BSF 2 suggestion topic.

FIREST0RM000 · Post by **FIREST0RM000** » Sat Nov 08, 2008 3:54 am

Unless it blocks Dieterlings, such a module is utterly useless. Confused

that is what I was referring to. when I think jump, I usually think dieterling.

TheBlueEcho · Post by **TheBlueEcho** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:35 am

Would Animated Sections be a sin to suggest?

Slayer0019 · Post by **Slayer0019** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 5:26 am

I hope not, because it would be epic.

IBurn36360 · Post by **IBurn36360** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 5:42 am

It would be cool, but extremely hard. Animation, usually, has to be done frame by frame, meaning that anyting has to either be pre done, or rendered frame by frame by the creator, making sharing ships nearly impossible. I heard that there are other ways of doing it, but I am not familiar with them.

On topic, I would like there to be a toggle to the Booster/Aiges deflector lines, those kinda get annoying, and its not really realistic to have a line that just goes to a section, to me, it makes more sence just to have them be deflected.

This would not be the same in Ship Maker though, the lines wuld be presant there, they would just go away when the .shp is opened up, if toggled.

Slayer0019 · Post by **Slayer0019** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 5:44 am

Actually, I got one. How about being able to make negative values without having to edit strings?
This may have been suggested already, but I don't know, I didn't read.

Deltaflyer · Post by **Deltaflyer** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 6:18 am

I know that its stupid but I just had this little idea of "signature pieces"

You could "draw" your own 3 or 4 pieces and "patent" them as your sig pieces, letting you have more individuality in your ships.

FIREST0RM000 · Post by **FIREST0RM000** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 6:36 am

I know that its stupid but I just had this little idea of "signature pieces"

You could "draw" your own 3 or 4 pieces and "patent" them as your sig pieces, letting you have more individuality in your ships.

the only problem with that is that if you want custom sections, you would have to distribute them in whatever ships you made that use them. that means that we would need a whole system for making and saving custom sections, in which case there would be no need to limit the number of available sections. just make any sections in a certain folder available to the user.

I'm not sure I even need to point out how awesome that would be. such a system should totally be implemented, for sections, modules, and weapons.

flabort · Post by **flabort** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 12:48 am

maybe custom sections could be stored directly in the .shp file, eh?

i think there should be a file for custom pieces made by the user, so if he/she wants to reuse one, he/she can easily reuse one. and, of course, a copy of any custom sections right in the .shp file.

also, the animated sections.... can't we do that with the DooSections already? or was it sectiondads? well, in any case, any animated sections could be done the same way doodads are done.

FIREST0RM000 · Post by **FIREST0RM000** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 7:55 am

maybe custom sections could be stored directly in the .shp file, eh?

basically, if you want to add any new object into the game, it needs the sprite itself (what it looks like, the hit box, and all animated frames it plays through), as well as a set of properties describing the object, such as the AI to use for weapons, or what properties a module is allowed to have. this makes distributing sections that are integrated into blueprint or ship files rather impractical. It would give no re-usability, and if you deleted the ship, you would lose the section.

a more practical solution is distribution through a dedicated file type, IE .sec or whatever. this could very easily be expanded to weapons, modules, and doodads. also, blueprint and ship files are kept smaller as they only need to to say what sprite to use, but don' t have to define the sprite. also, a database of sections could be maintained.

I'm not sure, but it would stand to reason that BSF 2 will still be 2D use sprites. whatever they do for file sharing, I hope they don't change it too much.

Post by **Kaelis** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 9:53 am

you're wrong, Firestorm. You can include sprites inside .shp - all you have to do is change .shp format from plain text file to archive (text + image data). Including binary data inside shp is also an option. In any case, BSF can just read such file, extract image data out if it, and create sprites. There are GM extensions created specifically for that purpouse.

Of course, just including image files alongside .shp and then searching for them when loading said .shp is much more practical as far as sharing sections goes.

FIREST0RM000 · Post by **FIREST0RM000** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 10:13 am

you're wrong, Firestorm.

that's basically what I was trying to say. we had a little discussion on IRC too and came to the same conclusion.

Post by **th15** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 10:22 am

I have tried using tar archives to store more data inside .shp and encounter files but the tar dll for Game Maker is pretty crap. You can do compression and archiving manually through GML but it's slow. Load times are already bad enough without adding an additional unpacking pass on the reading.

Added sprite files to .shp files would also make them a lot bigger. And would have to be loaded for each ship, even if they use the same custom sprites. It's a lot of work for a less than perfect end result.

Ideally, the solution to this is to have sprite packs and have the .shp files define their own dependencies. That means that sprites are distributed in packs which are loaded into the game on startup and each .shp file contains a list of required sprite packs that it looks for before loading.

The shipmaker interface needs to be improved to handle a larger number of sprites (it needs categories, dropbox and hotkey assignment built into the section selection system) and a method to uniquely identify each sprite pack would have to be developed (probably a md5 checksum).

Latooni · Post by **Latooni** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 1:14 pm

th15 wrote:Ideally, the solution to this is to have sprite packs and have the .shp files define their own dependencies. That means that sprites are distributed in packs which are loaded into the game on startup and each .shp file contains a list of required sprite packs that it looks for before loading.

You mean, like libraries? That'd actually be a really smart idea.

XEALMOX · Post by **XEALMOX** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 4:47 pm

flabort wrote:maybe custom sections could be stored directly in the .shp file, eh?

i think there should be a file for custom pieces made by the user, so if he/she wants to reuse one, he/she can easily reuse one. and, of course, a copy of any custom sections right in the .shp file.

also, the animated sections.... can't we do that with the DooSections already? or was it sectiondads? well, in any case, any animated sections could be done the same way doodads are done.

what about group sections(groups of sections you can save butt wich in game still are separate sections) so you could build ships faster

and because they aint custom butt just a few Y and X coordinates and data of pieces which everybody has it would not like custom sections require extensive modding of the game and shipmaker

TheBlueEcho · Post by **TheBlueEcho** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 9:47 pm

Müg wrote:
th15 wrote:Ideally, the solution to this is to have sprite packs and have the .shp files define their own dependencies. That means that sprites are distributed in packs which are loaded into the game on startup and each .shp file contains a list of required sprite packs that it looks for before loading.
You mean, like libraries? That'd actually be a really smart idea.

It also sounds like the most logical one. Would this be possible to do with weapons as well? Like, Section Libraries and Weapon Libraries.