Code can't get very far without some read-outs. I don't have any lights yet, so for now my 'screen' will have to do. Currently that 'screen' is a 50' HDMI cable running to my livingroom TV, but it'll do.... I spent a long time trying to find a good R-Pi compatible graphics library that would work with Typescript/Node. For some reason, everything seems to have been abandoned 2-3 years ago, and doesn't work with modern Pi operating systems. I'd be fine with even coding the graphics from scratch with a plain OpenGL context, but even a simple library to provide that seemed to be missing.
Eventually, I found a simple library that supported things like basic shapes, images, and text, that was designed specifically for RPi game dev, but had been abandoned partway through development. The author's last update said that they were working on keyboard/mouse support, since without that a game graphics library isn't very useful. Well, it's useful to me! no keyboards here...
Only problem was, it didn't work with the latest RPi OS, since they introduced a new graphics card driver, and it wasn't compatible with Windows (my dev OS). So I dug in, forked it, and made my own version with RPi 3 support, some features and bug fixes, and, with one late night hacking session, a shaky but usable windows port. Not too bad, all things considered. The nice thing about this, vs using an established library (if one had existed), is that if I find any other bugs or shortcomings, I can just easily add whatever I need, since I'm already maintaining my own fork.
With that out of the way, I got some initial status displays set up. Very rough currently; I am not in any way an artist. Hopefully I can work up something half decent for the screen at least, but actually doing some art for the playfield is probably beyond me... More mountains to climb down the road
I can add more cards from the drop targets
No scoring or ball logic hooked up yet though... I also need to figure out what exactly is actually going to happen once you complete a hand. To keep with the 'real poker' goal, technically you should have a final opportunity to bet before your opponent reveals their cards, so I figure you'll need to shoot a shot that can hold the ball to finally flip the cards and declare a winner. In this case, my only ball holds are the upper eject hole, the ramp, and the shooter lane, so I'll have to figure out some logic for that, as well as how exactly you can 'fold' if your hand is looking bad. I'd like it to be something on the playfield, vs some menu interaction, but it has to be something very hard to hit accidentally....
Current lines of code: 4,106
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