shillingworth

I got most the major bugs worked out now. Now I'm down to programming the behavior of EQUI into the UI engine. It is real nice, I can apply pixel shaders to pretty much anything that can possibly appear on screen, can put Panels and Windows of the program on 3D objects. Thinking about doing a N (N means Number) sided polygon for the open document display instead of tabs like most editors. Like a cube when 4 documents are open, the different sides when rotated horizontally have the open documents on them, not gunna bother with top or bottom that'd just get confusing.

This UI system freaking rocks ! I never imagined I could design something so complex with so very little actual code behind it. By little I mean less than an EQUI XML file worth, this thing should be cake to keep working and updated.

I'll have some Beta's of the UI system up soon, the EQ display code will take a lil bit longer though as I've got to sit and play around with EQ UI to get a solid set of notes on how various windows and their pieces actually behave. My current note set encompass 8 out of the possible 20ish behavior altering elements.

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Halelen

Keep up the good work man Im anxiously awaiting to see this beast in action.


My hats off to ya for undertaking such a project



Hal

shillingworth

Screenshot from the draw templates test (I can upload images again finally !):

This was the first set of elements I got working so far, the actual piece being displayed is just a Control - Control itself isn't usable in EQ, but it's the base class for the Window Draw Template that every on screen element can use. This was generated from an xml file, just a simple 5 liner, and using some xml/image files from DoomPda to declare the animation source.


The image was taken using fraps with the frame counter set to include in the image, that's the full screen framerate of the program, window mode hard caps it at 60 so that the desktop doesn't crash.

Drakah

I like the bordering

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Regards,

Drakah
shakahr.com
Remember...it is only a GAME

shillingworth

I have internet back, got most of the editor done, just writing the visual behavior of the UI pieces. So far I have 4 of the controls done, animations, textures, draw templates (of all types), and a little screen element functionality. Will probably be a week or two before i'm done with all the elements visual behavior, then I add input which should be very quick since I can use the input code from the gui I designed for the editor.

Sparxx

Heya, Is there a new place to download what you have so far? The links in previous posts are not working and I would like to give it a look.

Thanks!

shillingworth

I'll have to set up a new download site.

Looks like I have to rewrite the section of code that fetches pieces from other files. I was just using a bunch of elements in a single file to test things out, but when I tried one that isn't in my test xml file, it turns out that it's having problems keeping unused but loaded images (like the flyby animation of a button when it's normal) loaded while they aren't in the file with the element being interacted with. Probably just some flaw of my design, I've been having it load images into memory only when they are used to prevent out of texture memory errors (true me they are easy to get when your dealing with the massive animations file).

Input seems to work good, I coded the elements so that they have three behaviors: Editable, which is used when editing the element, like entering text into a label or stretching it's boundaries; Playable, which acts as closely as I can get it to in-game; and Dead, doesn't do anything but draws it's base type, like a combobox wouldn't extend it's sub-menu in this mode or mouse over on buttons wouldn't trigger flyby animations. The behaviors can be changed at any point once the element has at least an item name in the xml data.

I've already added a method for loading screen shots in the editor, can add any image type to the background image or just set the background to a color.

Overall this is getting to the point where it's more fun than work, though I do dead the thought of getting the behaviors right on every last element at each of their sub levels.

My plan for now is to get all the elements to load visually, to the point of basic positioning of them on the screen and interpreting that to the xml data. I may tweak the loading stuff later after I get the basics going but for now it's still a minute or two to load the default UI.

krowebar

Can't wait to try this out!

shillingworth

Well when geocities upload page starts to work for me, I'll have a test up. All the test does is render the 16 class animations, but it's to find out if I got the rendering worked out properly. Also there will be a settings xml file to change after download, I'll give detailed instructions on that when I get this file to upload.

In the meantime, if you intend to test this program when I get a chance to upload it, get the Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 1.0 Refresh. I'm using XNA to do the drawing since Managed DirectX is such a pita to work with, any computer capable of DirectX shouldn't have a single problem with XNA since it's built on top of DirectX.

krowebar

Ready for testing! lol

morpheme65

crossing fingers hoping it will work with vista home premium! lol

shillingworth

It should work with vista. Send me a PM morph with an email address, i'll send you a short test program to see if it will, curious myself.

Well this sucks, unless I find a better compression than 7-zip's ultimate compression, I'm gunna have to find a new file server to keep the test stuff on. My programs up to 7.5mb, geocities only supports 5mb uploads at the max.

krowebar

If ya want, I can try hosting it on my RR account. Not sure of the limits it has(since they don't tell ya), but I have many mp3's and jpg's on it for Magelos.

saieli

savefile.com lets u store up to 60mb per file try em its what i use for my files and its free