ZiGNoTZaG

mk and xet, dun worry. yuns will get to test when i got something that i feel is mildy ready to load and display just about any ini that makelevel or biuld level will compile without error into lvz. once i have things working like i think they should with my lvz's that ive been using to test. i need to go out myself and debuild some ppls lvz's and try and load them up. at first i was just going for the basics. but well now, its something else entirely. sos: ok so it is a map editor. i wasnt being a smart -*BAD WORD*- or anything. do you know some vb? or how differant .net is? im not sure. i know a little c and a little of this and a little of that.... i may consider rewriting the thing in vc. still using directdraw tho....its leet. vb alone, or even blt gdi performace sucks in vb. so i guess my program would require that you ahve directX installed. which you need to play the game anyway. sounds kewl with bot interaction.

na, both methods are ok. i was mostly talkin -*BAD WORD*-. which i thought i made pretty obvious, but maybe not. hehe ive found tho that not just any gamepad will work good for you. you need one thats really easy to move, and has a medium range of movement before change. the most ulimate controler i have found for ss was a thrustmaster rage3d, set to 2d mode. ive tried alot of diff ones, i should take a picture of the pile. it didnt exibit all the common symptoms of the direction changed while looking at your radar....etc. with many other types of those digital on/off type. the wide range analog ones might be acceptable if you cut the stem off, and glue the button back on....ive done this hehe. so type of gamepad is really important. but i guess any keyboard will do.

starting to actually do things..... image information optional display on images, to include layer, but not shown yet. added basic drawing guides, mainly only usefully for when you get off the grid. yadda yadda yadda. i sure hope this thing werks. hehe sos, what does your program do?

do you frequent your zone?

dont we all? hehe

its not quite working yet, i need to : write the add routines. which i have some in my head. finish the layering. write the save ini routine. im going to focus on getting all that working before i start on the same things for the level itself. importing high color and all that. much to do, it works pretty much like it looks it does. but some things dont quite all work. building gui elements before they actually work helps you keep track of your intentions. the only thing i dont like is the load time. ssme opens in the blink of an eye. my program takes quite a bit longer, but its preparing all the lvz things for use as well. once its loaded, its all speedy. also as of now there is no zoom, dont expect this soon, but i know i will miss it myself. so ill have to try. the radar doesnt resize, but it shrinks up if you want it to. i made the radar larger at this point. to compensate for the no zoom. until i can spend some time on that. i also saw someone mention a "shadow map" ekted i think, ill prolly try and make that work too. loads up another level, displays it below everything with a grayscaled tileset, and you cant edit it. like tracing paper. and the image thing. make a map in a 1024x1024 image with pixels. adn import it as a map.

some layering, special grid(blue, many settings), add brush displayed on screen as cursor. snapping to either grid. lots of other misc things such as more info about images etc.

edit arnt a bad thing, as long as they are made quickly, but it can be used to stupify things. and it CAN tell you some things about the person simply by knowing the post was edited. even more so knowing what changed. but, either way is fine to me. i cant think of any reasons why i wouldnt want someone to know i edited the post. when they cant tell what was edited. elighten me?

which game are you talking about? certainly not this one. the simple fact you think your better then anyone else in the game shows either A) ignorance or denial. take your pick. even the button range of movement on a keyboard is larger. well have to schedual a little round in DZA. you can use your keys. and ill use my gamepad. ill even use a levi. and you can get pads these days with a while slew of buttons. more then enough for all the important actions you could possibly need. lol you keys noobs sure are sensative. early in the mornings like till late afternoon like 3 central weekdays is good for me. whats good for you?

view keyborad controler defs, make a new one call it joystick or gamepad or sumtin. make sure use joystick is checked and set up all your keys. then open up the player profile you want to use the gamepad with and set that profiles keydefs to the one you just created.....ya follow? hehe

gamepads own. keyboards are better now that you can map the buttons. but for zones heavy on items. you cant beat someone who it tight on the pad, with clucky ole keys. everything right under your fingers instead of actually having to move your hand. its simple motion mechanics. the more efficent controler requires less motion. gamepads require less motion. and therefore are better. you cant argue that logic...so dont even try. keyboard nOObs. lol heheh

thats a nice lookin bg.but i suggest experimenting with darker shades of green. imho darker backgrounds will just workout better in the end. not shatter your cones when you play it in the dark. make the important things like ships and weapons stand out better. my 2 cents.

a bit of design thought should be used at this point. youll want to know how large the area is, and make your background the proper size so that when you tile it, it will achieve the proper result, ending in the right location. or, you could cheat and make asnippet, to fill the last part, or overlap a few of the images.

yeah, backgrounds. yeah, cover certain area. ive tried this some, and it works, but the bg's tend to slow the editor down some, so there will most !@#$%^&*uredly be a way to display only certain layers. some more image stuff..........

a collaberated effort would be nice. but we all seem to using something diff, which is good and bad, bad for obvious reasons, but good for the simple fact that if we all fail and give up in disgust, we all hve pretty good starts on map editors in like 4 diff languages hehe. take your pick. im really confident in mine at this point. and believe me i wasnt at first. i knew 0 about DirectDraw going into this. but now all the really challenging things are done. mostly. still gotta save lvls, and ini's. which are time consiuming, not tricky. things like cfg editors and f1 makers fit into that time-consuming not tricky category as well. ive never used the exsisting ones. but i get the idea, and its in the formating. time will tell i suppose.

http://www.sscentral.com/zignotzag/conted5.jpg some progress. lvz will be show on the radar is various shades of purp based on layer. optionaly showing them on the main map, with the orange being the "origin handle"

being inconsiquential is only good until all others of consequence are gone. You think even if by some absolute science-fiction fashion, such as lets say DUNE, these primates manage to overcome the US that it will end there? no, for there are many countries that hold alot of the ideals of the US. and its these ideals, that the so called "fighters of god", are attacking. will we get attacked again? most likely. will the retribution be harder and faster each time? yes. i agree. there is a point where being a civilian is of little consiquence. And genocide becomes the plan. some of these cavemen believe that 4 million american deaths would be the proper revenge for the killing weve done on their soil so far. sounds about like a nuke going off in New York. And that is this only way such a thing could happen. On a normal field of battle and In the cities fighting using guerilla tactics they are totally outclassed. just look at the numbers. And also agreed, i dont think any of us want that to happen, the results of that could be catastropic. Mid-Eastern Parking Lot. They cant be trained to "fight for god" if they dont exist.

Why not spend BILLIONS on developing countries? if people on those countries had 1/4 opportunity of an USA citizen or any other industrious country, wouldn't they be happy how they are, instead of attacking the bigger countries as a call for attention? Don't you know why people steal? they steal to get money, because they have none, you teach them how to earn, and they'll probably change. A Good Enviroment for a person DOES influence on the person's future actions. Well, the problem is countries such as USA wants their foreign slave labor, pay them dirt. Less Pay for the laborer, More Profit, that's how capitalism work doesn't it? maximize profits, minimize costs. -nintendo64 America wasnt just handed to us. No bigger more powerfull country at the time helped us out, or gave us anything. it was fought for and earned by the spending of many lives. Why should i, even for a second consider giving up even more of tax dollars to help them become even more dangerous? they have alot of natural resources....and have had them. they just dropped the ball. The US is also way younger than any of those places. its not like they havent had time. is the US supposed be picking up the slack for countries that cant earn what they desire? happyness is not found elsewhere, it comes from inside. from your own societies will to be ahead of the game. so the whole problem stems back to the average mentality of the individuals that live there. nothing is free in this world except death. everything else you pay for in one way or another. now topic...topic.... erm i have to agree that the WMD excuse does look pretty flimsy now. that thing wasnt really what i would call a WMD. but....i do see other aspects that come from this as well. for one it sends a pretty clear message, that there is no place to hide. these 3rd world contries are no longer a haven for the worlds trash. (dont get me wrong there. people are people, and like ive mentioned before....im sure that generaly iraqis are good people.) if we even think that you might have some, and the general concesses is that you shouldnt have them. you better watch out. cuss your being watched. and action will be taken. there is no doubt. as proven.

at this point no matter what the US does it will be the wrong move. The worst fear of mine at this point is another VN scenerio, where allied troops just go on dying, cuss bleeding heart politicians and activists feel the need to bring to light every single miss-step the US makes. This war would allready be over if the US/allied military was unbridled by the red tape that washigton so readly drapes all over the place. my statement was not radical, its what needs to happen. if you think there is any other way for the violence to end now....your diluded.

sadam proved to the world that he wasnt sane when he invaded kuwait. there is no room in the world for invasion and conquest. Screw the WMD, he should have been and was removed from power by a government not content to sit around and wait for tragic events to take action. Iraq will eventualy be tamed. kill the semi-intelligent leaders, kill enough low iq religious sheep, and their sons. Degrade and berate the prisoners, create more fear than hatred. Just a matter of time. fight terror with terror. quite simply put...the world will be a better place without them. arnt i the humanitarian?

1024 1600 Still some issues to work out with the clipping. And the layering needs to happen. most likely ill have some options in there to choose which layers you want to see. Grid is kinda strange too, but accurate. no more image flickering. prolly gonna take a bit of a break from it now. brought it this far in a few weeks those images slow it down, but they are quite large anyone know the state of those other editors i heard mentioned?

sorry to DP but a few more reasons why this a bad idea. first, jpgs and other images are almost always preconverted from jpg or whatever to an array of bits when you intialize the program. basically if you load an image onto a directdraw surface such as a backbuffer, it is allready a bmp. and since in most games this loading occurs before it acttualy has to display it, this is a moot point. only bad game design would make this a problem. not that i could do better, but i can see the flaws. whats more, ive seen no perfomace diffarance between the jpg and bmp versions of my EVO zone. which you can see below in my sig, doesnt fool around. onto the tiles, currently the map stores the tile in binary, meaning it uses structs of bytes to store the tile information. in one byte you can only store valid values from 0-255. so lets say you add 190 more tiles to the existing190. then you can no longer store the tileID in a byte. and who knows what deep implicaitons that could have on the whole rest of the program. not to mention increasing the map size by what could be double when all is said and done. at this point lvz keeps old SS and continuum two distinct beasts. no changes are made to ss that would affect the perforamce at this base tilelevel.

worse things are done to americans, by americans, inside american prisons.

a modern brand name video card should have no problems displaying tons and tons of lvz images. as long as you keep them small. and im not talking 200$ card. im talking 40 buks, older gforce or radeon with like 64 meg of ram. continuum is quite capable of displaying alot of graphics. will it run the same as 256 color 8-bit old school crap looking vie type zone? of course not. will it still have acceptable frame rates and look so much better? yes. i put up for example any zone that displays a solid BG image. they run fine. well at least they do on my geforceMX-440(nothing special). now if you can tile the whole back and still have it run smoothly, then there is nothing stopping anyone from placing a few lvz tiles over the standard tiles. in this way you get as many tiles as you want. and im willign to bet, if done in a thoughtfull manner, the player wont be able to tell you whats what. having to draw 2 16x16 images, instead of 1 isnt going to kill performace. maybe what really should be thought about is the way cont handles the drawing of things. such as not drawing tiles that are covered by LVZ.

just a little update, and some possible limitations. things are still moving along, havent had much time lately, and i hit a few walls that took me a bit to get over. max image size that the editor will display correctly will be 1280x1280 at this point. thats most likely way beyond anyones needs, at least it should be, if it isnt, you need to reconsider the way your designing things LVZ image placment is based on the same 16x16 pattern of grid elements, so lvz images are stored internaly in the program based on what tile thier upper left corner would appear in. while later on i plan on making this completely dynamic, intially there will most likely be a limitaion of 10 images per tile, inlcuding all the layers, but not the tile itself. that should also be way beyond anyones needs, and again, if it isnt, back to the ole drawing board. or wait till i make it totaly dynamic. hehe. dynamic is always better. i think i need to add at least a basic map tile add tool as well, so that you can place odd shaped images, then tile in behind them(while they are loaded, no guessing involved) next up is the clipping of the images, i wont get into the specifics but basically when you draw an image, if its not completelty on screen, it doesnt draw at all, so you need your program to check for that, and cut the image down to size if needed(while you scroll it offscreen) speed....its very fast, if you just load the map, its just as fast as ssme, if you load up the images, its still just about as fast as ssme, but a bit of flickering occurs. this really doesnt concern me...as this is an editor. of course, if this all works out like im planning, much more complicated LVZ's will be alot easier to produce, so those might impact the speed a bit more, lots and lots of images. another nice thing for the possible future, is that it seems it would be rather easy to convert a windowed DD program into a FUllscreen one. so full screen, spectator like view mode, is not out of the question. -zig