| |
WinV2 and Suggestions Displaying 1-6 of 6 total.
1
ladyvesper
|
Win V2 is interesting. Cloud's been porting our stuff to it and, while there have been a few hitches, things are working out well. Kudos.
Would adding functions to the pre-compiled set break compatibility? I'm thinking of a bunch of things that would make entity support better all-around, like the ability to kill entities (although this may have been added already; I'm still working from the 2.01 delta VCC specs), and the ability to draw entity frames separately so custom entity-handling code and such could be implemented.
Also, more frame lists would be nice. The walking frames are good for four-direction sprites, but the eight-direction sprites we want to use are taking a lot of work to implement. It'd also be nice to have frame lists in the CHR file for special animations, like jumping, etc. Right now we've got some stuff working in VCC (actually, Cloud's doing all the sprite stuff, as he's the better programmer between the two of us).
Oh, and is the WinV2 binary XP native? And how portable is it?
- the Lady Vesper
Posted on 2002-01-01 22:51:51
|
vecna
|
I'm aware of a few bugs in the last version, but by all means, let me know what you guys find. I'm here to make it be awesome as possible. ;D
Regarding vcc, we are working on a new VCC and so I don't really want to add stuff to the old one.
You can draw entities (sort of) manually by using the 'specframe' variable. Zeux uses this to handle custom animation with all of it's entities.
The binary should run just dandy in Win2k or WinXP, _maybe_ NT4 I can't remember. It should also run fine in 98/ME (over the break I tested it on my parents machines which are 98 and ME respectively and it seemed fine) but because of 9x's suckier OS stability, it is more sensitive to crashes or bugs and some people have problems with WinV2 and 9x.
- vecna
Posted on 2002-01-02 11:35:08
|
grenideer
|
v2 chrs can have pretty much as many frames as you want, which includes making all the diagonal walking directions you need as well as extras for jumping and things like that.
entity.specframe[index] is a great way for displaying frames and animations for quick movements and custom walking code. If you want another method (maybe to display entity frames without an entity actually being there?) you can always keep the entity pcx in your directory and use grabregion in custom drawing routines.
Killing entities and turning them off was added in 2.6 I believe but nothing for supported v2. What I do now is set their moving, speed, etc. variables to 0 and warp them to -1,-1. Actually, I believe in classic v2 the speed would need to be set to 9, which is an invalid speed, for this to work. 0 didn't seem to properly stop them (vec you could check on this, although your redone entity code should change this).
What project are you working on? I've always wanted to see a verge demo with 8-way movement AND 8-way frames. It always seemed weird for the chrs to still be facing horizontally or vertically.
Posted on 2002-01-02 15:16:37
|
ladyvesper
|
Well, you won't find the project listed anywhere -- Cloud and I wanted to keep it under wraps until it's in more workable condition. Cloud likes to call it "Secret Project X" for reasons unknown to me. ^^;
Basically, his idea was to see if producing a Verge game using freely available tools was feasible. Of course, this meant he had to write me a paint program. At the moment we've got a bunch of little utils doing batch processing of images rendered using trueSpace 1.0 (available for free on the web, legally). The paint program he wrote is usable and does what I need it to do, which is more than I can say for many pay programs out there. Right now the main character already has over 300 frames of animation, although this may get cut back as we move forward in the process.
What you've described for entity support is what we're currently doing, unfortunately. It just seems a bit inelegant. As to more frame lists -- all I mean is that it would be nicer to have the frame lists inside the .chr files instead of inside the VCC code, where they are at the moment.
- the Lady Vesper
Posted on 2002-01-03 07:43:16
|
ladyvesper
|
We've been playing with specframe and it works, but I was talking more about accessing the raw entity image data and blitting those sprites directly to the frame buffer (not as entities). Right now the dragon we have is 30 pcx images inside a .vrg packfile, each of which is shoveled on the screen in a loop. He's a big sprite, and having him be an entity would be nice. Although, entities can't be drawn translucently, can they? Now there's a feature request!
Have you ever considered a standard library of VCC functions that could be included with Verge2? While neither Cloud or I have ever released a demo, we've been around since the original site (something/~vecna) and the original release of V1. As everyone knows V1 was a hell of a lot easier to get running than V2. Standard, open-source program modules that "ship" with V2 would be a wonderful thing.
Of course, this opens a whole new can of worms as different functions would be required for different styles of programs; I can immediately think off-hand of the differences inherent between 4-way and 8-way systems, not to mention any code Zara would love to throw at the community. ^^; Battle systems would be nice too, although right now Cloud wants a Zelda-style system and I want one like Golden Sun, so don't ask us for input. _
Posted on 2002-01-03 07:54:00
|
ladyvesper
|
Almost forgot this too: have I mentioned before that the ability to edit with template tiles would be a godsend? Our game uses prerendered graphics, which are easy enough to import into maped2, but then placing images that are upwards of 100x100 pixels gets tedious. Is there any hope of adding support to maped2 for placement of templates? Like mini-maps in memory that act almost as brushes on a map -- you edit the template by placing a tile at a time, then use the template as a meta-tile to make your map.
Neither Cloud nor I have access to a Watcom compiler, or we'd just recompile the v2gpl sources of the maped2 with support of a kind for this.
It'd also be really easy to add saving of templates to the end of maps, the way you have the map file format set up. You could just add tags at the end of the file like so:
* byte, byte -- size of the template in tiles (width,height)
* template data (byte * width * height)
And if the end of the file is reached without finding a template, then none were saved with the map. There shouldn't be any problems with older maped versions as they'd just stop reading before the template blocks.
What say thee, vecna? ^^;
- the Lady Vesper
Posted on 2002-01-03 08:08:27
|
Displaying 1-6 of 6 total.
1
|
|
