[WIP] ToEE Front-End X 5.0 Progress Report

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

Thanks, AjiTae! Will test right away and include in a special version of TFE-X for experimentation, too!

- Agetian

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

I've integrated the newest patch from Aji'Tae into this experimental version of TFE-X meant to test the patch. My personal experience shows that it works correctly in the windowed mode now (which is great!) and it works correctly in the full screen mode as well (as far as I can tell) but unfortunately it shows, for example, the game party in the top left corner instead of in the center like it always did before the reshack was invented (interestingly enough, in the windowed mode it shows the party in the center as desired). Still, definitely the best implementation of the patch yet, can be injected in both fullscreen and windowed mode without the obvious ruined UI scrollbars drawback - but needs testing of course - Gaear, can you please test this version of TFE-X according to your good/bad points in both fullscreen and windowed?

WARNING: Please start with a clean temple.dll when testing this build of TFE-X! The easiest way to do that is to (yes, you're reading this right) delete temple.dll from your ToEE folder and then run TFE-X. It'll automatically restore a fresh copy of temple.dll from inside the modpack upon launch.

- Agetian

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

What does it do, just fix the scrollbar issues?

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

@ Gaear: The plan at the moment is to make the reshack behave consistently in both windowed and fullscreen modes so that there are no negative effects (e.g. broken scrollbars) but the good effects affect both the windowed and the fullscreen modes, but the latest implementation only fixes the scrollbars issue in both modes, it looks like we're not quite there yet in order to preserve the good points of the reshack in fullscreen. Aji'Tae is working on it though, I'm quite confident we're going to solve this puzzle in the end! I'm not sure what happens with the other good points you've mentioned in your post above - I haven't tested how this new updated reshack behaves in fullscreen as far as those go.

- Agetian

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

@ AjiTae: Why not? It seems consistent with the original game behavior in the originally supported resolutions... Personally I like it.

- Agetian

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

I agree, it's good, provided there are no undesired side effects.

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

Okay, I tested the latest. Functionality looks good - I tried a couple different resolutions in windowed mode and they worked fine, and 1680 x 1050 worked fine in fullscreen. No scrollbar issues in either mode.

Like you Ag, I had the party centered in windowed mode but not fullscreen. Likewise the console was stretched in windowed but not fullscreen, and hovertext for rolls/dialog history was skewed for fullscreen (like normal) but not windowed. So basically scrollbars are fixed in both, and only windowed mode retains the stuff we wanted to keep from the previous hack.

Re: windowed mode, I never really used it before but I see it has its advantages and disadvantages.

• Mouse: smoother movement but only the default windows mouse.
• Window scrolling: seems a bit less pained than fullscreen, but you can only do it with keyboard direction arrows or an extremely hard-to-locate spot at the edges of the screen with the mouse.
• Interoperability: this would be the big one IMO - the ability to mimimize the game while running and have access to other apps without closing. I've basically never been able to do this on my system in fullscreen mode (or at least its a losing proposition crap-shoot). Most of the time the game hangs for me when I try it and Windows becomes either temporarily or permanently unresponsive. Being able to go back and forth with ease would be a great testing tool.

I'm also mildly curious if windowed mode might have some affect on performance and possibly even things like jerkstop. If it did, I would almost be willing to force it on players lol.

The bartering ui seems to be attached to the character ui as a sort of extension that runs along its left side, so I suspect it would.

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

@ Gaear: Awesome, that means that RC 5 can use this updated hack then for the time being until Aji'Tae figures out how to make it functionally more advanced, if at all possible. I agree that Windowed mode is a great testing tool (that, I believe, was what it was originally meant for, at least according to Steve Moret back when I asked many years ago - he described it as a debugging tool which wasn't meant to be the mode players would normally use).

RC5 will be released soon, then hopefully the last pre-release version when/if Aji'Tae submits the final version of his reshack, and then the release a few days later since otherwise the front-end appears to be stable.

- Agetian

 

Re: [WIP] ToEE Front-End X 4.0 Progress Report

UPDATE: Updated to Release Candidate 5. Integrated Aji'Tae's latest version of the reshack (same as in the experimental build above). Some source code cleanup. Compiled targeting JRE 1.6.0 (Java 6).

P.S. As originally requested, did some testing and confirmed that DLL hacks such as Humble NPCs indeed work with vanilla patch 2 via TFE-X.

- Agetian