Small Status Update

[DarkStorm]

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to give a small status update regarding the engine's progress.

New stuff I've been doing:
- Experimenting with the ToEE cloth system
Well, I've found out how they defined what constitutes clothing and how they do the collisions. I've written a model viewer to visualize the corresponding collision objects (They've used Spheres and Cylinders). Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/OOSfR.png
Cloth simulation is still a new topic to me though, so this'll take some time and isn't that high on the priority list since it's eyecandy.
- Rewriting/Refactoring the skeletal animation systen
This is necessary to keep the engine maintainable. And it'll improve performance too.
- Help System
I converted help.tab and put it into a hyper-linked viewer ingame, and also wired the help button to it:

While this may not be very nice at the moment, it demonstrates the ability. Oh and there can be images embedded too. (It's basically a HTML viewer, really).
- Music + Ambient Sounds
The sound schemes are now converted and background music plus ambient effects are playing. The general system works, although it has some rough edges and needs polish. I.e. cross-fading between different music tracks and the /SCATTER command need to be implemented. But it really adds to the athmosphere already.
- Bugfixes
The usual ;-) Dwarves and Elves should now be visible. (Someone had the problem of Mona being invisible... Reason: She's a dwarf)
- Clipping Geometry
The clipping geometry should now be 100% accurate. This also fixes the clipping issues in the water node.
- Linux Support
Agetian is currently compiling the engine on Linux and after my vacation (I'll be gone for a week, starting next Sunday), I'll try to get my hands on a MacBook, to get it running natively on OS X too.

Regards,
Storm

[Agetian]

Great progress so far! Hope to get it up and running on Linux soon, too (as soon as we can figure out that stupid ffmpeg show-stopper )

- Agetian

[ManosFate]

Looks like great progress!

[Gaear]

I love the clear-background text displays ... easily superior to Troika's little black boxes with smudgy, boring blue text. (What were they thinking?)

Question: will the box with the worldmap and logbook et al be staying in the upper right corner? Seems like that would interfere with the battle queue during combat.

[ManosFate]

Originally Posted by Gaear

I love the clear-background text displays ... easily superior to Troika's little black boxes with smudgy, boring blue text. (What were they thinking?)

The translucent boxes look good until you open a 2nd window and they overlap, then the overlapping text becomes unreadable. I think I'd posted that as a UI improvement to Storm somewhere to be considered when the fine polish needs to come in.

I'll have to dig around into some of the other apps or OS's handle overlapping translucency.

That said, i agree with Gaear that the new interface is looking fabulous.

[DarkStorm]

Originally Posted by Gaear

Question: will the box with the worldmap and logbook et al be staying in the upper right corner? Seems like that would interfere with the battle queue during combat.

UI positioning/behaviour/style is NOT final.
Since none of the UI is coded in C++, and all is scripted, you can imagine how easy it is to change that later on ;-)

*edit*: By the way. I am really looking forward to improving the ingame help with the new features. Basically it's a HTML view now, which allows for a lot of new formatting. If you're technically inclined, this is the supported subset of HTML:
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7-snapsho...ml-subset.html

Especially interesting is embedding images (i.e. portraits, area of effect information for spells, maps, and other stuff).

Regards,
Storm

[Sitra Achara]

Just to demonstrate, it took me 5 minutes to find EvilTemple\data\interface\UtilityBar.qml, and change the bar's x,y coordinates to resemble ToEE. And it can probably be easily changed to be draggable. That's the beauty of it!




(if you are inclined to modify it as well, this is how the beginning of the file should look like:

import Qt 4.7

/*
    Models the utility bar, which is visible on the lower right side in the original game.
*/
Item {
    width: 181
    height: 83

    x: gameView.viewportSize.width - width - 5
    y: gameView.viewportSize.height - height - 5

)

BTW, will the help system support animations?
(I also like the added support for tables - should be very useful)

[DarkStorm]

I'll move it down too.

I don't even remember why I had it at the top ;-)

> BTW, will the help system support animations?
Good question. I'll try loading an animated gif.

*edit*: Hm, sorry, gifs aren't animated. If the need really comes up, I can embed the entire WebKit engine. I would only need to change a tag in the help ui file. Then you can use everything Chrome/Safari support in web pages. It'd add a 10mb DLL file to the distribution though (although I wouldn't mind, I'll probably go that route for some editing tools anyway).

Regards,
Storm

[Agetian]

Originally Posted by DarkStorm

I'll move it down too.
*edit*: Hm, sorry, gifs aren't animated. If the need really comes up, I can embed the entire WebKit engine. I would only need to change a tag in the help ui file. Then you can use everything Chrome/Safari support in web pages. It'd add a 10mb DLL file to the distribution though (although I wouldn't mind, I'll probably go that route for some editing tools anyway).

I think that given the size of the game, a 10mb overload would not be a huge issue, so if the implementation is justified by the needs (not only the animated gifs but also the editing tools), I'd say go for it.

- Agetian

[DarkStorm]

Originally Posted by Agetian

I think that given the size of the game, a 10mb overload would not be a huge issue, so if the implementation is justified by the needs (not only the animated gifs but also the editing tools), I'd say go for it.

- Agetian

The editing tools don't necessarily need to come with the default installation though ;-)

Regards,
Storm

[Agetian]

Originally Posted by DarkStorm

The editing tools don't necessarily need to come with the default installation though ;-)

Yeah, true. Who knows, maybe we should start a poll to figure it out.

- Agetian

[Salk]

Originally Posted by Agetian

Yeah, true. Who knows, maybe we should start a poll to figure it out.

- Agetian

I am all for having it part of the main package. I mean, nowadays 10Mbs of extra download is nothing for most people with a decent Internet connection.

Keep up the great work, DarkStorm!

[ManosFate]

Hey Darkstorm, how is progress? I never saw a link to the build with these tweaks that you mention. I'm always interested in seeing the new stuff.

[DarkStorm]

Originally Posted by ManosFate

Hey Darkstorm, how is progress? I never saw a link to the build with these tweaks that you mention. I'm always interested in seeing the new stuff.

Heyho, I am currently working on character creation, which will take a while, since several d20 rules need to be implemented first.

[DarkStorm]

To elaborate on this a little more:
I am currently implementing gameplay systems that will also be used for combat, since they are partially required for character creation.

I.e.: Registry of races, classes, feats, deities, domains, etc.

I am not implementing the full range of functionality yet, but adding them all just with a name and description is quite a bit of work already.

The character creation screen is also almost finished up to (but excluding) the feat selection. It still lacks the selection of a specialization school for wizards & favored enemies for rangers.

If you want to check out some of the changes, you can look at the scripts in the Git repository online:

i.e. classes:
http://gitorious.org/eviltemple/engi...d20-classes.js

all scripts:
http://gitorious.org/eviltemple/engi...aster/bin/data

Regards,
Storm