Status Update

Hello,

you may have noticed the silence in this forum.

Until last friday I was working on a different (work-related) project, but since then I've restarted my development on this project.

The current status is this:
- Rewrote the engine to use WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) as the display engine.
This has several drawbacks but one *huge* advantage: WPF and the corresponding IDE (VisualStudio) can be used to create an ingame UI which removes the need to write an UI system myself (HUGE waste of time).

- Refactoring the general architecture of the engine to be more maintainable.

These changes are more of an "under the hood" kind, so no new screenshots.

If you're technically inclined, you can check out the code in the SVN.

Cu,
Storm

 

I'm curious, what are the drawbacks?

 

You loose some performance, since you're no longer able to use Direct3D in exclusive (fullscreen) mode. I guess the performance loss will be similar to what you see when you run World of Warcraft in "Maximized Windowed" mode... (Thats what it's called).

It shoudln't be that much of a deal.

It's still possible to make it fullscreen. But it's "faked", since in reality the window just looses its border and is resized to the full size of the screen (just like WoW is). This has one advantage though... Alt+Tab'ing from such applications feels "instant" unlike Alt+Tab'ing from traditional fullscreen games.

Well, it works for WoW, so I guess it'll work for this project ;-)

Cu,
Storm

 

If it's transparent for content creation / porting, then it's fine by me

 

This is a vastly superior solution...
Fake full screen means:
1. alt-tab is much much faster
2. accidentally hitting the "windows" key does not minimize the game
3. a plethorea of bugs eliminated (random crashes in various games, crashes due to alt-tabbing; especially in older games, google chrome resizing weirdly and preventing the game from taking focus on some older game, etc etc etc).
4. Overlay things / windows on top of the game window.

Frankly I hate the "full screen mode" with a passion and wish everything used a borderless windows that covers the whole screen instead.

 

Well the big advantage is that you can use Microsoft Expression Blend or Visual Studio to create GUI controls. Thats the same environment that is used to create Silverlight "movies".

Cu,
Storm

 

New Update:

The WPF part is basically working very well now. (There are some UI parts checked in the repository).

I am working on the World-Architecture now. This means: The object system, how they are persisted to save-games and stuff like that.

I think I'll use a modified proto.tab as the basis for it all (Data-driven design!). But since the protos.tab is in my opinion unmaintainable, I'll convert the file to XML and use that instead. I may also allow splitting the prototypes into several separate files for better maintainability.

As soon as I have something good to show, I'll post it here.

Cu,
Storm

 

Here's my current draft of the prototypes.xml I want to use as the prototype-base for my engine:
http://www.hartte.de/prototypes.xml

I still want to condense the class-levels and natural attacks. How flags are represented is also up for discussion. They could be rewritten as elements with a boolean attribute for each flag.

Also on the todo-list is an XML schema to make it very easy to maintain and edit (with auto-completion and such).

Cu,
Storm

 

I just wanted to say I'm highly looking forward to this, along with whatever other useful information you come across.

You're awesome, DarkStorm!

 

Couple of questions.
1) When you complete the engine, will it be able to run the current ToEE code or will we need to rewrite/edit code to make it work with your engine?
2) Do you have a rough idea of when we engine will be rebuilt? I am just wondering if it will be 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years. Just a rough estimate would help me frame it.

 

What code exactly are you talking about? I plan to use IronPython in order to support the original python scripts.

Since it's a side-project I suppose it'll be at least a few months.

Cu,
Storm

 

I was referring to everything. The original Python, the DLL, anything we need to keep playing ToEE.

Thanks for all of the hard work

 

Since the DLL is the game, it is more or less what I am replacing ;-)

 

A few months? No offense, but it sounds a bit optimistic

 

Yeah well it might be. It always depends on how much free time I can invest ;-)

Cu,
Storm