As tired as I am after a long and difficult tow truck adventure this morning, I'm too excited to rest at the moment. I discovered devduck on YouTube and his Dauphin game. It's a RPG game where a marine biologist travels the world to clean it up and clean up the seas. It's exactly the kind of game I'd love to play. I plan on joining his monthly support subscription here soon and learning what I can from him. My PiCarts project is both hardware and software, but I'm working mostly to create a platform for excellent software. I'd love to release a Dauphin cart some day. I may propose the idea when development is far enough along, but it's a far off dream for now. Stardew Valley is another wholesome game I'd love to see on the platform. I don't even think there is a version out right now that will run on the Pi...
This log is you outline what I need my Pi 40p to do, and how I might go about doing it.
Game Development
I plan to use Pygame for game development if I can ever get the time to learn it. I'm also considering the Godot game development engine as it's available in the PopShop on Pop!_OS, which is my new every day OS on the Pi 400. I've been trying to avoid a game engine and doing things the easy way, as I want to develop more skill. In the end, I need to make progress on this project, so small, easy victories are in order. It's like how I'll use a chainsaw to fell a tree, just to cut and shape parts of it with an axe and hand tools.
Graphic Design
This should be simple enough, as I know of a few programs off hand I can use. Inkscape is my go-to, with GIMP being another solid option. Pixel art programs should exist for the Pi these days as well. I may also cheat and buy some indie game asset packs just to get going. The Pi 400 should have enough power for such tasks. I'll add active cooling to the Pidock 400 and overclock to 2.3GHz as well.
Video Editing, Management, and Encoding
This isn't a task related to any of my current documented projects, but is a separate hobby of mine. I work with video files all of the time. I plan to produce my own adventure videos as I travel, and I have media backups totalling about 5TB from over the years. Some files are very recent 4K recordings from my GoPro, some are DVD and VHS backups from many years ago. The plan is to be able to compress the 4K files and reduce them to 1080p and edit on the Pi, and also convert all old formats to something modern. I'd like to convert everything to H265. The Pi struggles very hard with that codec, as I haven't gotten hardware acceleration working, but it's possible. Slow. I may get a second Pi 4 just to run 24/7 and convert videos, or I may buy a Ryzen 9 Zen 3 based mini computer to handle the initial conversion. Either way, have much to do with video files these days. The first program I ever wrote actually was for the video clean up project I started in 2013. I wrote it about a year ago or so to find the codec of a video file and write it to the filename in square brackets. It helped me immensely as I tried to see what all I am working with. I've never seen another program like it. That's why I made it myself. I can run that on the Pi easily. It's Python. As far as software goes, I'm looking into Kdenlive for video editing, Handbrake for video conversions, my custom program to find and prioritize files to be converted, HBBatchbeast for bulk conversion, and Audacity for simple audio editing.
General Software Development
I typically use Thonny for Python, Arduino IDE for microcontrollers, and am testing out Notepadqq for notes, programming and replacing things. The Pi 400 is plenty fast enough for this task and I've had no problems with it. I am trying to avoid doing general development with Raspberry Pi OS as I find it's pain to use. It is the target platform for quite a few things, but I can keep that in mind as I develop elsewhere.
There isn't too much else I can think of. I'll start testing some software and workflows here soon. I've got to record some very important audio for a friend soon and will do the editing on the Pi. I've got some video clips I can convert from 4K to 1080p and work with in the editor. I've got tons of video files that need sorted and checked for corruption. I've got games, programs, and interfaces to develop. I've got plenty to do and am curious to see how much of it the Pi 400 can handle. Plenty more updates to come.
Dustin
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