I just want to leave to keep some of the stress off of me so let's leave it at that.
This doesn't mean I won't be making applications and utilites anymore, it simply means that the general public won't be a part of the process and I'll release them whenever, without wip or warning. Unless it's a brand new app I probably won't even make a news announcment on byoac's main page, so you'll have to check my homepage regularly. You might see me make a brief visit once in a blue moon, but definately not anytime soon. If you want to get ahold of me, you'll need to do so here or via email as I won't be checking my byoac stuff anymore.
Of course I realize the irony of this announcment as I've just recently moved my homepage to the byoac server. To be honest I haven't figured out what to do on that front. Saint has always treated me like gold, for better or worse and he was nice enough to give me this space after oscarcontrols went down. I'm not sure how appropriate it is for me to keep the space considering I won't be contributing to byoac directly anymore. On the other hand, I don't want all of my applications wiped from existance and would like them to still be available to the community if they should want them. I'm thinking about setting up my own web-space, but I'm not sure if it'd be worth it, because I can guarantee you that new releases will be few and far between for a good while. So for a while, with saint's blessing of course, I'd like to leave everything as-is and consider the whole site a working archive.
In case you are wondering, no dk will not be released at the end of the month as I promised. For one thing, I haven't worked on it in the last two weeks, so I'm way behind schedule. Also I've ran into a minor stumbling block that'll be difficult to fix and I don't have it in me anymore to work on things that aren't fun. What'll probably end up happening is sometime within the next month or so I'll be so bored one weekend I'll give it another look and I'll fix the issue and go ahead and make the final release. No promises though.
If and when I start coding seriously again, I intend to change direction. I'll still be working on emulation related things, but less with the front-ends and utilites and more on the actual emulators and simulators. Yes, believe it or not, I've progressed far enough with my coding to attempt (keyword attempt) to start work on some emulators/simulators for some very obscure consoles and arcade devices that nobody else is touching. So, I'm ok... don't start weeping or something. ;-)
So long story short, goodbye and thanks for all the fish. I've had fun, everyone as a whole has been a joy to interact with and I've gotten a lot of help over the years that can never be repaid. Take care of yourselves and drop me a line once in a while. Who knows, I might pull a "frosty the snowman" one day just don't hold your breath.
If anyone wants to relay this post in the byoac forums I'd be very grateful. I'd do it myself but I'd be tempted to stick around for a response and the whole viscious cycle would start again. ]]>
;)
As of now, when you enter the menu the skin is swapped out, which causes a noticable delay. I've decided to instead incorporate this into the current skin, which will allow for instant display and deployment. It's not the most original idea in the world, but it's something that a lot of fe's are severely lacking.. namely a quick way out of where you currently are.
While we are on the subject, let's talk about how dk's list structure has evolved since the last public beta. Check out this screen shot:
;)
Hmm, I don't remember a mame game named "played games"... We'll it's actually an example of two new list features. First off, dk now allows shortcuts to other lists to be added to any gamelist. This means you can do all sorts of crazy stuff with directory structures now, like replicating the before-mentioned menu blade with a "master list," making shortcuts to toggle clones on and off, having a catlist-based hierarchy of sub-linking setup so you can filter as you navigate or whatever you can think of! Maybe I should show you the inner-workings (which thanks to a utility I'm working on you'll hopefully never have to deal with). Here's the vd entry for the above gamelist:
[path]
logo=Mame.png
caption=Mame
skin=default
dynamic=0
hidden=0
useclones=0
searchstrings:-1=1=&&&& Played Games;5=MAME;0=pacman
filters:6=*mature*;9=*Working No*;6=BIOS;9=*Status Prelimenary*
[/path]
Longtime dk users will find most of this familiar, but there are some important new additions. The logo entry is nothing new, it determines which logo the logo element in a skin will display (actually the logo element can now display other stuff as well, but that's a discussion for another time). Caption, again is nothing new and also quite obvious, it'll be what the list is called in the menu blade and the path caption of the skin. Dynamic... now here's where it gets fun. Before all lists were made at once and they didn't change. Due to the new bookkeeping options (I'll explain those in a sec) this is no longer acceptable. Turning on the dynamic switch has dk filter together a list on-the-fly as you navigate to it. The speed is actually quite decent. While a huge list like every single mame game will cause a slightly noticable delay, most of your special-case lists are going to load instantly. Also, dynamic lists won't be created when you re-generate the master gamelist, which will speed up that process. Hidden is also new and was added as a companion for all of the new list-linking you can do. It became obvious during testing that the traditional list changing method (next and prev list keys) wouldn't cut it if you had several lists caused by a catlist hierarchy or what have you. The solution was to "hide" all of these extra sub-lists from the list collection. When you make a list hidden, it won't show up in the menu-blade and you won't be able to navigate to it unless you use a shortcut link. So for a hierarchy of all mame's cats, you'd make the primary list normal ("Mame") and all the sub-lists (Driving, Platformers, ect..) hidden. In the primary list, you'd link to all the sub-lists. Of course that's all optional, you can make them normal lists if you want. It's all part of the new, more flexible, list system.
Of course clones is pretty obvious and nothing new as are the last two. But check out this entry:
-1=1=&&&& Played Games
This is how we link to other lists. The "-1" tells dk we are searching for a list, in this case the list is list #1 and we want to call the shortcut "Played Games" (The &&&& is just a magic tag to ensure the entry gets added to the top of the list). We could do this other ways as well, like link to the List's caption, the "next list" or what have you. I'll go into more detail as the syntax is finalized and I get the list-builder up and running, but it's really quite useful.
Now for the second part. How exactly does dk make a list of played games? Via the new bookkeeping features of course! Dk now monitors your play habits, recording which games you play, how often you played them, how many times.. ect all to a nifty ini file which the list system can use, in conjunction with special tags, to make lists.
Here is the vd entry for the Played Games list:
[path]
logo=MAME
caption=Played
skin=hell
dynamic=1
hidden=1
useclones=1
searchstrings:-2=mrp
filters:
[/path]
Notice that the search sting this time is "-2=mrp." The "-2" tells dk it needs to search the bookkeeping and "mrp" is a magic tag for the 25 most recently played games. There are other magic tags in bookeeping like the longest played, if it's been played at all, ect... And of course these magically created lists can be filtered off just like any normal list. This takes building a "favorites" list to a whole new level as, with a bit of adjustment you can let dk automatically determine which games you like the most and automatically fill a list with them!
The new list features are really the crowning feature of the release as I've always said that a goodbackbone is far more important than any graphical features. (I've still got a few of those to show, don't worry)
Anyway, raster fonts are pretty much working atm, so I'm now moving on to tweaking the above features for optimum speed. As always, I'll keep you posted. ]]>
I've rolled out my own ".textwidth" function that works with the raster dimensions and a arbituary pixel height. This seemed to do the trick as you can see by the text below:
;)
The only thing that the raster functions use the ttf fonts for at this point is the height (the height I send to the rastertextwidth function is determined via .textheight). I may actually keep it that way. Right now you determine the textheight in dk via the fontsize, which makes sense as 90% of your skins are gonna use plain old tt fonts. It seems silly and confusing to me to have a seperate, pixel-based text height setting and I don't see as how the height would be any different between one font and another or at least not to a degree that it'd effect character placement. I'm welcome to feedback on that one though. ]]>
Sometimes it's better to just show you, so here are som random video game fonts applied to a very basic skin:
;)
;)
;)
How do you add raster fonts? Well fortunately sprite rippers have done most of the work for us. There are various bitmap font "standards" flaoting around the net and dk comes packed with a utility that can convert most of them to a format that dk can use "automagically". This utility can also make raster fonts out of a true-type font that you can in turn edit in photoshop for a dramatic effect. On top of this, I also plan on having the converter support the most famous raster font type, namely the SDL font, which is what mame uses! I'll post a tutorial on how to do all of this (quickly without having to edit each character manually) at a later date.
Ragardless, for now I'm cleaning up the raster font code and I'll keep you posted.
]]>
I've gotten a couple of posts saying a keyboard mode would be useful, so I'll add it and have an option to turn it off in the frontend.ini so that it doesn't interfere with the hi-score style input. How I'll set it up is you highlight a setting and press enter (regardless of your input mappings) and up pops a dialog box. You type normally, having full use of the backspace key incase you make a mistake. Pressing enter again will change the setting and rturn you to the menu your were in while pressing escape will cancel. Due to complications, the arrow keys and delete keys will NOT work in keyboard mode. Fair enough?
I'm tired of doing stupid functions so I'll probably take a break for a few days, but I'll make a post as soon as I get started again. Tomorrow I might put up a quick skinning tutorial just to give you an idea of how to make a simple skin from start to finish.
]]>
Anyway....
I'd say I'm on track for getting it done by the end of the weekend like I said in the last entry! This means I can get to fixing some of the more interesting features, which means you get a preview of some of the more interesting features!]]>
Needless to say, I'm still not done adding options to the skinner. Some options I plan on intentionally leaving out, not because they can't be done internally, but because it'd require me to add too many menu objects. To give you an idea of the mind-numbingly dull stuff I've been doing lately, here is my "to-do" list for the menus.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
snap/title
----------
Toggle Snap = Yes, NO, Fe Default
Toggle Time = 0-?
////snap
////----
////videos=Yes, No
path
----
////Alignment
Caption=
////Inteveral=0-?
////3dmodel
////-------
//leftoff
//topoff
////Videos=Yes, No
////Stop Rotation=Yes, No
Inital Rotation=0,0,0
////X Spin=
////Y Spin=
////Z Spin=
////xoff=
////yoff=
////zoff=
list
----
Columns=
List Type=Normal, Snap, Flyer, Marquee, Cabinet Title
Custom=Yes, No
Element Width=
Element Height=
Space=
Text Align=Left, Right, Center
////background
////------------
////all blend stuff
////layer
////Scroll Rate
////overlay
////---------
////all blend stuff
////layer
////fonts
////------
////font name=
////font size=
////r=
////g=
////b=
////High R=
////High G=
////High B=
////MenuTrans=
////FontTrans=
////HighlightTrans=
Pulse=
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each section generally requires about an hour or so to add. This doesn't include the 13 or so "main" groups I had already added. Things that are slashed out I'm finished with, so as you can see, it won't be much longer. Hopefully then I can concentrate on the more interesting features I've yet to bundle up which will be better for you and me. :)]]>
There is a new feature I'm adding this go around that I think got lost after the golden age of dos front-ends passed. ArcadeOS had (has) this great feature where you could update roms or the fe via a floppy disc. Because emulator settings, rom collections and front-ends have become increasingly complex, this feature was pretty much ignored by everyone when we switched to windows. Well not anymore! Dk is going to be able to auto-update itself, your emulators, or virtually anything installed on your cabinet.
The process is fairly simple:
1. Get a removable drive (Includes floppies, cdrws, flash drives portable hdds ect..) And rename the volume to match the "upgrade" entry in the frontend.ini ("Upgrade" by default.) or vice-versa.
2. Make a folder called "dk" and extract the new copy of dk to that folder (or if you are just changing settings, simply add the files you want to change).
3. Configure the extracted files to your heart's content.
4. Anything other than dk you wish to add needs to have it's folder hierarchy replicated and the new files put where they belong on the cabinet's drive. For example, if you wanted to add roms to "c:\mame\roms" on your cabinet you would make a "c" folder on your removable media with a "mame" folder inside with a "roms" folder inside of that and place your roms in the inner-most folder.
5. Insert the drive/disc/whatever and bootup dk. It'll give you an "upgrading" message, copy the files, and restart itself if needed.
I understand that in this modern world of virtual desktops and home networks that this isn't really necessary anymore but I thought it would be convienant and it hasn't been particularly difficult to add.
Finally the silly stuff.....
Sometimes you have a great idea for a skin. Sometimes it turns out well and sometimes it doesn't. You can decide on this one.
Confused? Well here's the story. Shang Tsung has been uppercutted off the pit and he, along with a arcade cabinet (changes based on game) and pretty much the whole skin are falling to their deaths in what appears to be a bottom-less pit, with shang randomly changing into various fighters as he falls. I wanted to post a video, but fraps refuses to capture on account of the dual viewports (3d cabinet and the rest) and the video preivew playing both on the cabinet and the snapshot area. The skin is nowhere near complete as I just whipped it up to test high-speed background scrolling (those pit columns really fly!). It's so fun though that I'll probably release it anyway, in hopes that someone will finish it and give it the polish it deserves. ]]>
Today's task involves skinning. People have often complained about how terrible the skinner app is and I seldom get user skins submitted to me. So I've internalized it. You can now set 90% of the skinner settings, on-the-fly from within dk. No more excuses people as now any idiot can make a skin.
Here's the new main menu. As you can see there are a few new options, including "edit skin"
Once inside you can manipulate any of the entries' properties, from their position to the blend mode and color tint.
So there you have it. Finally I've decided to make things a tad more user friendly. I am currently buttoning up this feature and should be done with it by monday. I'll post a new wip with my next project then. See you soon!]]>