vecna
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Yep, all the stuff will be compatible with XP. I'm currently running xp, tho as soon as I get vs.net I'll be reformatting back to 2k. XP's just a bit too pastel for me. ;)
CHR stuff is basically going to be the same as v2 chrs, only hicolor. (right now we just have a new CHRMAK. prae started working on a windows chr editor but got frustrated with it after like 5 rewrites and quit ;) the .CHR format is a bit different but the source art for chrmak is the same. Your transparent color should either be color 0 for indexed images or magenta for hicolor images (255,0,255).
For sound, well, basically the same as winv2. the standard mod formats, including IT. I think "hi quality" wavs eg 44khz/16bit work, but the wavs must be MONO, not stereo, since they're working as one sound channel with a selectable pan position and stuff.. uhm. I think air started working on support for stereo wavs, but I dunno if he ever got anywhere with it. And you can probably count on mp3 support to be in there in some form or other.
Enough people have asked what features I meant about mikmod. Ok I'll spill the beans. Basically we support nested suspend/restore music (eg your in a dungeon map. a battle starts - you SuspendMusic(), play the battle music, and when the battle is over, you ResumeMusic() and the town music comes back (with a slight fade-in) where it left off. Additionally, we have a music caching interface. You can precache any number of songs you want, so in the same example, the battle music could be precached so that the load time for the battle to start up would be absolutely minimal.
For maps, you can basically continue making any maps you'd like to use in a v2 game with maped2 or winmaped 0.999 and they should convert into maped3 seamlessly. Uh, but don't but too much effort into laying out entities. Those will probably change a good bit, so the entity conversion may not be very good. Be a bit cautious of the fact that "color 0" will not necessarily be transparent in maped3. Me3 is pretty smart about converting these but its not foolproof. Magenta (255,0,255) is considered transparent in v3 tilesets.
v3 Font images are laid out the same as v2 PCX2FNT templates, but, v3 has builtin support for variable-width fonts. The only difference here is again to use either color 0 for indexed images or magenta for hicolor for your transparent pixel, also v3 has builtin support for variable width fonts, all you do is design your template to have cells as big as your biggest font character, and make sure all of your characters are moved as far left in the character cell as possible. This way when you tell v3 to use this font as a variable width font, it'll just detect how wide each cell is, but it assumes the characters are pushed to the left of the cell.
Uh, I think thats it!
vecna
Posted on 2002-02-05 23:59:07
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