Overlay Capability

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Fri Jul 09, 2004 5:43 am

At:

dianneandpaul.net/CSBwin/OverlayDemo.rar

You will find a proof-of-concept version of the
editor (CSBuild), the runtime (CSBwin), and a demo
dungeon. You have to play it in size one to see the
overlay.

If you want to edit it to see how it works you need
to use the editor that is packaged with it.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Fri Jul 09, 2004 7:59 am

wicked.. need to investigate that.. I also need sleep.. oh my.. which to do first.. Hmm I think sleep wins out. but I promise after I investigate to provide you with more overlay stuff so you can have something to test with

If you want that kind of stuff that is

moo

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Fri Jul 09, 2004 2:03 pm

I don't need any test material. This enhancement is nowhere near
testing phase. I am just keeping you up-to-date with my progress.
What you see is only proof that there are no impossible hurdles in
our way.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Sun Jul 11, 2004 2:27 am

Oh.. BTW.. works nice and fast... but then I can't really account for much with a 128 meg card a gig of RAM and a hyperthreaded 2.8ghz CPU... a lot of things are fast on this thing. I had a 200MMX I would have tried it out on but I lent that to my dad as a Rogerwilco server so he can talk with his flying buddies on IL2.

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Sun Jul 11, 2004 2:37 pm

I develop all of these things on a 166 MHz P1 laptop. And I try everything
at a 'Medium' speed which is about 100 MHz, I think. If it works OK for
me then it should work well for you.

One problem is that the screen is updated only once per 'Tick' of the
internal game clock. At 'Normal' game-speed that is about 4.5 per second.
We might have to do something about that someday.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Sun Jul 11, 2004 2:44 pm

yeah well for DM animation I guess you don't need more than that.. however you might want to get to at least 10fps. That apears to be the main minimum fluid animation speed.

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 7:38 pm

I updated OverlayDemo.rar at

dianneandpaul.net/CSBwin

to include a pressure-pad-operated Save Point as suggested
in one of the RTC forums.

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 8:44 pm

wow, that was quick!
I assume if it works well the next stage would be to have a dungeon.dat format option for disabling normaling saving too?

Post by **Gambit37** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 9:06 pm

I just tried this and found a small bug -- the indent for the OK button on the "Saves are disabled£ screen is drawn in the wrong place, too far to the right over the movement controls.

As for the overlay capability; looks very cool but I have no idea what all that DSA mumbo jumbo means!

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Mon Jul 12, 2004 10:47 pm

I rather expect that the DSA will continue to be 'mumbo jumbo' for
many people. To help with this I am implementing an Export/Import
capability for DSAs. The Export already works.

This will allow you to request a DSA to perform a particular function,
someone else can design it and export it, and you can import it. We
might even develop a library of useful DSAs. It certainly beats asking
the author of CSBwin and CSBuild to rewrite the runtime and editor
to solve every problem.

The overlay DSA simply increments the transparency by 50 until 100 and
then decrements it by 50 until 0. You could try changing the two places where
'50 occurs to '25' and see what happens. If anyone really wants to understand
it then I can slowly explain it. It is (of course) really very simple once
you 'get' it. But there are lot of details to learn.....like the language it
is written in is foreign and that makes it hard to get started.

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:48 am

I posted a new OverlayDemo.rar that is capable
of using more than one overlay. I installed a dungeon
with cowsmanaut's underwater overlay sequence as
a demo. You can only see it in x1 size.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 4:31 am

simply awesome.. could use a few more fps.. but it works perfectly!!

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 11:06 pm

I posted a new OverlayDemo.rar at

http://dianneandpaul.net/CSBwin

Using the CSBwin.exe included in the demo and
the CSBuild1.3 that I released you can now begin
to test the overlay capability. It has lots of work
yet to be done (error conditions/messages, different
overlay algorithms, etc) but it seems functional.

It is labeled as release 'Overlay Alpha'.
It should solve Zyx's 'Blackout' problem.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 4:17 am

is it still only level one capable or in all screen sizes?

Post by **Paul Stevens** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 5:28 am