutes to compress the audio, but launching the game takes less than 10 seconds after that. i haven't played through the entire game but in the segments i did play, i didn't notice any regressions and can't think of any that would occur based on the code changed

@rugged maple @ornate sparrow if you have the chance to test it out, please let me know!

i've got an exam tomorrow so i won't be able to edit it much more today, but i'll take a look shortly after

[ornate sparrow]

apply_xdelta() {
    # Check if the data.win file exists and apply xdelta
    md5_steam="aed5b6b074e2386c1cb8255a1ab19104"
    if [ -f "$DATADIR/data.win" ]; then
        if [ "$(md5sum "$DATADIR/data.win" | cut -d ' ' -f1)" = "$md5_steam" ]; then
            output=$(xdelta3 -d -s "$DATADIR/data.win" -f "./tools/patches/voidstranger_steam.xdelta" "$DATADIR/game.droid" 2>&1)
        else
            output=$(xdelta3 -d -s "$DATADIR/data.win" -f "./tools/patches/voidstranger_itch.xdelta" "$DATADIR/game.droid" 2>&1)
        fi
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo "Patch applied successfully"
            echo "$output"
            rm "$DATADIR/data.win"
        else
            echo "Failed to apply patch"
            echo "$output"
            mv $LOGFILE $LOGERR
            exit 1
        fi
    else
        echo "No data.win file found to patch!"
    fi
}

Would be better if you had the md5sum of the itch version as well though

Audio compression taking its time on the rpflip2 as well. @livid hare Have you had a chance to check out the multicore pr yet? 😄 I think it has some issues with older gms titles, maybe I messed up some detection logic.

Game works better, it saved my palette this time

[blissful raptor]

the itch version's md5 is 31bab78237372df504789b9e322d9499

[ornate sparrow]

Cool, then you do this

apply_xdelta() {
    # Check if the data.win file exists and apply xdelta
    md5_steam="aed5b6b074e2386c1cb8255a1ab19104"
    md5_itch="31bab78237372df504789b9e322d9499"
    if [ -f "$DATADIR/data.win" ]; then
        if [ "$(md5sum "$DATADIR/data.win" | cut -d ' ' -f1)" = "$md5_steam" ]; then
            output=$(xdelta3 -d -s "$DATADIR/data.win" -f "./tools/patches/voidstranger_steam.xdelta" "$DATADIR/game.droid" 2>&1)
        elif [ "$(md5sum "$DATADIR/data.win" | cut -d ' ' -f1)" = "$md5_itch" ]; then
            output=$(xdelta3 -d -s "$DATADIR/data.win" -f "./tools/patches/voidstranger_itch.xdelta" "$DATADIR/game.droid" 2>&1)
        else
            echo "Unsupported game version found! Cannot proceed with patching..."
            mv $LOGFILE $LOGERR
            exit 1
        fi
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo "Patch applied successfully"
            echo "$output"
            rm "$DATADIR/data.win"
        else
            echo "Failed to apply patch"
            echo "$output"
            mv $LOGFILE $LOGERR
            exit 1
        fi
    else
        echo "No data.win file found to patch!"
    fi
}

[blissful raptor]

🫡 added that to the patchscript for this version

[livid hare]

Hi Jeod, not yet sorry. on my TODO list 👀

[blissful raptor]

i've done a good amount of testing on my own (not exhaustive, but a lot) and i'll probably put together a pull request for this soon. made new patches since one of the fixes implemented (some improper text spacing) is no longer required. i don't know for sure that nothing breaks in the new version, but there's nothing obvious from my code review or testing.
given the much smaller memory usage (hovers around ~320-360MB on my RG35XX+) i wanted to see if someone with a 512MB device could test it? would be nice to let this port onto even weaker handhelds if it's capable.