PlayStation Suite - A beginner's experience: June 2012

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

With the press of a button...

Alternating between different background colors was made possible by creating a variable called "buttonsPressed" using a conditional statement where if the button was pressed, the screen would turn black else it would remain the default red. Originally a ternary operator was used but was a bit more difficult to understand.

Here is a snippet of the code:

         public static void Update ()
        {
            // Query gamepad for current state
            var gamePadData = GamePad.GetData (0);

              if (gamePadData.Buttons != 0)
               buttonsPressed = true;
            else
                buttonsPressed = false;
              }

         public static void Render ()
         {
              // Clear the screen
              if (!buttonsPressed)
                 graphics.SetClearColor (1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);
              else
                 graphics.SetClearColor (0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);

            graphics.Clear ();

In this video you can see the background color changing from default red to black and so forth. I am pressing CTRL on the keyboard which is the equivalent to any button on the PS Vita.

Warning: may cause small seizures

Wednesday, 20 June 2012

PS Vita display

I used the PS Vita to display the red screen that I had up on the PssStudio simulator the last time. It worked!! It may be a very small step but oh boy is it exciting.

This first video shows the program running using PlayStation's Development Assistant on the PS Vita.

This second video shows an alternate way of running the program on the PS Vita.

When I can make a mobile game like this:

I'll be sorted!

(thinking positive thoughts)

PlayStation Suite to Mobile

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2012, Sony held a press conference on June 4 where they announced the renaming of the PlayStation Suite to PlayStation Mobile. They have also partnered up with the mobile makers HTC, ensuring that PlayStation Mobile games are available to certified HTC Android phones.

Check the links below for more information:

PlayStation®Mobile
PSM Press Release

I guess I shouldn't have been so hasty naming my blog pssuite...

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

Playing around with code

I opened the PssStudio and decided to play around with some code for a bit. I decided to create a new project and selected the PlayStation Suite Application:

This provided a template for me to start working on creating a program.

It is the first time I've really seen C# code and it looks very similar to Java to me. It may be a bit confusing here and there but I can still somewhat understand.

For a start, I built the project and ran it with the Simulator. This resulted in a black screen display which is to be expected judging by the code.

In the screenshot below, I placed a red box over what I decided to change...the color in RBGA format:

I changed the R parameter to 1.0f to change the color to 100% red, which resulted in:

Not that much to see but it's a start I suppose. I'll try to run this on the PS Vita next.

Monday, 11 June 2012

PssStudio GTK Startup Issue

So I reinstalled the suite thinking that would solve the original startup issue but that turned out to be a failure.

It turned out that I had another GTK installed previously with another program. Both the new and the old GTK library paths were in the PATH environment variable and this resulted in PS Suite using the wrong version of GTK.

I overcame this by removing the old GTK path and all works well now.

Grand!

PssStudio Loadup Issue

I was playing around with PssStudio and the UIComposer a few days back on my partner's laptop and we managed to change the background color and display the "Hello World!" on screen.

I'm loading PssStudio on my laptop now and am getting the "Program has stopped working" error so I'll have to reinstall it seems. Hopefully that will work.

I will post again about the background color change and hello world. For now, let's just get this program running on my laptop first.

Thursday, 7 June 2012

Installation Guide

Let's install the Software Development Kit

Go to link http://www.playstation.com/psm/developer/openbeta/index_e.html

Off to the download page and after reading all of the terms and conditions (which I'm sure we all do thoroughly) let's click on download!

287MB...let's take a tea break...

Okay! Let's run the executable

Click Next...

Click I Agree...

Select your destination folder and click Install...

Another window will pop up during installation

Tick the "I have read and accept the license terms" and click Install
That will install the .NET Framework necessary to complete the SDK installation

Click on Finish...
Another window will appear prompting you to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010

Tick the "I have read and accept the license terms" box and click on Install (You can send information to Microsoft about your setup experience if you wish)