Comments

So I'm apparently getting spammed in the comments sections. Don't think too much of it. I'll mark them as spam when I see them and they'll get deleted. I actually did make a little progress on PrC the other day. I have a working method of assigning actions, animations, and cameras to an enemy. What I REALLY want is a way to make a preview of that for the user. I can display the individual pieces of the models with textures on them, but the animation still doesn't make any sense to me. That and camera scripts aren't wholly understood so I couldn't guarantee that any preview of that would be correct. This would also mean loading up more files in memory. Not a difficult feat, but time consuming. I also thought about adding in action effects, but they are grouped in the exe rather than the archive so that's probably out. It'll be slow going from here on out. I'm still doing bits and pieces of things to it so this project will be alive until I'm done or dead.

Not related...

So yesterday, my not-yet-17mo daughter got a hold of one of my PSP cases that had a game in it. Somehow she got the case open, got the game out and closed the case. So what is the first thing she decides to do with her new treasures? She puts the game in her mouth (thankfully psp games are very hard to damage by physical contact) and begins shaking the case up and down while shaking her head side to side. She apparently thinks this is the funniest thing she's ever done by herself and begins giggling like crazy at this new coordination she didn't know she had. My wife (who is the only one with her) hears this and realizes something suspicious is going on and promptly takes both things away and calls me at work to tell me to put my things up. I can't help but laugh that it happened and be sad that I don't have any evidence of it other than her word. This is likely the funniest thing she'll do all year and I missed it. :(

After how many months...

Finally got around to opening PrCMDI's source and started tinkering again. Biggest reason why I didn't do anything before is I was crashing the designer with a custom control that I finally figured out was creating an infinite loop. I've since solved this and all attack data is correctly being processed by the appropriate window. I'm going to finish the enemy data window next. That probably won't take as long now that SpooX has posted a pretty recent PDF with the contents of the wiki. After that it's formations then a lot of GUI cleaning before a public beta! It sounds like fewer steps than it is so be patient. :) WM is fairing pretty well, but the source is in terrible shape. I mean, which would you rather have? A single 448K file with 80% of the source code in it or 28 organized files totaling 286K containing all the source in it? Needless to say it's very difficult to navigate and find where certain things are happening that need changing. Still, it's mostly ready for release. After two more adjustments it's done and I'm finished with it.

Removing Dependencies

Partially based on a not too friendly conversation I had with a user about this, I'm going to remove WM's dependency on the VB Power Packs. I didn't like using them for only a minor graphical flair so I'm switching to the more acceptable practice of using the Graphics class to draw lines (which I should have done in the beginning). This will be implemented in the final WM version which will also accompany the releasing of the source for WM and PrC. Don't think that's wholly a good thing. The more I look at the code in WM the more I hate it. It's full of bad coding practices, commented code, not documented, etc. It's not a good example of my coding ethics today. There's still the possibility of implementing xml with it, but that will take time to hunt down all the text I want to be changeable. PrCMDI will continue to be closed source.

Back to it a little

Remember back in the day when WM was being created and all the functions and properties were still being discovered; And how I had to release a new minor version just to update the description of a thing? Well say "screw you" to all that now. PrCMDI's going all xml and going to be using external strings to represent everything now. I recently helped a modder add quadruple and quintuple AP growth on weapons and armor and he'll have to manually edit the weapon/armor data using the raw data editor in WM. There's no option for greater than Triple AP growth in the drop-downs on the weapon or armor tabs because the unmodded game ignores values that are greater than 3. Well, now PrC (and eventually WM) will allow for additional changes like that. For example attack effects only range from 0 - 35 (23h) right now. However, if one adds a 37th effect to the executable, they'd have to edit the raw data in WM. There's no way to do this in PrC so enemy attacks couldn't have this. The new xml feature will allow you to add a 37th effect to the menu if you're awesome enough to know how to do that. I've already added all the texts and tested it. It works great! If I need to make a change to a damage formula or get a description wrong I just change the text in the xml and it's reflected in PrCMDI. This xml is also going to store things like text characters and element names so WM/PrC will be easier to use in other languages. It will also store battle variable and opcode descriptions so you can change them around if you wish. Point is, this is going to make WM/PrCMDI much easier to use. This will be WM's last version and I will likely release its source along with it. The source looks sloppy, but consider that I wrote the majority of it three years ago. :)

Happy Birthday WallMarket!!...almost

Four years ago, WM was in the middle of beta testing. It's gone through a lot of iterations and bug fixes to get where it's at. It still has some issues, but I'm still proud of it. I created it because I wanted to start a new game of FFVII and I learned there wasn't a tool that would let me have more materia links on the Buster Sword. After googleing my way on to the forums at qhimm I discovered what it was partly known and contributed much to what wasn't. Good times. Back to the point of this blog. So in the interrim between Skyrim and Black Mesa: Source not much has happened at all. I keep picking up PrCMDI and deciding that lots of things need to be restructured. Real life work is picking up, my daughter is starting to walk, lots of things are happening that demand my attention. This being a personal project is lowest priority to me. It still has the potential to be the greatest modding tool FFVII will ever see, but it's going to take a while in the making.

Overdue update

For those of you who haven't been watching very closely let me break it down to what is on the table now. I've been discussing strategies with other VB.NET users who are supposedly knowledgeable about such things and they think that 32 drop-downs with 800 entries (the action lists) is poor design. They don't know the specifics yet, but I'm really not certain anything else will do. I've played with the idea of a listbox that the user can click on to enable editing, but that seems a bit clumsy and adds extra clicks that I don't think the user should have to do. On the other hand, populating each listbox does take forever for each enemy form loaded.

Since I finally got time to play Skyrim I've been doing a lot of that and mostly neglecting PrC. I'll get back to it when I'm satisfied with my killing sprees in Skyrim.

I've also been "commissioned" to see how the texture effects can be safely extended from 15 fps to 60 fps without having to alter the animations themselves. What I've found is that the graphics plugin handles all of that. Since I've gotten Aali's OpenGL driver I can't see how the delivered plugin handles it. It looks like the exe dumps some values in specific places that the graphics driver reads and does things with. I have to do more investigating....