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1

Technical forum / Corrupted .X file after loading game?

« on: November 21, 2011, 04:40:47 PM »

Hi all
This is one of those dreaded DirectX problems... hard to track down what's going wrong. My 3D actor works perfectly, except after loading a saved game. The idle animation flickers on and off, meaning the actor cannot stand still. The walk animation also gets oddly slowed down, and it looks something like roller-skating. This happens only after loading a saved game, and it happens every time I load a saved game.

I had a workaround where the game unloaded and reloaded the actor every time saves were loaded. This solved the flickering/animation bug, but it has caused serious problems for me in scrolling scenes (layers larger than screen) and scenes where a different actor is supposed to be loaded.

I also tried UnloadAnim() for every animation, then MergeAnim() to essentially replace the anims with a fresh set. Oddly the idle animation begins flickering again as soon as it is loaded.

What happens to the actor3D object when saving/loading? Why would this problem not occur when a new game is started?

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!!

2

Game announcements / Miskatonic

« on: November 13, 2011, 10:10:38 PM »

Hey all. I've basically finished the game I've been working on for a while. 
Thanks to everyone on the forum, especially Mnemonic and Metamorphium, for helping me out, directly or indirectly. I am a novice and much of this was new to me.

The game is called Miskatonic, it's a third-person mystery adventure with some comedy and horror loosely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft stories (set on my version of the famous university campus). I'm doing the final testing right now, it's 99.9% done. I wanted to wait until I had things basically done before announcing anything.

I'm thinking of going commercial(not sure how yet), and this is just the first episode. I have some work done on other installments, and I'm hoping it might be successful enough to let me finish the long story a little faster.

Anyway, you can see the website here for a basic idea of what it looks like.

www.miskatonicgame.com

3

Technical forum / Jigsaw Puzzles

« on: August 08, 2010, 07:56:45 AM »

Hi all
I'm working on creating a jigsaw-type puzzle right now, plugging away with trial and error. I'm making slow progress but I feel like things are getting unwieldy... juggling too many things. I assume others have created similar puzzles in the past, so I thought I'd ask for some advice.

What is the best/simplest way to implement a jigsaw with rotatable pieces?  I assume that each should be an entity, but I'm not sure of the best way to allow the player to pick up and drop the pieces in new places. I guess the key issue I'm having is how best to move the entity around the screen following the cursor, and then settle in a new place.

I was thinking left click pickup/drop and right click rotate, with the active cursor changing to match the piece sprite. However, with this, I'm not sure how to drop the entity somewhere else.

If you haven't realized by now, I'm a tech fool, so feel free to point out the seemingly obvious... any advice is a new lesson for me!

4

Technical forum / Ending dialogue in inner branch

« on: June 25, 2010, 03:25:28 AM »

Hi all
I'm working on a dialogue puzzle, and I want the dialogue to end abruptly if the player chooses certain responses. This is no problem in the first branch, but on the inner branches it always returns to the previous dialogue (I'm using a modified version of the oldguy arrays from the WME demo.)

I found an old topic discussing this, and Metamorphium gave this response:

If you want then to in some inner branch cancel the whole dialogue you can use the following trick:

Code: [Select]


while (loop)
{
  ...
  ...
  Selected = Game.GetResponse();
 
  switch (Selected)
  {
    ...
    case 1:
      loop = SomeNextBranch();
      break;
    case 3:
      loop = false;
      break;
  }
 
}

And in the critical response of the inner branch you set return false; otherwise you return true. So when the SomeNextBranch ends with your terminal response, the loop will end too.

This seems to be what I'm looking for, but I'm a technical dunce, and don't really understand how to implement it. Not very clear on using the switch/case commands. What do we set "return false"?  The loop? A code snippet showing the inner branch would be really helpful.

Anyone able to explain this to a child? Is there any other way to just abort the dialogue using a simple command?
Thanks

5

Technical forum / Exporting Toon/Black Outline on 3D character

« on: February 10, 2009, 12:15:07 PM »

Hi all...
I'm a longtime lurker around here, and I finally decided to get started on playing with the engine myself. So far almost everything has been working fantastic, the tutorials all worked well and I've managed to get a properly animated 3d character into a scene of my own design. However, what I really wanted was to get the "toon outline" effect that Zbang uses so well (copying, extruding the faces and flipping the normals). I understand the principle fine, and I can get the 3D program (Max 09) to display it beautifully, the problem is exporting the .x file.

Using Panda exporter, I seem to be unable to get the .x file to appear as the model(s) does in Max. It's not a deformation problem, it just seems unable to display the flipped normals, and shows a flat black surface (black is the color I am using for the "outline" mesh). I have tried toggling the normal options on Panda, but no luck.

Am I missing something basic here? Should I be making two separate actors? Is there a switch I have missed in Panda? Should I be using Blender instead? By the way, Panda exports this model+mapping etc perfectly without the normals flipped/inverted. If anybody has got this trick working in WME, I would love to know how you did it (software etc), since this black outline is kind of important to me (being a finicky art type)

Thanks in advance for any help/comments.