Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Four levels and some talk

[Christian Mauduit]

On Tue, September 22, 2009 8:59 pm, Kasper Hviid wrote:
> Yes, zoom + scroll looks pretty good! The zooming could also be used
> for some special effect - maybe zooming out at the start of the level
> or some fast back-and-forth zoom when a team is killed.
Yes.

> BTW I can't get "--display-console" to work - it says "no console
> support".
This is because you're running MS-Windows. For obscure technical reasons
it's complicated to link with both SDL (the graphics library) and
libreadline (the tool used to handle the console) when using mingw32.
AFAIK there's really no easy way to do this and so enabling console on
MS-Windows would require specific, dedicated code which I'm clearly not
likely to write.

> When it comes to vector, I guess I should be using that .svg format.
> It seems like .svg prefer to have a certain size in "pixels". Will it
> matter to you wether a vector file is 10x15px or 1000x1500px?
In practice, I will probably rasterize any vector data and put them into
textures before displaying them. FYI this is what is done with letters
(text) in the game. The internal format for fonts is vectorial (ttf) but I
draw and blit them on bitmaps before drawing on the screen. Displaying
textures with OpenGL is fast & convenient. The one thing about it is that
it's important (not 100% mandatory, but it's optimized this way) that
texture size is a power of 2. Valid sizes include 16x16, 128x32, 64x256,
512x512, ... Additionnally, it's important that LW6 is compatible with
hardware that only supports 512 pixel wide textures. Modern hardware does
handle more (2048 is common) but I insist that legacy hardware is
supported too. After all, LW does not truely require such precision, it's
just eve-candy. So well, in practice, 512x512 is the maximum allowed. For
a cursor 64x64 is probably even enough.

> How about colors? Could LW6 replace all fill="#00FFFF" in a .svg file
> with another color? Is transparency supported?
>
> Regarding cursers, each level folder could contain a file called
> cursor.svg which were used for the in-game cursors. Of course, it
> would have to be colorized for each team.
I suggest you draw them in SVG, keep the SVG somewhere, and the SVG itself
will be rendered on a 64x64 or 128x128 PNG texture for rendering purposes.

> Examples:
> http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/1349/cursors1.jpg
> http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/7008/cursors2.jpg
Cool!

> Hey, I liked the color shifting in the LW5 cursors - I go offtopic
> now, but I just found a clip showing the heavy color cycling in
> Endorfun:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IEFC_Y3nrA
Color shifting was something really cheap to implement in LW5. I'll think
about it.

> I'll continue to play with level creation, .xml files, vector art and
> that video thing. Please don't let all my talk distract you too much
> from that network thing - I have a feeling it's a quite important
> feature.
OK. I still think I will release something before the network-enabled
release. The current WIP has a bunch of small enhancements which are IMHO
really worth the upgrade. Additionnally, I need feedback on the new
full-threaded code. Threaded code is known to be error prone. I've tested
it quite a lot, but not as much as it would be if released officially.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/