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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

slowly with the directdraw stuff, but i have it displaying all the lvz and propertiles in DD. and its pretty darn fast, even when ya get some larger images going, im working on the layer of the lvz now, as well as deciding amongst a few diff methods of displaying the map. this display part of everything will take the longest. mainly cuss what i knew about DD you could write on the back of postage stamp as of like a week ago. once i get this display area ironed out. things will speed up. i know a bit about VB. im also deciding what the limitation of things will be, largest images that it will display properly whilst editing. and such.

ok im back to the point i was at before i decided to re-write into directdraw. it was well worth it.

im currently rewriting the display in DirectDraw, the same interface SS and cont use im pretty sure. anyhow, hold tight. ive allready got it sorta working, and the intial speed results are great. ssme scroll around the map speed.

and let there be lvz... still need to fix the offsets and layering. but all i did to get that result was double click a map and double click a ini ooo ahhh....no ss server involved. and yep itll scroll all around the map displaying all of the tiles and lvz the only real shortcoming at this point is it wont display lvz's that u cant see the upper left corner of. ill get to that later.

actually im not quite sure how i will handle this area. one would be a user type array with all the layers. another would be a relational DB. that would be prolly a bit easier. but performance concerns. a mdb would handle the editing aspect of things pretty well i suppose. why is this important? well, i know for one that with amke level, you can draw as many image on the same layer as you want, and the order displayed would equate to the order of that entry in the ini. so one could draw lets say an animation of light pulsing, and add that to the after ship layer cuss you dont want bomb explosions to ever cover it up. and on top of it you could place an array of diff types of "light fixtures". now you could do this with one image, but lets say you want to change its color or use the same fixture and have a diff pattern light. conserving lvz size. and increasing performance by onle making it draw the light animation, not the container. now you also want the fixture afterships. so its quite an array of things that need to be considered to make it truly dynamic. i dont know how far ill take it. ide say it makes me pretty happy allready just draggin the mouse around to diff tiles and seeing lvz lines magically appear

not alot of work to make it able to take hours and hours off your dev time, alot of work to make it as nice and fast as ssme

wooo.... weee......Wooot!

more like move around and click to place. Just about got it reading a quite large inifile of mine. heres my plan, you open a map. you open a ini file, just the main map one for now the one with all the IMAGE's in it and all the map objects. worry about screen objs later. then it loads all that up into some structs that i can use, sort and all that. the path of the ini is then where the editor is going to look for all the images when it needs to display them. also, all of those exsiting images get added as default brushes that you can cycle through with a click, also then it knows that when you add a new brush, what image# to give it in the ini when saving a new ini. well see.

1500! woot! thats some dedication. and in case it makes you feel any better. this proggie will have prolly 10 times that many lines. granted they are alot more fun to type in, and not so tedious(mostly). heh.

Oooh, think you can have 32-bit tile support? i think so, it will all depnd on weather or not ss will actually even use em. Or how about more tiles? you will be able to have as many tiles as you want, in a way. my main goal now is to have it load up standard ini's and show the map the way it would be shown in game. thatll take a bit formating the read on that. you will be able to browse previews of images. before you start using em, and you will be able to see them when placing them. and then after they are placed. thems the plans. anyhow. proggie might be a bit of a mem hog. but...i dun care. hehe most editors are, load up unrealed sometime. im mainly concetrating on it working at 1024x768 and 1600x1200. fer now.

Tiles woot actual tiles, and a few other things, still draws pretty fast

Speed VB 6 so that map took "around" 4 seconds to draw the entire thing, at this point its drawing even the off screen parts. when all is said and done remeber it only has to draw what is on the screen( loop in the thousand , not one million). so do the math, of course itll take a bit more to draw the actual images in....but not enough to outweigh only having to loop as many times as tiles are on the screen. and thats the one of the biggest maps in ss you will most likely come across my super leet WD race 356k

It should be ready to use pretty quick at the rate its going. plus i just made a deep change that made it alot faster. it should rival ssme for speed. but ya never know well see. im not ace programer. im just doing this cuss im deving this MG stuff, and i learned what its like to add lots of lvz image with my Just about totaly lvz zone chaos evo. and i just never want to do that again....ever. anyone thats done it knows. oh ya and i should be able to add screen objects, i knew i was forgeting somthing. if i t perfoms like it has so far ill make it show the right tiles. would be nice to see your tiles while your adding things. or at least add it in as a default option.

Heres how its come along during my little vaca. back to work monday! woot. the brush window is where you will select your images. and tell the program what layer and if its a animation.... all that junk. the LVZ window will display a list of all the objects youve added. and let you check for duplicate entries. well ill prolly automate that come to think of it. anther thing im going to add is something like a second tileset sort of thing. where you can add new 16x16 tiles to a collection and use them sorta like regular tiles. refresh the pic if nothing looks new since the last one. Progress

here is a beta shot of program i have beet workin on. i fairly confident i can complete the rest of the program now that i have it loading the map. what will it do? it will allow you to load up a level, and scroll around it on a 1 to 1 aspect. with just a default tile for all the tiles to increase speed. then you will be able to set up an image like a brush, and happyly go around your map plopping in images. it will allow you to set all the aspects of the ini for the current brush. snaping to a 16x16 grid or not. you will be able to zoom sum like you can almost see the whole map here, but for now, all adding images will be done 1 to 1. another thing im going to try is to build in a highcolor bmp replacer. ive got a pretty good handle on the lvl File now(with some help from around the net) and should have no problems pluggin a high color bmp in front of all the tile data. its not as fast as ssme at loading so far, but still i plan on this program shaving hours of tedious ini crap. it wont have any tile features or any of that, strictly lvz images, i should have it outputing ini lines in a week or so. and maybe building lvz's some time in the future. what im really after is just the fast image replacemnet. and ultra quick making the ini lines needed to place things. im pretty confident i will get this to work. or i wouldnt be showing it. hehe http://www.sscentral.com/zignotzag/LVZMscreen.jpg

lol, ya thats pretty good.

i say im not impressed, meaning that these pictures dont come as any shock to me. i dont think you clearly understand what fearing for your life every single day can do to your mind after awhile. yuns seem to think good normal ppl who go oversees into some totaly -*BAD WORD*-ed up environment , where you cant do your job like you were trained to do it, should just be shot or die or however you put it....if they cant handle it. sounds to me like you shouldnt fling the word ignorant around too much. those pictures are the normal outcome of war. try not to get hooked so easily on the media. maybe you should look up the defenition of impressed while your at it too. and dont apply your own context to it.

That is NOT socially acceptable behaviour in any situation but the military - in combat! it is combat. nice attempt to elevate yourself with the ole spelling slam. dont presume to tell me who i voted for thanks. dont shoot me down for injecting opinions about something i have little involment in if you plan on injecting your own. i seriously doubt your on the front lines of any of this.

Cowardly isn't quite the right word for these militants or terrorists or whatever they are. A rag-tag group of ill-equipped and ill-trained people against the might of the US military is hardly an act of cowardice. Is it brave to stand up wearing rags and use a pea-shooter against a friggin tank? They do what they think they have to do. Regardless of how futile, counter-productive, reprehensible or immoral it is. But it is hardly cowardly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ laf..ill equiped... they are very well armed with weapons that make tanks pretty much useless in the middle of a city. and more and more weapons pour across poorly defended borderes daily. unless your gonna take that tank in there and use it to its destructive potential. which because of the cowardly way they fight, you cant. cant use it like that against them if you dont want to murdfer innocent ppl, they shoot at you from behind a civilians house, then when you blast that house to ground with your tank. everyone cries abuse abuse. so you cant do that. a tank is made to fight an enemy force that is agressivly defenfing thier terriotory with large weapons(tanks and AA and artil)of thier own. basicaly they have nothing to really fear about the tanks, as long as they know the sheep like at!@#$%^&*ude of the world is ooh how terrible. so what now we are suppose to be thier police too? the great american global police. screw that. protect and serve? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh...and just because there are reasons behind the actions of those torturers (frustration - as you put it). That doesn't make it justifiable. Who know...maybe we would do the same thing if we were in the same situation....But whatever...It sure as -*BAD WORD*- wouldnt be justifiable. and WTF? Walk in his shoes? What do you mean by that? You think I can't judge someone who tortures another person until I do it myself? BS. I will judge whoever I want, whenever i want. If it was an Iraqi torturing an American I'm sure as -*BAD WORD*- you would've judged them in a flash. And the American government's response would be harsh and brutal and there would be a -*BAD WORD*- of a lot of "collateral" damage. Its a double standard. ---------------------------------------- oh yes you can climb nice and high on your imaginary box and judge whoever you want, but you cant always believe what you see. and if you do then you need to wake up. sometimes theres alot behind images we see that is left totaly unclear and the images show to us are just pieces of infinite time. often selected purposfully and decievingly. nobody was talking about justice here. yes humans are animals, and they will become animals when you place them into a situation that agrivates primal instinctive reactions like fear and pain. ----------------------------------------------------------- Clearly those soldiers thought that their -*BAD WORD*- didn't stink anywhere near as much as the people they tortured. The problem with people like you is that you think the only type of action that matters is action involving force. Force didn't work in Iraq. Force has made matters worse. "Talk" would've been much more productive. I guess that is what Blix was on about all along. As for control...The US has NEVER had control in Iraq. The US might never have control either. --------------------------------------------------- you dont know what those soldiers thought.

yawn, im not impressed. where are the pictures of the shredded up GI's? sure losing innocent lives is not a good thing. and no doubt most of the ppl in those pictures dont even come close to deserving that. as far as US brutality agaisnt Iraqis? a direct result of the frustrations brought apon them by the constant harasment from cowardly iraqi militant groups who shoot RPG's at soldiers from within crowds of civilians. what do you want? "ok would the guy that shot that rpg please step out from the crowd so we can shoot you?" gimmie a break. and as far as US doing this wrong, and US doing that wrong...blaa blaa blaa from all you. what could you possibly know about it. As the saying goes.... its EZ to judge a man until youve walked in his shoes. or mayhap... "what you think your -*BAD WORD*- dont stink?" its not a pretty situtaion. but i know with almost 100% certainty that no-one here could have handled the situation any better if they had control. and if you think you could have...your wrong. all you really have is talk. zero action.

danke, ya i think your right.

heh. well AM? arnt you going to answer em? start here MineGoBoom's SS Server Help Site

is that a trick question? hehe....interesting.