Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Flaming_Sword on August 06, 2009, 09:25:11 am
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Hi.
EFF support is now more or less complete, except for HUD and briefing icons (rendered using HUD animation code).
Get it here. (http://www.mediafire.com/?ziqm4goyyeg)
Notes:
- Based on Antipodes revision 5582 (Patch (http://www.mediafire.com/?xm2nwdujiyn))
- Compiled with MSVC6
- Fixed limitation restricting ANI and EFF in-game to 256 frames (not that you should use that many for ship and weapon textures :P)
- Added support for EFF in techroom weapons and intelligence tabs
- Added support for EFF in command briefings
- Added support for EFF in ship select screen
- Added support for EFF in weapons loadout screen
- Added support for EFF in mainhall
- Added support for EFF in multiplayer screens
- Added support for keyframes in interface EFFs and ANIs (including techroom and command briefings)
- Added support for single image as command briefing animation (eg. TGA)
Things to test/confirm:
- DDS and other textures in EFF (different DDS compression types)
- EFF with different framerates
- Loading times (ANI vs EFF - ANI is known to be horrible with this build)
- Colour accuracy when using non-PCX interface background
- FRED (shouldn't be any different, but you never know)
- In-game testing
Known Issues:
- Long loading times for ANIs
- Higher memory use while in techroom
Future Plans:
Command briefing EFF support - completeMainhall EFF support - completeBriefing loadout EFF support (including adding keyframe support for EFF) - complete + bonusHUD EFF support (not sure about feasibility) - HUD to be rewritten - includes briefing iconsAdding EFF support anywhere else that currently uses ANIs - complete
Please inform me of any errors, crashes, memory leaks, etc.
UPDATE: New build posted, command briefing support added. Single images can also be used in place of a 1 frame animation.
UPDATE: Replaced with build with crash fix.
UPDATE: New build - trunk sync, weapons loadout EFF support, keyframe support (including techroom and command briefings).
UPDATE: Added mainhall support.
UPDATE: Added support for other animations, except briefing icons and HUD - more or less complete.
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Is there any other difference between antipodes and trunk at this point we should know about? I was under the impression not much had happened with it since safe strings was committed.
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Is there any other difference between antipodes and trunk at this point we should know about? I was under the impression not much had happened with it since safe strings was committed.
Not much happened. However, if I do get permission to commit, I'd want to do it in Antipodes, given how much stuff I'm potentially breaking.
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Of course, but we wouldn't want to get too many features in there at once. That's happened before and it can be a real mess, so I didn't know of portej was going to be trying something out with that branch soon or not.
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I'll check with him, but I don't think there was much, at least in the short term.
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Could this be extended to the main hall as well?
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i think effs should be able to replace all ani files. including hud icons and elements. hud things are somewhat limited to 15 shades of gray plus transparency (multiplied by some rgba value it seems). would be nice to have 32 bit color on hud elements and shield icons. would also be useful for loadout icons.
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The plan is to cover everything that uses ANIs right now.
I mostly want to see whether I'm on the right track or have broken something before I continue.
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Heck, that would be nice. I'd like to go away from monocolored HUD towards true color animations.
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Of course, but we wouldn't want to get too many features in there at once. That's happened before and it can be a real mess, so I didn't know of portej was going to be trying something out with that branch soon or not.
I'm happy to monitor development of features there, however I do want to limit it to one or two at a time (preferably in distinct areas of the engine), and I do want to ensure testing is thorough enough to pick up anything that appears to be out of the ordinary.
Is there any other difference between antipodes and trunk at this point we should know about? I was under the impression not much had happened with it since safe strings was committed.
None at present - I haven't had a lot of time to work on it, and the safe_strings commit was a massive merge job (think on the order of 1000s of one line changes across 168 files)
On a related note: I nominate Flaming_Sword for commit access to antipodes - he's churned out a lot of good code recently, and has made a lot of valuable comments about suggestions and ideas for the branch (well, staging area).
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Sounds good, but there is the frame limit we need to think about... I'm not sure if the ANI frames also go towards it, but if no, then replacing all ANI's with EFF's can top us over the frame limit very fast...
This will also demand a new subfolder for the real effects... so it won't be too messy :)
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- Fixed limitation restricting ANI and EFF in-game to 256 frames (not that you should use that many for ship and weapon textures :P)
You read that, right? You know that by "fixed" he meant "for all intents and purposes removed"?
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If you mean the total number of frames from all animations loaded, yes, they count towards the limit. No, there should not be a problem because these ANIs/EFFs will be unloaded when you exit the respective screens anyway (only one at a time should be loaded anyhow, for this very reason). Just don't do something crazy like make something with 4000+ frames. :P
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Me??! doing crazy numbers effects?? where did you get that idea from? :P
Yeah I was talking about the total number of effects, great to know, you have my vote to get rid of those pesky ANI, a pain to convert, and a pain to edit... :)
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If you add support for EFF animations to the main hall, you'll be my personal hero of the month. I have main hall ready for Saga for five years now - I just never had the nerves to convert animations to ANI and then struggle with getting colors on the original image to fit ANIs. ;)
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:bump:
Updated first post/title.
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I must have missed this somehow. .
Am I right in thinking this will supercede the .ani files then?
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It should. And it does, for intel anis. CB anis still need some work, that part does not work correctly yet (Crashes with assertion). Bug report has been submitted already.
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Crash is now fixed, original error was a misnamed directory.
See first post.
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:bump:
Bumpage for new functionality.
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- Mainhall EFF support
HUD EFF support (not sure about feasibility) - HUD to be rewritten
Add these two and I'll send a, ehhh... small gift your way. ;)
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I'd also greatly, massively, appreciate a HUD system that can handle more advanced
animations or color.
Have had a couple of new HUDs gathering dust or stalled as WIP because they couldn't be utilized to their fullest yet.
Will this also aide in allowing individual unique HUDs per ship in the future?
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I looked at HUDs at one point - it's a mess in there!
I've stripped out someones earlier attempt (NEW_HUD) in preparation for either an attempt at it myself or someone else to have a go.
Whatever happens, it needs to be fairly well planned! :P
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I'm working on a HUD rewrite. The plan is right now is to have EFF support, ability to move all HUD gauge locations, change characteristics of individual HUD gauges, per ship HUD layouts, and make it easier for coders to add more HUD gauges without dirtying up the code.
No ETA yet.
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well as long as you have your hands in the hud, it would be awesome to be able to set manually the resolution we want the hud to be stretched
For exemple in a 1680*1050 game resolution if we could force the hud to render in a 1280*1024 resolution from the center this would be awesome (and this would add triplehead compatibility as this is the last thing that give problem for it. )
is it?
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- Mainhall EFF support
HUD EFF support (not sure about feasibility) - HUD to be rewritten
Add these two and I'll send a, ehhh... small gift your way. ;)
The HUD comment is referring to Swifty's rewrite. I'll see if I can get the mainhall working this weekend. :)
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I've found and fixed a bug in this build.
Keyframe functionality only applies the first time an animation loads.
Example: weapon select screen - loads default weapon
1. Observe keyframe behaviour (should be correct)
2. Select a different weapon (doesn't matter which)
3. Select the first weapon again
4. Observe keyframe behaviour (should go back to the first frame - incorrect)
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Ahem, on the subject of the main hall support - new EXE works like a charm.
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Right. Here's a pack of eff-ified mainhall anis for the terran mainhall. Just put these into <modfolder>\data\interface. Word of warning: u8888 dds files compress extremely well.
EDIT: Here's another package, this time containing the eff'ed vasudan mainhall as well. Due to the fact that the memory hjandling code is a bit inefficient, I changed the dds files from u8888 to u1555, which roughly halves the space required. Still, I would consider these to be extreme cases which should not be recommended for normal usage.
http://www.mediafire.com/?zzxqqjtzyum
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:bump:
Bumpage for completion.
http://www.mediafire.com/?ziqm4goyyeg
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What about the cursor? Can a DDS file be used as a replacement?
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Yep. You need to use an eff, which can of course consist of only one frame. I've attached an example using the Blue Planet cursor.
[attachment deleted by Tolwyn]
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Ahhhh - I tried using a DDS with alpha channel. Which, of course, failed.
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Wait, what? The DDS files in the package I posted have an alpha channel, and they work just fine....
For the record, u8888 and u1555 work pretty well here. I haven't tried using DXTx yet, but they should work as well.