Mycal
Staff member
OK, I've not made any huge progress, but the World Editor is almost in a state where it can be declared good enough 
. It currently only allows creation of maps/areas, but that should be good enough for the time being. I just have to add one more property page with the remaining elements for the map and it'll be good enough to move onto the next step.
It's been stated before, but maps are now very basic and rely totally on scripts to make them more dynamic. For example, old style map-attributes are gone. They were totally expendable anyway, since a script could do everything that a tile attribute could do. Anyway, I'll leave a few key map flags that are expected to be used a lot (such as Indoors, Always Dark, Boot Map) and then leave a large amount of flags that can be set using scripts.
Finally, for the world editor, just because I don't want to yet, I'm not going to worry about doing the animations for tiles yet. It should be relatively easy, but as past has shown, tweaking animations to look right is a real pain.
Next step that I'll work on is the client. In the past I've used a separate but similar codebase for the client and the demo. Not anymore. From now on, I'm going to have them totally combined and simply use a compile flag to determine whether to build with or without network connections. The client, unlike the world editor, will be a fresh start for me. I'm not going to reuse the old code, nor upgrade the code to vb.net. I want to start totally fresh and work from the ground up off of slimdx.
For those interested, I plan on going in this order.
- Load a very complex testing map (lots of tiles, layers, tints, rotations, xy shifts, opacity changes, etc).
- Draw the map fully each loop
- Once everything draws exactly how it needs to be, use a buffered system similar to what was in use in the old VB6 code.
- Draw a single player and fully test the depth level of maps
- Add lighting and particle effects
- Go back to world editor and add lighting to the maps
- Create a very small selection of effects and leave the rest for later (or scripting)
- Add sound and music
And now that I have everything listed out, this part seems like the easiest part of this whole project (sans Lighting effects). Everything has been done before relatively easily in both DX7 and DX8. How much harder could it be to do in SlimDX (famous last words)? Lighting effects I've always had issues with. I can never seem to get them to work properly in a 2D environment. Hopefully that's not the case this time.
Next update should have pictures!
. It currently only allows creation of maps/areas, but that should be good enough for the time being. I just have to add one more property page with the remaining elements for the map and it'll be good enough to move onto the next step.It's been stated before, but maps are now very basic and rely totally on scripts to make them more dynamic. For example, old style map-attributes are gone. They were totally expendable anyway, since a script could do everything that a tile attribute could do. Anyway, I'll leave a few key map flags that are expected to be used a lot (such as Indoors, Always Dark, Boot Map) and then leave a large amount of flags that can be set using scripts.
Finally, for the world editor, just because I don't want to yet, I'm not going to worry about doing the animations for tiles yet. It should be relatively easy, but as past has shown, tweaking animations to look right is a real pain.
Next step that I'll work on is the client. In the past I've used a separate but similar codebase for the client and the demo. Not anymore. From now on, I'm going to have them totally combined and simply use a compile flag to determine whether to build with or without network connections. The client, unlike the world editor, will be a fresh start for me. I'm not going to reuse the old code, nor upgrade the code to vb.net. I want to start totally fresh and work from the ground up off of slimdx.
For those interested, I plan on going in this order.
- Load a very complex testing map (lots of tiles, layers, tints, rotations, xy shifts, opacity changes, etc).
- Draw the map fully each loop
- Once everything draws exactly how it needs to be, use a buffered system similar to what was in use in the old VB6 code.
- Draw a single player and fully test the depth level of maps
- Add lighting and particle effects
- Go back to world editor and add lighting to the maps
- Create a very small selection of effects and leave the rest for later (or scripting)
- Add sound and music
And now that I have everything listed out, this part seems like the easiest part of this whole project (sans Lighting effects). Everything has been done before relatively easily in both DX7 and DX8. How much harder could it be to do in SlimDX (famous last words)? Lighting effects I've always had issues with. I can never seem to get them to work properly in a 2D environment. Hopefully that's not the case this time.
Next update should have pictures
!