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Civ4 Title Music!

Also C64 remixes are fun: http://remix.kwed.org

Wow didn't expect that so soon! That works a treat, thank you CJ!

making good progress with the AGX integration btw

thnks!

lemmy

*blushes*

Ahh yes, thanks smiley!

Hi CJ!

I'm trying to port over the AGX editor into AGS now, but am having trouble with the tree view... Basically I have two functions, AddTreeLeaf and AddTreeRoot. Unfortunately the leaf one doesn't seem to handle children at this time, so I can only make trees of 1 depth. Is there anything I'm missing here? If not would it be possible to add parent support to the AddTreeLeaf so I can do deeper trees?

Thanks!

Lemmy

Awesmoe stuff CJ! this version is as close as we've had to 100% perfect since the move to 3.0.x! (with the huge added bonus of DX9, of course!

One thing though: when you start betas for the next point release, would it be possible to get the new plugin event that triggers once per frame before all the frames are set up you mentioned a while back? no biggie for now, as we have a work around, but it has some quirks that makes Mia go into the moonwalk at some points that we can't get around. It's fine for development though and we can progress perfectly well without it for now... (Also it adds a lot of messy hacks to integrating AGX into a game once that's released for use)

cheers for all your help!

lemmy

Thanks guys for the lovely comments!

Just a quick post to say tonight we cracked the final technological hurdle in getting the existing overlay system (used for credits, logos, lighting effects, etc) over to DX9 to run alongside the new particle system, along with a new text rendering engine for doing dialogue choices in AGX. This is officially the last big programming thing that is required for the prologue! Everything else is pretty much sparkly bells and whistles!

That said a fair bit of work is still needed on the scripting / dialogue side, the prologue has grown a great deal as we've gone on...but we're getting closer than ever now!

/party!

The worst is when there's *no* distinction between game objects and background. Anything else is down to stylistic choice IMO as long as there's consistency, as Binky says.

Awesmoe! To be honest though I'd like to do a bit of a rethink to get it to fit in with how AGS does things, to ease use for people using it without switching between two UI philosophies (AGX editor came before 3.0) For a start I'd like the folder structure for AGX files to be accessible in the tree view if that is possible, but nice to know to get it initially implemented will be straight forward

Thanks again!

lemmy

Fantastic, thanks CJ!

Awesmoe, thanks CJ! Will look into that soon.

Yup, it's D3D additive particles. Splashes being drawn before the characters, rain drops after. Works a charm!

We've still got to convert our software overlays to work with it, but it's all worked a charm. Thanks!

AGX consists of two plug-in DLLS, one for the DirectX overlay effects, and one for the conversation/cutscene engine.

There is then an AGS module which communicates with these two DLLs, so everything can be done with calls such as:

AGX.Start("Town/ThunderLoop");
AGX.Start("Town/Music1");
AGX.Start("Town/OldWomanIdleLoop");
AGX.AddEmitter("Rain1", 50, 20, 800, -15);
AGX.AddEmitter("RainSplashes", -10, 100, 800, 140);
AGX.AddEmitter("Steam2", 125, 240, 10, 10);
AGX.SetLogic("EnteredTown", "first");


The editor is written in C# in Visual Studio, and has no physical connection to AGS or AGX (beyond the files it spits out, which as xml and loaded by the AGX plugin) but we're working on integrating the editor into the AGS 3.0 editor, with CJ's help, so that AGX scripts will appear in their own category in the tree in the 3.0 editor!

And yes. Everything we do will be released for use by the AGS community. Also once the entire 3 acts are out and released, we'll be releasing all art, backgrounds, sprites, animations, effects, in their source formats for use by the community for free for non-commercial use.

That's some way off yet, though. But the initial release of AGX should be well within this year (we won't hold out on the plug-ins for all three acts ) , as we also should release the prologue. Okay, we've said "this year" a few times since 2006 but hell we're feeling like we're getting close, finally!

Thanks!

L&B

Hmmm maybe

We'll see what we can do.

Hi subspark!

First of yes, it's possible to do whatever particles we want... some scenes have single drops dripping through the trees, we have steam, fire and all sorts all running through the same system... and we're planning on having water guttering off corners of roofs in the final thing. There are also splashes in it already, they're just notoriously difficult to catch in single screenshots but are quite clear when it's running.

We'll look at getting a youtube video up of the rain in action.

re: AGX, we've basically added a new conversation / cutscene engine around AGS in a plugin, along with an editor for editing dialogue / cutscene scripts in Cole & Haag movie screenwriting format:


Click to enlarge

You can look at the example script file by following this link:

http://www.cgempire.com/forgottenelement/Example.rtf



It allows for "Poses" to be set up, to allow characters to move in and out of poses, along with transition frames and speaking frames (like):





As well as a 16 channel music blending system, asyncronus script processing, 32bit overlay system with blend modes such as additive, subtractive, modular etc. Soon we're planning pixel shader support, to allow for gaussian blur, bloom and other real-time postprocessor effects.

It will, of course, be released as soon as we've got it to a level where we're happy to release it. Thanks for your interest!

lemmy&binky

Just a quick post to say. HURRAY!

We now have fully functional DirectX particle system in AGX, meaning The Forgotten Element now has an uber lovely 32bit rain effect.

Huzzah!

Thanks go to Nickenstien for his tireless efforts over the past few weeks getting this into AGX (and thanks to CJ for implementing DX9 in the first place!).  Also note some lovely Mash characters now inhabiting Littleroot Town. Huzzah!

L&B (+N+M+N)

Okay dokey integration it be, then

That sounds cool then, I'll look to integrating the AGX editor into AGS ASAP. One thing though, does the new editor use .NET Forms? And will it be compatible with C# given it's CLR or will it need a rewrite?

Thanks CJ!

*looks into .NET plugin tut you wrote*

PS: Rain is done!!! It looks ace, thanks for your uber DX9 stuff!!

Thanks CJ! (again)

Hi CJ, I'm looking to add a "pose manager" to our C# AGX script editor, where the user can set up the different poses for characters, along with transitions in / out, and talking frames, but what would be really handy would be if we could display the poses animating in the editor.

This would mean having access to the view information from the game, as well as the sprite data to draw different sprite numbers from the acsprset.spr and into the editor. We can easily get the view information from the Game.agf xml file (YAY 3.0!) but would it be possible to get the file format to acsprset.spr?

I know that ideally, the AGX editor would be a plug-in to the AGS 3 editor, but it's not ready for that yet.

Thanks!

lemmy

Ahh it's actually called "Modify", sorry.

Glad it worked!

lemmy

cInvis works! It's moving the player slightly to the side, but he is moving off the region! Thanks, lemmy101! Thanks for the sugestion, Rui 'Trovatore' Pires! By the way, how can I put the "(Solved)" in the thread title?

"It's moving the player slightly to the side" Are you sure this is the best solution then? and cInvis isn't the same character you're trying to move? I didn't think there would be any visible snap of the player using this as all the player does is walk to a location, it's the invisible character that's snapped to the walkable area.

You could try adding a cPlayer.StopMoving(); before all that code, it might stop him snapping.

If you're happy with the results though, then cool. glad to help!

PS: Click Edit Topic and then edit the subject.

[closest place]

That would be ideal, if you want them to walk to the specific place they entered the region on. Alternatively if you want to move them to the closest place outside the region they are stood on, not the previous place, you could do this:

and I'm only supposing this out of the help file, it's got a couple of assumptions and I've not tried it, but in theory it should work:

My solution would be to create a dummy character (cInvis) who wasn't collidable, and had an invisible sprite, to help determine where the closest point outside the region to where your character is currently stood is. Then walk to where your dummy character gets moved to by "PlaceOnWalkableArea".

Next, make two walkable areas. One covering the "region" that you wan to walk off automatically (walkable Area 1), and one surrounding it which represents where you want to walk off the region onto (as well as the entire walkable area in itself)... Walkable area 2.

So what you do is this:

First you call:

Code: ags

RemoveWalkableArea(1); // this will stop the walkable area over the region your character is on 
//from being a walkable area. To help us find out where the closest walkable area is now that's not an option...

// Then move your dummy invisible character to the place your character is...
cInvis.x = cPlayer.x;
cInvis.y = cPlayer.y;

// Since the walkable area they're stood on no longer exists, if you call:
cInvis.PlaceOnWalkableArea();

// It should, in theory, move the invisible character to the closest pixel that's on a valid walkable area using 
// CJ's closest point code now that the disabled region is not an option. Then do...

RestoreWalkableArea(1); // This should reinitialise the walkable area the player is stood on so he can walk on it freely again.

// Then finally, you make the player walk to wherever the dummy character was moved to:
cPlayer.Walk(cInvis.x, cInvis.y);

This should, in theory, always work out the closest point to where he is stood out of the region. might be overkill, I dunno.

Hope this helps!

lemmy

cMia.ChangeRoom(12, 100, 100);

As far as I can see, this only affects some screen transition types and only the Direct3D driver. Has anyone had this problem with the DX5 driver?

Us, actually. The version I'm getting this on is still in DX5, we've not ported the overlay system across to DX9 yet. :S
I've tried it on Instant and FadeOutFadeIn and is doing it on both.

Cheers!

lemmy