Archive for March, 2010

Ace Attorney Online has expressions!?

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

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. (more…)

Posted in Ace Attorney Online Converter | 2 Comments »

0.960 and some other stuff

Friday, March 12th, 2010

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 »

PyWright 0.95 is live

Monday, March 1st, 2010

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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0.95 Ahoy!

Monday, March 1st, 2010

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!

Posted in development status | No Comments »