[OpenMaw]

LeoD, on 30 September 2012 - 01:54 PM, said:

When it's done.

Oh you're asking for someone to love you in all the wrong ways.

[Fox]

Commando Nukem, on 30 September 2012 - 01:56 PM, said:

Oh you're asking for someone to love you in all the wrong ways.

True story.

[LeoD]

Love me.

[Jenz/Amaka]

LeoD, on 30 September 2012 - 02:24 PM, said:

Love me.

When Duke64 is done

[Nukey]

By the way Fox, you should probably chat with the eduke32 developers about possible methods of converting sound numbers at pre-map through code.

[Hendricks266]

I was about to post: Is there any lack of functionality in EDuke32 that is holding back the mod?

[Fox]

Well, not completely, though I am waiting for some improvements.

The biggest problem right now that is holding the mod back is that you can't save a map in Mapster32 without it changing tons of things on it.

[Jimmy]

Have you tried using an older Mapster or JonoF BUILD?

[Fox]

I want to use scripts.

[Arkides]

Fox, on 30 September 2012 - 08:01 PM, said:

I want to use scripts.

Making sure it's known there's still love for this mod and some impatient fans waiting.

[MusicallyInspired]

And some patient ones...

[Hendricks266]

At this point some of the roadblocks are desired features in EDuke32, including dynamic sound remapping.

[Fox]

The top priorities for now would be 1) dynamic sound remapping and 2) translucency (0-255) for actors or sprites on the screen. Although the first issue makes it impractical to release the mod.

[Nukey]

As pointed out, the lack of dynamic sound remapping is a definite obstacle, and it wouldn't make much sense to release a beta until we have that functionality.

Having said that, we are still actively working on the mod: Hellfire is currently ripping and animating the models, Fox never really stops working on the mod, and I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve.

I think this mod is quietly approaching its peak. After another extensive bout of silence, I expect to see dynamic sound remapping hit and for the domino effect to take over.

[MusicallyInspired]

I'm curious, what exactly is dynamic sound mapping and how will Duke64 utilize it? I've just never heard the term before and it could mean anything the way I'm thinking about it.

[Nukey]

Duke64 uses an entirely different set of sound definition numbers, so all of the sounds are scrambled when trying to play the extracted maps.

Unfortunately, some of the sound definitions in the game are hard-coded, so redefining them via DEFS.CON is not possible.

As I understand it, dynamic sound remapping will remap the sounds 'on the fly', allowing even hard-coded sounds to be redefined.

[MusicallyInspired]

Ah, I see. Thank you.

[Hendricks266]

dynamicremap : art tile numbers :: dynamicsoundremap : sound IDs

(analogy notation)

[Hendricks266]

I just made three commits that ought to help the project. I haven't touched dynamicsoundremap because I don't know what (if anything) Helix has planned for it.

[Fox]

Thanks, but spriteext.alpha is still not working for models.

Edit: I figured you can control screen translucency by setting the variable alpha after using rotatesprite... but that seems to affect menus and such, hmmm.

[Hendricks266]

I'll see what I can do about models.

Ugh, more screen drawing commands. I wish there were a better way. I'll see if anyone has any objection to three more. (gametext16, rotatesprite16a, gametext16a)

[Fox]

Alternatively you could convert the "16" effect to a orientation flag, so you would only need the alpha for rotatesprite and gametext (actually gametextz).

[Hendricks266]

That's a good idea. So, rotatespritea and gametextza.

Off-topic: Daedolon wants some way to center text with variable-width fonts. How should that work?

[TerminX]

The same way the line wrapping code works, you loop through all the letters to be printed in order to get the size of the string on-screen and then base the starting position off of that.

[Fox]

Well, I think it is a bit weird that there is no orientation flag to align the text to the center / left / right.

If a new command for gametext is going to be created, it wouldn't hurt to have a letter-spacing entry. If I am not wrong it's impossible to write anything legible with minifont.

[Hendricks266]

TerminX, on 03 March 2013 - 07:08 PM, said:

The same way the line wrapping code works, you loop through all the letters to be printed in order to get the size of the string on-screen and then base the starting position off of that.

There is a problem in that CON is not C; we can't access the individual letters of a quote and compute which tile they will use, even though we have tilesizx/y.

However, I discovered that the game's hardcoded hacks have benefited us for once:

definequote 16382 This quote is centered

onevent EVENT_DISPLAYREST
    gametext STARTALPHANUM 320 30 16382 0 0 16 0 0 xdim ydim
endevent

Just set the x value to 320. (Or 320<<16 once that becomes an option.)

[Fox]

Probably most people who have used gametext know of that. The thing is having a text center-aligned without it being in the center of the screen.

[Hendricks266]

gamevar temp 0 0
gamevar x 0 0

definequote 666 This quote sucks

onevent EVENT_DISPLAYREST
    qstrlen temp 666
    setvarvar x tilesizx[STARTALPHANUM] // rough approximation
    mulvarvar x temp
    divvar x 2
    addvar x 160 // put your centered position here
    gametext STARTALPHANUM x 30 666 0 0 16 0 0 xdim ydim
endevent

This code was only ~1px off from setting x to 320 and letting the source handle it.

[Fox]

Since you are planning to change the behavior of gametext now, I suppose that, besides the must-have letter-spacing entry, it also needs some orientation flag to read the characters from BIGALPHANUM or THREEBYFIVE. It's annoying that you must have another set of these fonts in a rearranged order so you can use them with gametext. Another thing missing now is the ability to change the width of the whitespace from 5px to something else, I suggest that it should return the width of the tile after the tilde (if the tile in question exists). Other than orientation flags to align the text that's what is needed to give control over the text.

[Hendricks266]

Hold your horses. I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the requests for the text functions.

Ideally, letter spacing would be completely controlled internally using the tile sizes as proper guidelines. (This means variable-width text welding.) There must be a font guide somewhere that states that the ideal whitespace size is half the letter 'N' or something.

The issue with adding things to orientation is that it is an engine-side variable that gametext (game-side) passes through to the engine rotatesprite calls. I can see us adding a new, separate bitfield for the game-side text functions to munch on. In fact, I like this idea. We could benefit from separate flags for the blue font, gray font, red font, mini font, etc.

Alpha is in for models and voxels in Polymost.