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Archive for the ‘Ace Attorney Online Converter’ Category

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 »

Gif 2 Strip, AAO converter soon

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Hey all. I have been working slowly but steadily on the Ace Attorney Online converter. One issue I ran into, was that all of the graphics (or most of them) are GIF files, and GIF files in PyWright often need some extra work to make them compatible. I thought of fixing GIF support for PyWright – I don’t even know how possible that would be, without actually writing my own GIF loader. The bugs have to do with bugs in the libraries I am using. I may work on that eventually, but at the moment my time is better spent elsewhere.

To that end, here is the first version of the gif2strip program. It is currently a webservice, as it requires a few external programs making it a bit difficult to package. You just put a url of some gif file, and it will spit out a .png and a .txt that is ready for PyWright use. The AAO converter will run all of the gif files through there, making sure games have working sprites!

You can find the gif2strip program here:

http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/gif2strip/index.cgi

It’s not fancy but it does the job, and partially solves the issue with porting art, as gif files seem to be the easiest way for most artists to create animations.

Some progress on documentation has been made. The chapter on adding and removing objects from the scene has been posted. I would have to strap myself to the chair and have Franciska whip me to finish it in a timely fashion, but it will get done.

Finally, I am submitting a game for the TIGsource assemblee competition. The game uses the core of pywright beta 11, and I have been updating that as my game sees fit. It’s a very action packed shooter, with awesome 3d effects, and hundreds of sprites on screen. It doesn’t use wrightscript unfortunately, I couldn’t find a nice way to integrate that which wouldn’t slow me down too much. But the core is getting a nice set of optimizations and features. After the deadline, which is in a few days, I am going to get back to the wrightscript engine, and see if I can’t make some progress. I’m not into new year resolutions, but beta 11 this year? I hope so :)

Posted in Ace Attorney Online Converter, External Tools, development status | 1 Comment »