Tychon

Alright, I suppose the name is misleading, as the program does not in fact edit dialogs per se. At the moment, all it really does is dump the position, size, and colors of rectangles drawn, in OFP number format. Which is to say, 0 to 1, and any amount in between.  I created this program due to the simple aggravation of constantly flipping between OFP and notepad, constantly tweaking sizes and such of my dialogs, as I'm sure those of you reading this understand. - excerpt from readme.txt  After about 5 hours of coding, I feel that this program has at least reached a point where it can be unleashed upon the masses, heh. I've attempted to create it as bug free as possible, of course, but the enviroment it was created in is fairly new to me. So please, if you see any bugs in the program, or in the numbers it dumps, please let me know. I only tested the actual dumps a couple times, as I need to get on about my day.  Anyways, I just hope someone at least finds a use for this. It seemed like a good idea to me at the time... (I also apologize if this should have gone in a different forum, being as it deals with dialogs I just felt ME was the right one.) ofpde.zip

You just want to give me work now don't you, heh. At any rate, yes, I am alive and yes I am still working on DE. No, I don't have any updates ready, sorry. Real life caught up with me a bit and I got a little burnt out, so I'm a bit behind. However, I do have some stuff written up, and I am of course looking for ways to improve the project. At any rate, here's a little write up of what is guaranteed to be in the next release. No I don't have a release date, there's still a bit of work that needs doing, and there are some other things that I want to see if I can squeeze them in the next release. First new feature, limited or complete removal of indexes. It's still a bit too early to say if this can be completely removed, but the new system will limit the amount of indexes required. So far I can assure no more "boxing" will be required, that is.. // Control0 // ~Control0 If anything, it will be one line at the end of a control, like so. // ~ControlName While this isn't perfect, it is much nicer, in my opinion. But who knows, I may think of a solution to nicely remove indexes all together. We'll see. Second feature, multi dialog support. No more working on one dialog per EXT. The next release will support as many dialogs as are in the EXT, and of course however many controls are in the dialogs. Third feature, colors! I know this really isn't terribly important, but I have had some requests for it, so this is going to make it in the next release. Just basic stuff, no alpha blending unfortunately. Fourth feature, internal resources. That is, the DE will understand that RscButton will have a SoundEnter, SoundPush, SoundClick, and that RscText will have a font, sizeEx, and colorText properties. Whether or not these resources will be editable still remains to be seen, but I intend to make them custom definable. I.E., you give it the name, and DE understands it throughout the EXT. Fifth "feature". A reworked layout. I'm tired of that immobile box look with the little tab. So I have a new MDI window based layout for DE. In simpler terms, you get a couple windows that you can move around inside the main window. All the previous features are guaranteed to make it into the DE in one form or another. Of course several of these will be completely new to the DE, so as always, new bugs may be introduced so please be patient with me. Also, I'm going to attempt to give the dialogs a more "true to life" feel to them. That is, text controls will actually be text, image controls will actually display an image, and buttons will have the button text on the face. No guarantees on this, but I'll try to get it in anyways. Happy?

Alright, I'm doing some major tweaking on the code, so there won't be an update tomorrow. Maybe sometime this weekend, but we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping these fixes will help in many areas. You as the user might not see a whole lot of difference, but it will make the code far more clean and modular, which means updating or adding things will be easier and faster. However, this doesn't mean there won't be any new features in the next update. I do have some things planned, but it's too early to really say what will make it in and what won't, so I'm not going to list them. Oh well, you'll see them when I release v0.12 at any rate. The version should give an idea of the amount of updates and features I'm hoping to add in. But again, we'll see.

No guarantees, but sometime tonite or tomorrow, you may see the first basic rendition of loading already created dialogs. It'll probably be ugly at first, but here's to hoping that I can get it done soon.

Well given the relative rate of time I spend on my computer versus the time I spend being around humans, yes, I am a machine.

Yay, v0.11 of DE is finished! I got tired of all the letters, figured it'd had enough updates to merit a number, heh. Same download link as usual, so I won't paste it here. At any rate, here's what's been updated. Â -> Several more tiny math tweaks. I fiddle with this a lot, can you tell? Â -> Customizable control hints. Hints can now have specific parameters, or a control can have no hint at all, it's up to you. Â -> Edit menu. Right click in edit mode now brings up a popup menu, allowing for more potential use in edit mode. Â -> Layer control. This only affects display in the EDITOR though, this will not affect your OFP dialogs. Being as this update has quite a few new features, please be on the lookout for any glitchs, the possibility of them is higher in this release than most of the past releases.

After fiddling with some annoying code for the past couple hours, I've come to discover that opacity control won't be easily done without some major writing to the control. So, it is unlikely that transparency will be implemented any time soon. It probably will make it in at some point, but that will take a bit of work, so until the important stuff is finished, that will have to wait. Unless it's in high demand or such, of course. As for the layering, that's coming along alright - I may have a release out with that sometime in a couple hours. Maybe.

Search before asking. Weapons on ground

I am working on opacity and such, but this will be implemented along with coloring - so that won't be available just yet. But I am looking at layer settings of controls and such, so the user can custom stack controls and such. And what I meant by custom hints was a selection of check boxes for things such as X, Y, W, H, resource type, things of that nature. So a person could just have the name in the hint of one control, the name, width, and resource in another, and so on and so forth. Just a thought.

Well, I'm not really going to add in the actual types, as that would force the user to use the define CT_SLIDER, for example. But as for hints, how about in the insert box I add a little panel that lets you decide what will be added into the hint for that control you're creating? It'll require a little rewrite, I'll need to add some extra data properties to the objects that represent the controls, but it can be done. Plus if I add in these properties it would pave the way for greater.. control, over controls, for later on.

v0.10c is now available here. Right click on the link and click 'Save Target As..' to download. Â -> Several math tweaks, hopefully it will be slightly more accurate. Â -> Updated the control hint. Hints will now display name, as well as X and Y positions. Â -> Updated the painting, thanks to Spinor's suggestions which gave me some ideas. You can now paint starting with either the bottom-right or the top-left corners. Also, you can right click to cancel a current paint process - that is, if you've clicked once, simply right click to undo your first click. Â -> Also Spinor's suggestion, controls no longer require a type to be defined after. Being as names are automatically created, no parameters are required at all.

Probably, you could assign the parameter to a local variable, then use that variable, instead of directly using the parameter. I don't know if that works, I haven't tested it. Just a thought.

Edit: D'oh, I thought that was in reference to manual resizing. Actually, that may work as far as placement goes, I will try it out later on. But as for manual resizing, I discovered an interesting little thing. While 0.25 may not work, 0.250 does. Go figure. So for now, just add an extra 0 if you need a number like that. I dunno why the hell it does that.

That site is in SWF format - meaning you won't have the music in your temp directory, as the music is imbedded inside the Flash file. You would need to have Flash MX and open up the SWF file, and extract the music from it.

Ack, I found a nasty little bug in the manual resizing code. At the moment, your control may disappear if you use a perfectly even W or H value. Such as 0.1 or 0.25 for example. Simply add on a few extra small numbers, such as 0.2500126, and it should work. Don't worry, I'm working on fixing this, but it may take a little bit.

Not meanin' to be rude or anything, but I think this would have been much better placed in the Off-Topic forum.

Not meanin' to be rude or anything, but I think this would have been much better placed in the Off-Topic forum.

Actually it not drawing the control if the second click is not lower-right than the first click is intentional. The current method of figuring size and such depends on it working that way. It would spew out negative numbers and such at the moment if I were to allow you to place the second click above the first click. I may work on fixing that if it really is a bother. As to the IDs, I haven't made any ID storage method, so you're right, it would create multiple IDs, as it just increments a variable. I'll convert that to a constant so it never goes down. And as for setting the cycling order, I can't do much about that, you'll have to manually arrange the order of the code yourself. I could adjust the order inside OFPDE, but I can't do anything about it in OFP, sorry. And yes, I really want to fix up the math and sizing methods before I work on anything directly control specific or such. Core features first. I don't suppose it's that difficult to have the user type a couple lines, heh. Anyways, I'll work on manual resizing and I'll fix the ID counter. v0.10b should be out in an hour or so, depending on if I'm not interrupted by my family again, heh. Addendum: Well uh, that was simple. I fixed the ID counter, and you can manually resize controls. Now the exact sizing might be a little off, but only by a pixel or two. Anyways, v0.10b is up and available for download. And to update a control's size, simply go to the editor, adjust the W and H parameters, then click on Update Display under the Dialog menu.

I do intend to make the screen resizable, but I want to get the math just right, as currently everything would be screwed up if I let the window be resized. The snap-to-grid will probably be implemented, when, not a clue. Whether I use mouse or keyboard, we'll see. I know I could program it to add in specific control parameters, but the problem with that is it would require people always use the same resource class names. That is, text will always be defined as class RscText. Otherwise, the engine wouldn't be able to decide what parameters to add. If people would be willing to always use those defines, I'd be willing to implement it to add in all control parameters. The ID does already increment, although it does start at 0. As for selecting the controls with the arrow keys, I don't really see much use for that. Almost all operation with the visual control will be done by mouse, so it would be a little tedious to switch to keyboard and such. As for the styles, I prefer to use defines as that makes the code much clearer. Yes, it does require people use ST_CENTER, but they can change that if they really want to. And yes, hopefully this will eventually be as easy to use as Yahoo! Pagebuilder, hehe.

Ah yes, language settings would do that to you. Hehe. And I'm definitely adding it in, that's too necessary a feature to consider leaving out. Eventually I hope to add in a sort of debugging tool to error check one's code and whatnot, but that will probably be awhile before that comes around, heh. And no, while I could have worked it to be cross-platform compatible, I saw little point. OFP being a Windows game, I just didn't think it worth the effort tackling that beast, hah.

Er, text editor? No, it's a dialog editor.. it's for visually constructing dialogs for OFP: Resistance. As to the commas, does it output commas on all X, Y, W, and H properties? It's putting periods on my end, hm.. and as to the manual adjusting of properties, I am going to add that in, but as I said, this was just a release of the core features - I.E., ultimate basics, heh. Don't worry, that will be in there shortly though - I was just wanting to get something out so the first release would fade from memory. Gah that thing was hideous. But if you'll notice in the Dialog menu, a grayed out selection titled, 'Update Display'. That will be what you click to update sizes and positions for manual editting. Just felt you might like to know, hehe. Oh, and just redownload the .zip file, I already added in the named boxes. I always use the same link, so you can just download it every now and then. I won't post every fix, as at this point that may get spammy as I come across little bugs and such.

The ramp is an addon - unless you have downloaded it and placed it in your AddOns folder, you won't be able to place it. If you do have it, sorry, not a clue what it's called. Probably under Empty -> Objects. Just a guess though.

Well, I have some decently surprising news, to me anyways. The core of version 0.10 is complete, so this means, it's up and available for download. All the features I want in this version aren't there yet, but the core stuff is done, and it works, so I'm going to release it now. OFPDE.zip  As per usual, if anyone sees any bugs, please post them here, telling me what you did, what it said or did, et cetra. Since I was too lazy to write another readme file, I'll just type up a quick thing on how to use it here.  To start, click on File -> New EXT. This will either load up your template file or will simply add the controls index to the editor. On a quick tangent, if you place a file named template.txt in the same directory as OFPDE, anything inside it will be loaded into the editor when you click on New EXT. You will have to manually add in your own controls index, but that's simple. Simply add the following two lines, exactly as is, with no spaces before them, into the template file where you want the control code to be added. </span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE"> // Controls // ~Controls <span id='postcolor'>  And again, there must be absolutely NO spaces before the index, or else you'll get an unable to find controls index error.  Drawing is exactly the same as the previous version, so I won't go into it. However, when you finish drawing, a dialog box will pop up asking for three things. You only need to enter the control type, such as RscText, or RscActiveText, whatever you have defined. I think you all can figure out what control name is for, and control action is whatever the action for the control is. Neither of these two need be entered however. When this is done, it will add in the basic code for the control into the editor. Special type-based control statements won't be added, but that's all you will have to type at least.  By now you may have noticed the menu called Dialog. There are two working options up there. Insert mode and edit mode. Insert mode is the default mode, which allows you to draw controls. Edit mode allows you to move and delete controls. Left click and drag to move a control, right click to delete it.  Well, that's about all of it. Save simply saves to description.ext in the directory of the program, load opens up the EXT. Hope this helps you all. I know, it's fairly low on features even still, but I'm working on it. Addendum:  Fixed a couple tiny bugs, and added in it showing the names of the controls as hints. There you go, Spinor. Still need to look at the snap-to-grid idea though.

You people answer too fast, sheesh The time it took me to type up my response, it's already answered. Hehe.

Good news! Things are going better than expected. So much better in fact, it is possible that an early edition of the next release may be out by Saturday, possibly even Friday. It will only be the basics though, nothing fancy. But you will be at least able to paint objects, move them about, and have them dynamically added into your EXT file. Â And remember, I said it's possible, I didn't say it was guaranteed.