After a couple of months slipped by I finally finished the last few touches I was wanting to include. It has a mix of semi new features and tweaks to old stuff. Check it out! The update is available in the engine, or at this link: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/updates3/engine/0.974.zip

(The full binaries are not yet updated, so if you don’t have PyWright yet, you’ll have to grab 0.973 first)

The changelog has a detailed list of the fixes, but here are the most important:

• Preliminary gamepad support
• Easier window scaling
• Autosaves, multiple save files
• Expressions to aid coding and eventually help in the AAO converter
• Some protection against easy to make coding mistakes
• More fixes to the downloader

For the future I am thinking of adding more flexible input support and maybe tackling the settings dialog again. That’s the kind of stuff a 1.0 release needs. Other than that, I’ve been working on various tools like the gif2sheet program, something to help find overhanging words on speech bubbles, and the aao converter of course. I’m trying to figure out the best way to bundle this stuff so that others can use them. I have some ideas but haven’t really tackled it as of yet.

My goal is to finish 1.0 this summer. Here’s hoping I make it

Posted in development status, releases | 1 Comment »

Ok back to the regularly scheduled PyWright. Version 0.974 is scheduled for the 7th. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a very big release, there are a few tiny requests to be filled, but other than that I don’t have huge plans. I keep saying that I will get the aao converter out eventually, and it keeps being mostly true. I’m really not sure how useful it will be, except for the novelty of playing an aao game in fullscreen or whatever. But I’ve put enough time into it now that I have to at least show that it exists!

Posted in development status | 2 Comments »

I am happy to report I have returned to this project after several weeks of low activity. My time away has given me some time to think of a new approach to the engine, which I think will work out better for me as a developer, as well as for everyone making games with the engine. It’s not so much a set of new features that is the most exciting, but a new philosophy. Rather than build something which can emulate a specific series of games, why not open it up to allow other kinds of games to be made?

This idea of branching out in the game world, and seeing where things can go, has led me to look for another popular series of DS games to start with. I think I have found the perfect series. This series is so different from Phoenix Wright, that it will be a great test for the engine. There is no courtroom, no court record, no focus on textboxes, none of the things that make the “ace law” games what they are. And there are quite a lot of these games too, and I’m sure many fans (although I don’t know any).

A limited beta release of 1.0 has been making the rounds, and received great feedback! “I’ve never seen anything like it before”, said one beta tester. “It was so, I mean, wow. It made my eyes bleed,” said another. Some random guy on the court records forum who managed to beg the beta from me informed me that “I didn’t try it for very long, I am done with it.” I think he means it is really fast to get things done with it! It’s quite simply unique in the case maker world.

Screenshot is below, and once the beta testing period has ensured that there are no last minute bugs which will need updates and patch nonsense (ha ha ha), you will all get to try out this grand new vision for my engine. Enter PyMagine:

It will let you create games based on the “imagine” series of games for the Nintendo Ds!

I hope you will enjoy the new changes!

Posted in silly | 5 Comments »

I am officially impressed. I have not been that up to date with AAO. I’ve played a few games here and there, but I was too focused on my own engine to really pay attention to how other great developers have approached this domain. I knew that AAO was basically an editor, and that it used javascript somehow to play the cases. But I didn’t realize how advanced it really is. It would be a mistake to write it off just because it is focused on an editor instead of having a full scripting language.

Anyway, the feature that kind of floored me today, is one of the last features I have to implement in order to convert games from AAO to PyWright with 99% accuracy. (I say 99%, as that last 1% of compatibility may or may not be there – it’s hard to know without testing every single AAO game in existence) This feature is expressions. Expressions in AAO allow a developer to have almost a mini scripting engine, interacting with variables and doing math on them. You can increment variables with “set x = x + 1″, you can do booleans with & and |, and you can do very complex math such as the “%” operator. It also follows the general order of operations like most programming languages with expressions engines do. Not what I expected from an easy-to-use, true casemaker.

PyWright has no expression engine. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ace Attorney Online Converter | 2 Comments »

To coincide with Turnabout Substitution’s third demo release (congrats to Ping’ and his team for all of their hard work!) PyWright has received a minor version bump. It is almost exclusively fixing bugs related to Turnabout Substitution and how far that game pushes the engine; although most of the fixes are generic problems anyone could run into.

The binaries on the download page have been updated to 0.960, or you can update by going to the download section from PyWright’s main screen. If you update from the engine, don’t forget to close and restart the engine after the update.

Note: If you have a version of PyWright prior to 0.95, you may have been confused when I said 0.95 was out, as your engine didn’t automatically update to it. I might not have made this clear, but 0.95 uses new binaries, so the only way to update is to download the full package again. If you haven’t updated PyWright yet, and are still using beta 10.94, head there and grab the shiny new 0.960.

Some other changes in 0.960 are related to the Ace Attorney Online converter. For those paying attention, I put a version of DramaticaXIV2’s hilarious AAO case, Ace Attorney Online: The Game, on PyWright’s game download section. It’s still very buggy, but mostly works. Download it and play around, if you dare.

I already have a load of new fixes for 0.970 planned, most of which are related to the scary 0.95 in which I allowed feature creep to roll me over. I added so many things I was bound to leave bugs and irritations in my wake! There are also some things which AAO games need, such as the password control, in order to be more accurately converted, so that kind of stuff will be there as well.

Finally, I am working on the test game which was supposed to come out closer to 0.95’s release, but isn’t out yet. It will have some examples of how to emulate AAI in PyWright, as well as demonstrate how to use all of the new features. Note that, emulating AAI is not going to be that close to the real game at this time. Version 2.0 may be able to handle it better, but for now it’s just an emulation. If you want true AAI support, pwlib is probably going to be a better choice, if version 1.2 of that ever comes out.

Yep so that’s my progress in a nutshell. 2.0 is still on the shelf, looking at me forlornly with it’s extreme features, but I am not ready to tame the beast. I hope that somewhere I will find a good way to transition smoothly into that.

Posted in Ace Attorney Online Converter, development status, releases | 2 Comments »

And I can finally sleep. I am really excited about this version, and I hope that you are too! I have incorporated almost every suggested change or new feature, or at least laid out some plans for how to add those in the future. More than that, I have cleaned up and fixed many of the things that have hampered the engine a bit in the past.

Things like label none conflicts, menus forcing you to split your scripts a certain way, and there being no way to load a script at any other line then the first, forced game coders to do things in a certain clunky way. Many of those kinds of limitations are now gone.

There were still a few areas where PyWright could not easily be customized. There were hacky ways to do things, and it was MUCH more flexible than some people gave it credit for, but it still had a long way to go. In fact it still does. However, being able to put graphics on your buttons, and some more variables to customize other core components, makes this the most customizable version ever.

So to sum up, I’m really happy with how this version came out. When I started working on 0.95 (which was then called beta10.95), I didn’t expect to get into it as much as I did. But with all of the great feedback from users, the help I’ve gotten with various things, testers finding new ways to break it, and some epiphanies on how to fix long-standing issues; it has culminated into something I’m actually proud of.

It’s a long way from 2.0, but I am happy to finish 1.0 before going there. One step at a time.

Downloads here, as usual. I hope you enjoy it. If something breaks, that is good too, because there is so much more to be done.

Don’t forget to read the changelog, especially the part about regressions. While there is mostly just a bunch of new features, some things have changed that may or may not be detrimental to your project. beta 10.94 won’t force upgrade to 0.95, so you are safe to stick with the old version if you must.
And with that, I’m going to have a nap!

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The new version is finally upon us. I for one will be glad to stop shuffling files in and out of zip files, waiting for people to report breakages, fixing it, and then zipping it up again, and uploading it, and editing 50 files at once…

Yeah, releasing is HARD.

Until all of the files are uploaded things will be kind of broken. Downloads on the download page will not work.

0.95 will NOT download automatically by running PyWright, the full packages for your system will need to be fetched again.

I am not too upset that I didn’t make February, considering it’s a day difference.

I can’t wait for you guys to see what I’ve been working on!

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Ping’ informed me that there are songs that appear to play slower in PyWright than they should. Here is the reason:

In a typical music player, it is always only playing one music/sound at a time. Because of this, it can shape the music player to fit the rate of whatever is loaded. Music can have different sample rates, which is similar to a framerate. It says how many samples per second are stored in the file. When your music player loads a file, it adjust it’s playing rate based on what rate the file says.

Now, with a game engine, it’s not so simple. You have many sound effects and different music playing at different times. Because of the way the hardware works, you can only run things at one speed at a time. If you try to play music stored at one rate, and a sound effect stored at another rate, you either have to stop the music to change the settings and play the sound; or resample each file to the settings of the hardware. Resampling means analyzing the sound file and either cutting out frames to make it a slower rate, or adding frames to make it a higher rate.

Some kinds of resampling are very easy. To double the rate, you just have to read two frames at a time; while to half the rate, you can skip a frame. If you are not doubling or halving the frame rate of the sound though, you have to do deeper analysis of the frames.

The libraries PyWright depends on, namely SDL_Mixer, can do the cheap resampling for free. It doesn’t know anything about more advanced resampling however.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in PyWright tips | 2 Comments »

I’ve been spending some serious time on the next release of PyWright, and been having a blast. It kind of started when Ptapcc from court-records.net started asking me if PyWright could handle certain features he was interested in. When looking closely at what he wanted, most of the things were either doable right now, or would be doable with just a few modifications to the PyWright core.

One of the features had to do with zooming, which had already been implemented but not hooked up to wrightscript; and the other had to do with being able to do collision detection with wrightscript alone.

Now I am not trying to compete with pwlib, I don’t intend to fully replicate the edgeworth walkabout code. But I was interested in whether implementing that was possible without too many changes to the engine.

After implementing a few things, each change led to another, and beta 10.95 is turning out to be one of the biggest updates PyWright has ever had. Most of the updates are small, but quite a few of them are meaningful enough to really have an effect. Being able to add graphics to buttons, rock-solid saving capabilities, and more control over where code jumps (label none is being deprecated) can make workarounds the exception rather than the norm.

It’s such a big set of fixes in fact, that I am starting to think that the “beta 10.95″ moniker isn’t really fitting. PyWright for the most part has been pretty stable. Each release brings issues along with it that can break games, but the amount of changes needed to update games to be compatible has been low. I would have liked to break old games less than I have, but it was beta right? Well now it’s not. I’m not going to hide behind the beta name any longer. The internet has enough betas on it’s hand.

Henceforth, the next version of PyWright is going to be named version 0.95, and it is the series of releases that will eventually (and soon) be 1.0. I will still keep tweaking things as I always do, I’m sure 0.95 will break something, but I am aiming for more stability from this series. Changing the name is part of that. 0.95 will be out this February for sure. It will require new binaries for those of you using the binary releases.

Currently I am methodically testing the save feature in every possible situation I can come up with to ensure that it is crash-free.

Oh, and the mythical beta 11? Besides being somewhat on hold, it’s new name is going to be version 2.0.

Posted in development status | 6 Comments »

After much neglect, I am going back to work on the next version of PyWright beta 10. I’ve already done a few things, but I want to make it a very polished release. I will need your help to uncover those pesky bugs that have been hiding for some time. PyWright isn’t perfect, and likely never will be, at least until beta 11 fixes everything. But that keeps slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future; so it is time for beta 10 to get another kick in the pants and strut its stuff!

Discussion here:
Forum to discuss current bugs

Yes, AAO and documentation are still on the table, and in a big way. Another chapter is almost finished, and aao is in final testing.

Posted in development status | 3 Comments »