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some questions about V3 Displaying 1-3 of 3 total.
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Technetium
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Will it support a graphics format that has built-in mask data (like .tga or .png, for example)?
When using functions like setpixel or rectfill, will we be able to set a range of transparency options (such as 1-100 %) instead of the previous on/off?
Previously, when creating sprite graphics, we had to use either RGB(0,0,0) or RGB(255,0,255) to represent pixels that would be omitted in the image, completely transparent. If V3 treats everything as high color, then what color will be used to represent that (if the first question I asked is yes, then you don't need to answer this since it would be obvious)?
Are we going to be able to run music independantly of map files? So that we can start a song playing, switch maps and have the song continue, but if you were at a certain plot point in the game, you might want a different song to play (and still continue between those maps).
While on the subject of sound, will the old V1+ variable for mod position be back?
How about use of parentheses in IF statements?
Last one... Should I recode all ~15k lines of Vortex in V3, or do you think it wouldn't be worth it? If a lot of changes are made that I asked about, then it would seem like a good reason... but will it drive me insane in the process? :-)
-Technetium
Posted on 2002-02-05 20:59:59
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vecna
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Yes, we support 1-100% type lucency in all blit functions. The primary transparent color is magenta (255,0,255), but in the engine it can be changed.
Your question about the alpha channel is an interesting one. The short of it is that our image objects load and keep track of the alpha channel but currently none of the blit code deals with it, and there is quite a lot of blitter code. So, v3 WILL support alpha channel, but NOT in the first version. There's too much other stuff for us to deal with first, and I don't really consider alpha important enough to delay the initial launch. It is possible that rather than us going back and putting alpha-channel stuff in all of our very numerous graphics api functions, we'll just have a BlitAlpha() function.
In short, if alpha is REALLY important to you, sphere or ika or something that had alpha built in from the ground up might be a better choice. For us it's something we'll support as much as we can, but our original plan didn't really include it since the core graphics setup that drives v3 was written before alpha was very prominent.
Is it worth recoding in v3? Well, I dont know what kind of game it is, but there are a few reasons it might be worthwhile.
1) V3 has just goddamn cool graphics effects, and just TONS of small improvements throughout the entire engine that really add up.
2) V3 isn't "weird". winv2 is still "weird", somewhat to my dismay (eg, unstable). When I made winverge I ran into a lot of problems where the tools were buggy and/or not very resistant to user error. So there were some bugs I simply could NOT fix, because they were sort of inherent bugs, corrupt maps, strings that weren't properly null-terminated, things of that nature. I think there's still that a bit, to a lesser degree, in v2. I know for a fact that there was a rare bug in the RLE compression/decompression routines used throughout V2. But in any event, v3 doesn't exhibit ANY of the weirdness that winv2 does (even on 98 systems), even tho they share a good part of the core engine code (a general engine/api I've been playing around with since before V2 went GPL. We've used this base engine in many projects, including VO, and none of those exhibited the weird behavior that WinV2 does, so. blegh).
3) If I can ever figure out how to make the UI not be horribly hideously ugly (new feature announcement!), v3 will have a builtin vc debugger. I originally wanted to put this into winv2 as well (which is where the VC stack trace in the latest winv2 beta came from) but it turned out that we had to change the vc3 bytecode a bit to add some more information to make the debugger very useful, so it was not practical to add to winv2.
Um. I think that's it. yeah.
vecna
Posted on 2002-02-06 00:35:38
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Technetium
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Well, alpha is pretty important to me, but... I can also be patient, as long as it eventually goes in there. If the engine is currently loading the information, I'm confident someone will eventually write the code to make use of it. The reason I don't go to a different creation kit like Sphere is that I have been with Verge since quite a while before the first V2 came out, and it's what I know. VC is currently the only language I really know, and it's taken me this long to learn it as well as I do. V3 appears to be an expansion of the syntaxes used in V2 with minor changes. The python V2 was totally different, and that's why I stuck with v2.5 despite python's obvious flexibility. So I'm looking forward to this V3.
Posted on 2002-02-06 23:56:13
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