So by now you might be wondering what the BYOND development staff has been up to lately, now that we've seemingly finished with a round of beta versions. Well, let's start with the bad news: It turns out I left out a pretty important part of the new sound code, so that will have to be fixed. The good news is, I don't think there's going to be another 3.5 beta.
Tom set himself a goal in February to get 4.0 rolling again, and he has overcome that inertia. Things got off to a slow roll at first because one of his major projects was the new icon format. The new format is 25-bit, using on-off transparency but full 24-bit opaque color. It stores all pixmaps in a .png file, and annotates with comments to put in all the DMI-specific data like which frame goes with which state. This should be really cool, and it removes a limitation developers have railed against since before I even heard of BYOND.
However I expect we may have reason to see full 32-bit icon support not too far ahead. Just recently Tom laid the groudwork for some new drawing code, which in turn needed tweaking by myself, and which set up a foundation for OpenGL drawing support. Shadowdarke is implementing that, and now Tom reports that this is pretty much done and BYOND can now draw with OpenGL. This means it will at some point be feasible to create a graphical BYOND client for Linux.
So BYOND 4.0 is rolling along quite well, and a lot of the new graphical stuff it needs is done or nearly done. Huzzah!
ID:10412
 Mar 28 2006, 7:33 pm
|
|
|
Mar 28 2006, 7:36 pm
|
|
Sinyc
 |
Huzzah! That's awesome news! ;)
|
New icon format? I know I should reread the paragraph, but what is new about it exactly?
| |
24bit color support and alpha support. That means that your icons can be a lot more "purrdy".
@Lummox: Huzzah! That's awesom....oh someone beat me to that... GREAT, lets see that 4.0 rolling down the ethertracks. | |
Aside from the 32-bit support, the icon format also makes creating > 32x32 icons trivial. So you could have a 64x64 dragon with animation and directions and everything. I don't know how important this is, but because was a real pain to implement, I feel it needs to be mentioned here!
| |
Lummox JR wrote:
Tom reports that this is pretty much done and BYOND can now draw with OpenGL. Eeeeexcellent, eeeexcellent... =) Will the first version of BYOND 4.0 use OpenGL, or is this something that's going to be integrated down the track? (I suspect the latter.) It stores all pixmaps in a .png file, and annotates with comments to put in all the DMI-specific data like which frame goes with which state. So does that mean that BYOND will actually use *the* PNG format for its icons (the one that's readable and writable by every decent image editor on the planet), or will it use a modified format that merely has strong similarities to PNG? Scoobert wrote: 24bit color support and alpha support. Correction: No alpha channel support (yet), just ordinary on/off transparency. Having "alpha channel support" implies support for translucency, which probably won't be supported for a little while longer... but the good news is that OpenGL does support translucency using an alpha channel. So in theory, once BYOND starts using OpenGL for drawing, we'll be able to use full translucency, which would be very very nice. No more crappy dithering when you want something to be partially visible! | |
Eep, Tom posted while I was writing my reply. :-)
So Tom, what exactly does that mean in practical terms? Do mobs now occupy different numbers of tiles based on the size of their icons, or is it just a graphical effect? (Either one is cool!) | |
The format is PNG w/ embedded comments that contain the DMI-specific info. So any editor with the ability to edit PNG comments (like Paint Shop Pro) can edit DMIs. The DM Icon editor also supports cut/paste of arbitrary-sized images so it is pretty easy to create a "big DMI" within the editor by simply importing each image within the desired frame.
OpenGL works, which means alpha support is in as well. Of course we haven't tested this very heavily, so take that with a grain of salt. | |
Currently you can see "big icon" support by loading up a BMP or PNG > 32x32 and placing it on the map. Internally we just break it up into tiles. This is now supported in the DMI format as well, so you can have 64x64 DMIs (that is, w/ directions and frames). With the support of a special "big icon" DM library we should also be able to make the use of such icons within the code in a manner that is transparent to the developer.
| |
I have a question on the transparent/translucent whatever icons. By this you mean kinda like taking something into a Photoshop file and changing its opacity right?, and how is this going to work. will you set it in the DMI file, or will it be a DM var like 'transperenency=0'
| |
It is a part of the icon format. Just as each pixel has red, green, and blue components, it now has an 'alpha' component that says how transparent it is.
| |
Cool, thanks Tom.
Tom wrote: Currently you can see "big icon" support by loading up a BMP or PNG > 32x32 and placing it on the map. Internally we just break it up into tiles. This is now supported in the DMI format as well Ah, right. That makes more sense than what I was thinking. =) | |
Woo! This is excellent news! I didn't realize so much work had been going on in the graphics department lately; I'm very glad to see this. It was definately the biggest hurdle BYOND needed to jump.
| |
Excellent =D
Looking forward to it! :o | |
Holy crap... Murder Mansion is going to love that...
| |
Ah, good. I'm glad to see that the BYOND administration hasn't been sleeping. Good work guys, keep it up. =)
| |
I'm loving this
| |
Nice work you guys have done so far, I can not wait to see the finish product.
->Calus CoRPS<- | |
The good news is, I don't think there's going to be another 3.5 beta. I wouldn't say that. There are a number of major bugs in beta 5 that need to be fixed ASAP. The primary reason for delay on that is that I've been slacking. Too much goofing around on server optimization and not enough real work. No paycheck for me this month! This means it will at some point be feasible to create a graphical BYOND client for Linux. Perhaps, but in my estimation, the drawing code is a tiny, tiny part of the effort required to port the gui to another platform. At best this gets us a few inches closer, but we're still miles outside of the ballpark. | |
Finally! Hmm, now that BYOND 4 is so near, we can begin speculating BYOND 5! (Muahaha!) ...alright, maybe later. =]
This news makes me very happy. I heard some details of the new format, but that 32-bit support wouldn't be ready for a while. Finally, I don't have to make retarded-looking attempts at false anti-aliasing! | |