Notes for the WME 1.1.037JPG supportWhile using JPG files for your background images can significantly reduce the size of your game, this format is NOT suitable for sprites and generally any graphics with transparent areas. Due to the lossy compression those solid transparent areas get distorted and do not work as transparent anymore.
How to use thumbnails for saved gamesFirst off, you have to enable thumbnails in ProjectMan. You do it by filling in the thumbnail dimensions in project properties in the "Saved games" section. There are two properties, "Thumbnail width" and "Thumbnail height". If as least one of those properties is set to zero, thumbnails are disabled. Otherwise WME will automatically save a thumbnails with the saved game.
Secondly you need to display the thumbnail somewhere. It's dependant on the design of your interface windows, but generally you reference the thumbnail image as an ordinary image file, using the following filename:
"savegame:0" ... where 0 is the number of a save slot whose thumbnail you want to load. You can use this filename convention anywhere you'd normally use filename like "path\file.bmp".
The WME demo uses the following approach: The save and load windows contain an empty static control, and once the player selects a used save slot, the scripts calls something like this:
if(Game.IsSaveSlotUsed(SelectedSlot)) Thumbnail.SetImage("savegame:" + SelectedSlot);
else Thumbnail.SetImage(null);
As you can see, it uses the filename conventipon described above to load an appropriate thumbnail from a selected save slot. See the "load.script" and "save.script" files in WME demo for details.
Fonts generated using the FONText utilityIf you are using the excellent
FONText utility for creating fonts for a WME game, you'll have to add one extra attribute to your font definition file.
Example:
FONT
{
IMAGE = "fonts\image_name.tga"
COLUMNS = 16
TILE_WIDTH = 24
TILE_HEIGHT = 24
AUTO_WIDTH = TRUE
FONTEXT_FIX = TRUE EXPAND_WIDTH = 1
}
The problem is the FONText utility excludes the sapce character from the font image, while WME expects to find it. The FONTEXT_FIX = TRUE attribute will tell WME the font image doesn't contain space.
