JeffSventora
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Posts posted by JeffSventora
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To be fair, even XML is plain text that needs to be parsed. I personally feel that during the debug phase, XML is optimal, being able to change things on the fly but upon release of a game/application you should always convert to binary. Maybe you could add a Boolean in the source for something like that.
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> So, if you could have regions be any amount of maps you want, you could basically wrote your whole game as one "region" and the whole game would be seamless. Would there really be any benefit of making more then one region? Like, do bigger regions run any slower or have any problems that may come about making your whole game one region? Or would it be more like if you wanted to create an ground level of your game and like an underground, you could make the ground level one region and underground another…
I think the beauty of the system is that you can use it for whatever you want really. Personally, I would create regions for whole cities and separate large areas on the map. You could do one GIANT region for your whole game but I wouldn't recommend that being that whichever region you are in is the region that will be loaded into memory. Personally I wouldn't choose to make regions bigger that about 25x25 maps. I was also thinking about allowing you to define the dimensions of the region, so you could have one that is 25x1 or vice versa. About the teleportation, yes. When you reach the edge of the region you will be teleported to the adjacent regions IF one is set.
I want you all to think of regions as just BIG maps. Lets say you have 3 main cities in your game and a lot of fluff in between. Create three regions for your cities and shops and create a few larger regions pieced together to connect it all. As Ertzel said, you could even "layer" the regions. So if one of your cities had an underground dungeon, create a new region the players will be warped to that define that underground dungeon. No more "MAX_MAPS" on a grid, think of it as a bunch of LARGE maps floating in the air (under the hood) but pieced together on the front end. -
Nothing TOO crazy, but I'm re-working the entire world system. It is now powered by Solar, the rendering engine I created. On top of that, here is some info on how the maps will work in Eclipse.NET. the world will be broken down into "regions". Regions are nothing more than a grid of maps that can be any size that you wish. So you could have a very large area take up 20x20 maps or a small town take up 2x2 maps. These regions are seamless HOWEVER, upon reaching the EDGE of the region, you will teleported to the adjacent region. if that doesn't make sense, I'll try to elaborate further.
- 6 Static Layers (3 Ground, 3 Fringe)
- 4 Animation Layers (2 Ground, 2 Fringe) -
When you reach that stage, feel free to PM me if you'd like. I wouldn't mind lending a hand for free 
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Looks great so far, what are you guys creating this with?
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> Jeff this isnt a debate topic i accept your idea. but it really has no bearing on the art of it. so unless you has an idea on improving it art aspect of it then please share. i wont be making a debate on anything to off track the topic.  but this wont be in a game its just so i do somethin. 
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> Updated Thurst.
This is simply not a debate. I am not an artist, I am a programmer. This seems to be some kind of art asset for a game right? As a programmer I'm giving you insight on how you can improve efficiency. I doubt you would go through all of the trouble of copyrighting/watermarking this if you weren't going to use it in some form of project or at least someone else use it. Your art is good but I would never use it and that's why I'm giving you some tips. Accept advice if you want, but that's what you're going to get in this section. -
But ultimately will be translated by programmers. When your game has hundreds of sprites, the size of your game will dramatically decrease with simple changes like that.
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Why use all of that texture space for the SAME exact texture? You could just use 3 with different flames in one direction (forward) and then rotate it in code?
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This is my weenie.
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My only suggestion would be to work on the sky, it just looks odd to me for some reason.
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That was me defining a source rectangle in the tiles image and drawing it with a red overlay. It's a stack of hay that I have following the mouse cursor, just for debugging. 
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I know how parameter lists work, but I don't like them for readability reasons. I like to know what goes where.
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I like sticking to the Colors. by all means, do what you will with it when I release it 
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Well the way it's communicating with the C++ side it requires the raw integers. If you wanted to use Vector3's, you would have to convert them to integers regardless. So I created the overload to use colors which is great because they have some many pre-defined already.
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Well sort of, you would still handle all of the shader code in C++, you would just write helper functions in C# to set them up.
Also, I have a little update! Text can now be draw to the back buffer using an ID3DXFont object.
```
// Advanced Method C#
Solar.DrawString("Hello world!", new RECT(0, 0, ClientSize.Width, ClientSize.Height), (int)(Alignment.DT_BOTTOM | Alignment.DT_CENTER), 255, 255, 255);
// Easy Method C#
Solar.DrawString("Hello world!", new RECT(0, 0, ClientSize.Width, ClientSize.Height), Alignment.DT_TOP | Alignment.DT_CENTER, Color.Red);
```
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You would have to re-write the DLL to use DX 11, but that's the beauty of it, you'll have that ability unlike XNA where you're limited to just XNA.
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I'm not reinventing anything, all I'm doing is giving the user more access to the lower level graphics API. It's all about control. On the surface In C#, it would be extremely simple to use and if you aren't comfortable with C++, you'll never have to worry. But what if someone wants to upgrade to DX11 or OpenGL? They could just go into the C++ source and modify the DLL and guess what, in C# everything is still the same to them  It's like having a car and being able to swap out the engine, only people who know about cars will be able to tell the difference but a majority of people won't when they're behind the driver's seat.
> Right.
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> With regards to C++/C#, would a user of the engine ever have to tinker with the C++ part of the code?
No, only if you are comfortable with doing so. -
It's blended with the background. That is the alpha blend doing it's job. Basically, to sum it up, there is support for transparency. As far as the C++ talking to C# and vice versa, it's something called PInvoke.
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The way I see it is, optimize from start to end because when you finish your project, you'll have room for more. And hell, even XNA games could benefit from complex data structures. However, I guess I'd have to ask, what is considered complex? Linked lists, dynamic arrays, graphs, trees, hash tables? I'm pretty sure I use almost all of those at some point. Lol
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Do you program games? because when it comes to games optimization, complex data structures etc… are normal.
[Official] Eclipse.NET
in Custom Versions
Posted
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> Also a question about the editors in this project. Are you making them part of the client like in the vb6 Eclipse or are you making them external editors that doesn't require you being logged into the game to use?
They are external. And I'm sort of working like that in a sense that only VISIBLE maps will be drawn but having them loaded in memory will greatly reduce the amount of HDD accesses which will always be slower than reading from RAM. Besides, I've done some math and if you have a region of ~50x~50 (2500 total maps) it will only consume roughly 20Mb which is considerably small.