RE: [GD-General] Scaling GUI graphics

[<phi...@pl...>]

Err, I reckon it probably took Bob a month of core programming, plus
ongoing support and maintanence. He's still tweaking and optimising it, as
there's always something to improve (currently it's the text rendering).

I believe it's a binary format, but one that's well documented (I'd ask
Bob, but he's on holiday at the moment, I myself would have replied
earlier, but I've just come back from honeymoon;). The main saving was one
of not having to write the front end editor, although obviously we still
had to write all the hooks.

Communication between the flash interpreter and the game code is a bit
hairy, but boils down to shared memory. The flash does all the menu logic,
setting state variables which the game code polls. This meant that our
flash designer/artist/programmer (he's a flexible guy) could try different
layouts and structures without hassling the programmers too much.

It was most definately worth the initial hassle, especially since we're
re-using all the code for our current project. The only thing that worries
me is relying on an old version of the macromedia tools to enforce our
restrictions. Hopefully if more people start using it, Macromedia will take
note.

As to rendering, everything is converted into tristrips, in a pre-process.
I believe we can control anti-aliasing on a per-object basis, although we
may have had to remove it for certain primitives. I think there were issues
with spider-webbing on translucent objects.

Cheers,
Phil



                                                                                                                       
                    "Corrinne Yu"                                                                                      
                    <corrinne@elapsesof       To:     <phi...@pl...>                              
                    tware.com>                cc:                                                                      
                                              Subject:     RE: [GD-General] Scaling GUI graphics                       
                    08/19/2002 06:35 PM                                                                                
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                    corrinne                                                                                           
                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                       




-----Original Message-----
From: gam...@li...
[mailto:gam...@li...] On Behalf Of
phi...@pl...
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 2:40 PM
To: gam...@li...
Subject: RE: [GD-General] Scaling GUI graphics


We do all our front-end / HUD stuff in Flash, although our scripting
support is limited to Flash 4, and there's a couple of rendering things
we
don't do, either for performance, or 'bang for buck' issues. IIRC some
of
our game logic was in it for a while (I certainly recall having to read
state changes back out of the flash interface class).

-- Cool. How long did it take you? (And was it worth it time wise?)

-- Did you read Flash 4 file format? Is it a text or binary file? It is
kind of cool because you saved programming time of programming the GUI
and programming time of programming a GUI editor (which very few
programmers make anyway).