Finishing the Preferences screen

By Siver. T

Not much has happened (as in new features) since the last blog entry. There are 2 main things, that needs mentioning.

  1. AssetRefMockerManager was moved to the BootstrapManager class. Because BootstrapManager is now a singleton then there is no need to be AssetRefMockerManager in each scene. Therefor, it was made as part of the BootstrapManager class. Because of this, the code required some changes. The one reason was, that while the AssetRefMockerManager was in the each scene, then on the start of scene  all the ref mockers could be loaded. But now, the Start()method is run only in the bootstrap scene so therefor batching mode was implemented. That is, when the batching mode is on, the asset ref mockers are just registered. And only after all the mocker are present they are loaded.
  2. Implementation of the fast help text (FHT, a.k.a. tooltips). This was implemented using separate canvas in the bootstrap scene. There the FHT would be shown, always on the top. The FHT consist of two parts. The FastHelpTextComponent which is used for game objects, which will have some tooltip info. And the FastHelpTextRendererComponent which is actually used for rendering the text. The glue between those two is FastHelpTextManager. Because of how are FHT implemented, the "control" characters in the text (like "|") were replaced with tag based (like <b>...</b>). Then, they're further processed to TMP's rich text tags (like <font>, <color>, ...). For instance | is processed as custom font and custom color. The custom font is needed, because the text should be bold. And because a bitmap fonts are used, for bold text the separate font need be used (well this is not strictly true, as even with bitmap fonts one can used "weight table" but it is much harder implement it in our situation, because of "embedded" font assets int .sti assets). Then color tag is used for the color (which is defined as a field in FastHelpTextComponent.

 


There were also some minor changes, like fixing the focus "bug" in the preference item prefab (when the item was unchecked, it still retained in the "selected" state, so the sprite wasn't changed. This was fixed with disabled "Navigation"). Also, sound volume settings changes are now reflected in the appropriate mixer. Then there was implemented color change on focus for Toggle4State and changing the default colors for the buttons and preferences item in preferences screen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Main menu updates

By
Image
W ell, another "long time no see". I'm still working on the project as much as I can. But it's not a steady work. During summer I was doing some other things (like bike touring) and mostly work. So, what's new? Well the main menu is working. While working on it the need arise for some sort of "mockups" components for various asset and mockup manager. Let me explain why. Because the assets of JA2 are proprietary, it means that you need to extract and build the asset bundles by yourself. Therefor all the assets in the GameObjects needs to be referenced indirectly (because they may not exist yet). This is where mockup come on scene. The mockups are just references to the real assets (like pointers in C++). And when the scene is loaded, the mockup manager primary role is to load the real assets from the mockups. Also, the main menu is implemented using Aspid.MVVM package (MIT licensed). Some other minor changes is custom Script edImporter for .pcx and .st...
Read more

Project reborn

By
W ell, after a long time of inactivity I started to work on this project again. It's been a long time since I touched the project. I've got a lot of other work to do, and also other "spare time" projects to work on. This time, I'll be using Unity engine. So, the basic infrastructure is almost done. At moment I'm working on the UI stuff. The project would be using uGUI (Unity GUI) with some MVVM library. The one big difference from the previous project is, that original JA2 data would be needed only in build time, not in a runtime. There would be editor utils, that will convert the original JA2 data to the format Unity could work with. This means, that every user would need to do this step manually as I don't think it would be legal to distribute it. After the working main menu I would post a github link to the project as I need to also update readme.md so anyone would know where to start.
Read more

Changes to string handling - UTF-8

By Siver. T
So after some time here are some minor updates on project. As first, std::wstring was replaced by std::string (as UTF-8 as default) as it somehow wrong approach to use std::wstring anywhere. For more details see [1], [2], [3]. All std::string now by default hold UTF-8 valid string. As next I will change all projects to use unicode by default and use wide WinApi functions (with help of core::ConvertClass). As second some changes were made in whole game state/screen/handling management. There was added some new classes for init screen handling and so. As usual you could see changes in google code project site. For the near future I'm planning to implement MouseRegion class and the go to GameManager::run(). And happy new year :) [1] - boost.devel thread about strings, UTF-8, ... [2] - boost.devel tread about strings and future [3] - stackoverflow question about UTF-16
Read more