Archive for the ‘development status’ Category

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0.9861 quick fix

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

Turnabout Substitution, one of the coolest fan cases to be made in PyWright, was exhibiting problems with the timer system in 0.986, so I put out a quick update. The lower framerate was causing the timer values to be floats, and wrightscript does not yet handle floats well. I set the framerate to be a constant in 0.9861, this is the only difference between 0.986 and 0.9861.

For 0.987 the variable framerate will be back, and I will come up with a better solution to handle the possible float values. Unless necessary, I don’t want wrightscript to really deal in floats. They can make some things simple, but also can be messy, especially when dealing with pixel values. It shouldn’t be hard to solve, but I want to make sure I solve it in a consistent way in every part of the code.

Posted in development status, releases | 2 Comments »

PyWright wants you!

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

That’s right. You! I have been running this project as primarily a one-man shop up till now. I have had some contributions to various aspects of the project: art contributions here and there, some code to add a small feature, or just simple feedback from users on broken aspects of the engine. It has been valuable for me to have that input from the outside, reminding me that I am not merely tinkering with crazy code for my own enjoyment. Without it, I doubt PyWright would have made it this far.

But I’ve never solicited help, or organized tasks for third parties (i.e. not me) to complete. Thanks to the Pezman, who began hounding me first via email, and then over skype and google chat, with a strong wish to aid me, this is changing. Besides working on a tutorial game in the background, and focusing my development efforts on unpolished areas of the engine that I have had a blind eye to, he is also going to organize the community efforts. He started a thread on the backup court-record forum with a clear delineation of tasks, and there has already been quite the response. I am excited to see how these efforts will change the PyWright landscape in the future, improving things which I just haven’t had time for, and maybe freeing me up to look into things I haven’t been able to.

If you are interested, head on over to court-records to see if you fit anywhere. We are looking for people to improve core content, such as sprites, music, and sound effects, to make fangames a little easier to dig into without game authors having to look all over for the initial building blocks. We need clever wrightscript authors to build macros to implement new game features, make current animations more closely match the DS versions, and eliminate redundant coding styles for common behaviors. And eventually, when I have some clear coding tasks more organized, we will be happy to have python programmers contribute additions to the core engine. If you have any of these skills, or even if you don’t, check the thread to see where you might fit!

Finally, just because I am soliciting user contribution, doesn’t mean I am resting on my laurels. The next update will soon be ready. With some important bug fixes, improvements to animation code, and interface changes, it’s something to look forward to! Also, it will be the first viewing of some of the debug tools I have been working on, to easier understand what is going wrong when mistakes are made in wrightscript.

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Hiatus over, more development on the way

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Where I’ve been

So I took November off to create an “important work of literary fiction”, as part of the National Novel Writing Month initiative. Ok, so it was a trash sci-fi novel. As if the world needs another one of them, right? It was a blast, and I did manage to meet my word count. Now that I am starting to recover from the insanity of trying to write 50,000 words of creative goodness in such a short amount of time, I am going to be getting back into PyWright stuff!

The engine itself

I continue to assert that the engine is “mostly done(tm)”. There are some definite shortcomings which I want to close before I stamp a big old 1.0 on it. The last release, 0.980, broke a lot of games because it started using an international Phoenix Wright font file, instead of the screenshot character set directly from the game. This was to enable users to choose their own font files, as well as support multiple languages. Well, the font file had different spaces encoded in it than the image file did, so it stretched out the text, and ruined carefully aligned work such as Turnabout Substitution. This is the biggest bug in 0.980. Other bugs include: valid resolutions not appearing on the list, and some dissapearing arrow problems. I need to squash these things down before I add anything new.

Some new things I am thinking about are better expressions, reconfigurable controls, better (faster) 3d, and some more builtin stuff to help aai type games be easier to make.

AAO Convert

I’ll be including an early version of the aao converter soon. It is still missing a lot of things, I’m sure, but working on it alone and trying to track down all the issues will take an infinite amount of time I think. Each time I work on it I make a large step of progress, but it’s a hard project to keep momentum with. Still, it’s really close now. The slowest part of the conversion process is downloading all of the audio and graphics, but fortunately it only has to do this step for new art and music.

Hopefully there will be some new stuff ready when/if the court-records.net forums ever come back online!

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

What I’m working on 10-23-2010

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

Here’s what I’m working on:

Posted in development status | 4 Comments »

0.976 release announcement missing, 0.977 on the horizon

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

In anticipation of 0.977 which is coming soon, I thought I should probably post a 0.976 annoucement for archives sake. I really have let this website slide, and no one comments on the forums any more. It happens. I’ll try to keep in touch more often!

So here it is: 0.976 is available for dowload, and has been for a while now. It is only a bugfix release, so not too exciting, but if you are still using 0.975 you really should upgrade. Some nasty bugs in that version…

0.977 will be out before the month is over. There are some nifty new special effects available, some tools to aid in finding errors in your game, and I changed how the resolution works so that it is a bit more flexible and standard. Also, this release should be fully unicode compatible, so all of you non-english PyWright users can make cases in your native language!

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0.975 is released, only a couple days later than TS times 2!

Friday, July 30th, 2010

This is the release that was meant to be only a short bit behind 0.974, which I’ll admit was released in a very halfway done and somewhat broken state. The whole issue with automatic saves, but not actually showing users a list of saves to load from, caused so much confusion it’s actually pretty funny. I learn something every single time. So I was sitting here, finishing up 0.975, trying to remember if there was anything I was missing.

Then I decided, I don’t care. I’m sure there is something missing, but I won’t be sure until one of you lucky individuals finds it. So here’s your chance to make PyWright better! Download 0.975 today, kick it and poke it until it breaks, then let me know about it! If there is anything either A) serious or B) easy, I’ll probably work it in to another release pretty quick.

The update is in the usual places, download service, or downloads page; and all of the binaries for platforms have been updated as well. The Pezman complained at how infrequently I update the binaries, and he was totally right. I plan on updating the binaries every time. It’s a pain, but oh well.

Full changelog in the update, here’s a quick rundown:

  • List of saves to load
  • More save control for game devs and users
  • “Sticky” cross examination arrows
  • Object priorities revamped to allow timers while interfaces are open
  • The ability to include file extensions or leave them off almost everywhere rather than having some commands need them and some commands need them to be left off
  • More support for spaces in games

And here’s my plan of features for the version after next (the next one being reserved for bug fixes)

  • Tools included with pywright to aid casemakers
  • Add hotkey to gui Buttons
  • Buttons that repeat if you hold them down
  • User controls config
  • More control over file layout (being able to use fg on files in art/bg for instance)

Most likely some of that will be pushed into the next next next version, but who knows. Let me know what you guys think.

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PyWright has been updated to 0.974

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

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 »

April fools is over, pymagine will only remain in our hearts

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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 »

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 »

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!

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