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16

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: April 04, 2003, 12:42:41 PM »

Well, I think this would be possible, but do you really think it's necessary to draw directly into the backbuffer and/or texture?

I think it would be cool for filters or dynamically created sprites (e.g. constructred from different parts). In my case I want to be able to paint a beam from one point to another onto the background.

Of course, you can overcome this by calling the LoadLibrary function explicitly and keep the DLL loaded all the time

That's what I hoped for.

but there comes the biggest problem: the player can save/load at any time and there is no standard mechanism of telling the DLL to "serialize" its internal data.

I admit, that I didn't think about serialization. In the case of my tree type, I could overcome it, by initializing the tree, the first time it's called in a game session(providing it's possible to use global DLL variables). I want to use this trees for conversations and haven't thought about any further use .
Maybe a general serialization could be done by using binary buffers or strings. The plugin would use a special function to allocate memory in the engine, that's automatically serialized.

My plans for the future are: the DLL "plugin" will contain one or more "objects" (in WME terms). ... What do you think about this?

It sounds very professional but also very complicated (for plugin developers).  It would allow for very powerful plugins and I would certainly like to have this kind of access to the engine. Maybe it would be the best to have both ways .

Greetings

Banbury

17

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: April 04, 2003, 08:48:13 AM »

The main differences to JAVA are pointers and the absence of a garbage collector. Getting used to pointers can be difficult (it was difficult for me at least).
All my releases come with full source code. So they should be useable as tutorials. The first thing I will try is to add new advanced datatypes like trees.

Greetings

Banbury

18

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: April 04, 2003, 07:47:13 AM »

Hi,
essentially the DLLs we are talking about are just a bunch of functions. These functions can contain any code you want. So there is no real limit to what you can achieve with this but your imagination. On the AGS pages you can find some pretty good examples of useful plugins for a game engine.
Now for the bad news. C++ is not an easy language to learn. And writing DLLs belongs to the advanced topics. So if you are really interested in learning how to program be prepared to invest some time (a few months at least). And get yourself some good beginners books.

If you have more questions about programming don't hesitate to ask. I'm always willing to help.

Greetings

Banbury

19

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: April 03, 2003, 09:00:35 AM »

Hi,
this sounds good. And I missed the switch statement, too.  

Maybe it's possible to provide functions to convert a sprite to a HBITMAP and back. This way one could modify the sprites with GDI before sending them back to the engine.

Greetings

Banbury

20

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: April 01, 2003, 10:07:48 AM »

Hooray! I'll promise to write a neat DLL as soon as this feature is available.  
Oh, and it would be nice to have the window handle (HWND) or better the device context (HDC) of the backbuffer as a WME constant.  

Greetings

Banbury

21

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:Interface thoughts

« on: March 12, 2003, 08:17:58 AM »

Scarpia, if you can do it, why don't you create some templates?  

Greetings

Banbury

22

Technical forum / A bug

« on: March 05, 2003, 08:10:22 AM »

Hi,

the following command crashes the compiler:

actor.Talk(s[Random(0, 4)]);

It results in a runtime error in dcscomp.dll and a complete crash, before the line is even executed. It's not a big problem, but it was unexpected.

Greetings

Banbury

23

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:Some feature suggestions

« on: March 05, 2003, 08:06:29 AM »

Hi,
my problem with 3D acceleration is, that it looks really bad on my ATI card. I don't have the same problems in software mode, so without it I couldn't continue with WME . My computer is a laptop, so I can't simply stick a new graphics card in.
Please, don't remove the software mode in version 1.

Greetings

Banbury

24

Technical forum / Talking region entities?

« on: February 24, 2003, 08:31:27 AM »

If I use Talk() or TalkAsync() on region entities, nothing happens. I have checked, that my code is actually executed, and I have assigned a font to the entity.
How else can I create an invisible speaker without creating a transparent sprite?

Greetings

Banbury

25

Technical forum / Re:Can I...

« on: February 24, 2003, 08:23:31 AM »

For pong or side scroller games I can also recommend Game Maker (http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/). It's easy to use (Point and Click) and has a powerful scripting language. I think this is the best choice for beginning programmers.

Greetings

Banbury

26

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: February 21, 2003, 08:09:56 AM »

Maybe it's possible to treat all parameters and return values as typeless pointers (void *). In the DLL they would be handled as pointers to classes. This way you could use complex types.
All the DLL author would need is a header file with interfaces to your type classes.

Greetings

Banbury

27

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:Multiple PC's (Player Chars)

« on: February 21, 2003, 08:05:38 AM »

You don't need a new feature to achieve this. If you look at the sample code, you'll see that all player actions are handled by the 'actor' variable. All you need to do is load a different actor and assign it to the 'actor' variable. All events now use your new actor.

Greetings

Banbury

28

Technical forum / Re:Mouse cursor confusion

« on: February 21, 2003, 07:55:09 AM »

Maybe this is a problem of your graphics card. The transparency of the cursors works quite fine on my machine. Since you have problems with the background image, too, it's highly probable that it's your graphics card. Try using software mode instead of hardware accelerated and check which version of DirectX you've installed.

Greetings

Banbury

29

Technical forum / Re:Some bugs

« on: February 20, 2003, 07:57:23 AM »

I wanted to create a special talk function for cutscenes. So I called the TalkAsync method and followed it with a loop with the exit condition either IsTalking() = false or Ready=true. The programm never executed the loop and when I printed the values to the screen they were never correct. Maybe this is a timing problem and the values of IsTalking() and Ready are not set immediately after TalkAsync is called?

Greetings

Banbury

30

Feature requests, suggestions / Re:DLL functions

« on: February 19, 2003, 03:09:06 PM »

I think the easiest way would be to allow external function definitions ala Visual Basic.
The declaration could look like this:

function MyFunction(Param1, Param2) external 'mycool.dll';

You'll probably need some form of type information for the parameters and return values.

Greetings

Banbury