This week I spent my time building the various menu screens that our games uses. In particular I implemented the:
- Start Screen, which welcomes the user to the game
- Ready Screen, which the user sits at when waiting to start a multiplayer game mode
- Game Won, which the user sees when they win
- Game Lost, which the user sees when they lose
The end-game screens are shared between the game modes which enables some resource sharing since the graphics module is just muxing between different inputs to the display. Overall I’m pleased with how they turned out, I’ll save the preview for next week during the in-lab demos. They’re relatively simple, just showing some simple stats from the game and a win/loss message.
I also found the time to figure out what was happening on Eric’s end with his synthesis bug. The issue was that his compilation kept crashing with an interesting error in both Quartus II on the ece machines and in Quartus Prime Standard 19.1. It turns out that you cannot have empty modules (like headers with no content) added to a project in Quartus, and it causes the analysis and synthesis step to crash.
That was all I had planned for this week so overall I feel good about where I am in regards to our schedule. I feel that my sub-systems are in a demo-able state though there are a few quality of life changes that still need to be made. I need to rework the delayed auto-shift functionality to work with jittery buttons, so I’ll put that on the slate for next week. Otherwise, my remaining work is integration steps with Eric and Alton. There is a stretch goal where I want to get some graphical assets set-up such that the tiles render as more detailed objects than just colored squares. Given our lack of area constraints on the DE2-115 it would be interesting to attempt to get a nicer rendering working.