CHGame library

The one include for a CHGame game: buttons, frame pacing, palette, drawing, lettering, effects, sound, saving and the debug protocol. More...

Modules
	Buttons and frame pacing
	The global chgame object: the frame clock and the eight buttons.
	Palette
	The sixteen house colours and pal::: felt themes, fades, flashes and colour cycling.
	Drawing
	Panels, span sprites, dithering, polygons and the 3x5 font, drawn into CHGfx's framebuffer.
	Lettering masks
	Outlined, shadowed and gradient lettering, logos and the cover titles.
	Effects maths
	fx::: easing curves, integer sine and cosine, presentation randomness and the screen shake.
	Particles, banners and floating texts
	fx:: particles (sparks, confetti, coins ...), the pop-up banner and floating texts, configured per game.
	Sound and LED
	audio::: sound effects, music and the status LED.
	Saving
	save::: a game's options and progress in flash, with a CRC, kept across power cycles and re-uploads.
	Number formatting
	Integers, money and times as text, without printf.
	RAM functions
	RAMFUNC(name): put a hot function in SRAM, about three times faster than flash.
	Debug protocol
	dbg::: the serial protocol the simulator and the PC tools drive a game through.
	Build switches
	CHGAME_DEBUG and CHGAME_PROFILE: set them with build.extra_flags.

Detailed Description

The one include for a CHGame game: buttons, frame pacing, palette, drawing, lettering, effects, sound, saving and the debug protocol.

#include <CHGame.h>

brings everything the twenty casino games share, on top of CHGfx (the framebuffer, the panel and its DMA). It is modelled on the Arduboy2 library: one global object, chgame, with the same button names, nextFrame() and pollButtons(), and a handful of small namespaces for the rest (pal::, fx::, audio::, save::, dbg::).

Every CHGame game runs the same frame loop: logic, then gfx_wait() (the previous frame has finished going out to the panel), then drawing into the framebuffer, then gfx_flushAsync() (the panel gets it by DMA while the next frame's logic runs).

void setup() {
    chgame.boot();                    // buttons; START held 3 s goes back to the menu
    gfx_begin(GFX_DIV2, GFX_12BPP);   // the panel
    pal::init();                      // the house colours
    chgame.setFrameRate(60);
}
 
void loop() {
    dbg::poll();                      // the debug protocol (nothing in a release build)
    if (!chgame.nextFrame()) return;
    chgame.pollButtons();
    // ... logic ...
    pal::tick();
    audio::update();
 
    gfx_wait();                       // the previous frame has gone out: draw
    pal::commit();
    gfx_clear(FELT);
    // ... draw into the framebuffer ...
    gfx_flushAsync();                 // DMA to the panel while the next frame's logic runs
}

The whole of that sketch, with a sound and a saved counter, is the Hello example. The twenty games in the library's examples/Games/ folder are complete programs built on it.

See also

The library's README, Getting started (for Arduboy developers), Why the library is as it is