Working on 0.8.0 compatibility

[GeorgeS]

Let me know if you need hosting on this emulator site. Rogean owns the site, but I have shared space there for my emu tools and misc. files, thus have direct access.


GeorgeS

[Lothrian]

I could probably host it for you as well

[Tharkun]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but with the source being available, would this mean the client could be run in a non-MS environment? (ie one's favorite unix/linux OS)

[Lothrian]

i think it could possibly be ported to linux but i doubt itll just run under linux as is

[Secrets]

Originally Posted by GeorgeS

Let me know if you need hosting on this emulator site. Rogean owns the site, but I have shared space there for my emu tools and misc. files, thus have direct access.


GeorgeS

I'd support GeorgeS here. He would be the person to talk to about hosting it. That way it's not under licensing, and you can remain anonymous.

[Windcatcher]

Originally Posted by Lothrian

i think it could possibly be ported to linux but i doubt itll just run under linux as is

Your best bet would probably be to port it to Free Pascal + Lazarus. One of the things I had to do was upgrade ClearLogin to support 0.8.0 servers, and for kicks I made a Lazarus version of it in addition to the Delphi one. I'm not planning to attempt to port SC over, but it should be possible to have a single code base that works under Delphi 6 as well as FPC and Lazarus.

[Windcatcher]

Almost there...i've been redesigning the color subsystem to support separate ambient, diffuse, specular, and emissive colors. It's going to take too long to completely test everything, but I want to make sure that the important stuff is working. The hard stuff is all done, including upgrading OpenZone, but I need to fix my shaders. I also made a few game sounds so playing won't be completely silent. Once I get the shaders nailed down I just need to place some more sounds in the zones, re-export everything to XWA, and do some final testing (mainly zoning and checking mob locations).

[Windcatcher]

Progress update:

Shaders...pretty much perfected, just one more thing to verify.

Auto-attack: working, had to copy the generated map files from OpenZone to the server's maps folder.

Player heading: finally got the client correctly understanding the player's heading and correctly sending it to the server.

Merchant: fixed the problem with not being able to close the merchant window. It was because the confirmation opcode is 0000, so the cilent has to not wait for the ack in that case.

Selling items: fixed, had to flip all my nodrop flags in my DB since they're reversed in 0.8.0 vs. 0.5.5. Also had to add a flag to the client so it can tell the difference.

Further tests:

1. Zoning out of the tutorial zone.

2. Zoning between zones.

3. Checking my merchant placements in Lelembeth, because I changed them.

4. GM training.

5. Scribing, memorizing, and casting spells.

6. XP updates.

None of these will take very long, and I'm not going to test grouping because that's not really possible to do by myself.

[Windcatcher]

Here's a status update folks:

XPing ... Working

Zoning... Still a little buggy, sometimes it can't conect to the zone server. I might release that part as-is, assuming that some other devs here are interested in fixing it.

Spells ... Working

Merchant placement ... Good, but there's a problem with my collision avoidance all of a sudden. I don't know why yet.

There's one showstopper that I need to fix... The server is putting me at a bad Z coordinate when I zone in sometimes. It's related to the map file for the zone. I don't know if OpenZone is creating it improperly or if the server is parsing it improperly. I need to do some more investigating.

Texture animation rate is broken, should be an easy fix.

I'd also like to add better ambient lighting control to OpenZone, but it's a bottom priority. At a minimum, I need to add a placeholder in the XWF file format for it.

[Lothrian]

I wouldnt mind taking a crack at the zoning issue. I personally am thrilled at the progress and cant wait to try it out! Awesome work Windcatcher

[Windcatcher]

Did some more work on it today...

- Fixed the bad-Z showstopper, I needed to have OpenZone swap the X and Y coordinates when making .MAP files. While I was at it I added an option to just export the .MAP file without having to export the whole zone. There's also a similar option for just exporting sound info.

- Fixed the texture animation rate bug, this was also an Openzone bug.

- Fixed another OpenZone bug when exporting colors.

- Found a bug when destroying items ingame, I still need to fix it.

- Took a quick look at controlling ambient lighting. What I want to do is specify how much outdoor lighting affects individual objects so I can have outdoor areas respond to sunlight but not indoor areas. I'm not yet sure how best to handle it, but I'll think about it a little more tomorrow.

- The zoning bug is really annoying. Before I release this I want to take a couple of days looking at it to see if it's something easy to fix.

- Skill updates might be broken. I'm not sure yet, but I'm not seeing any notifications about skills improving when I do playtesting. I need to look at it, but hopefully it's something really simple like getting an opcode wrong or something. It was working when I was connecting to my 0.5.5 server, so it can't be all that hard to find.

[Windcatcher]

Getting there:

- Fixed the bug when destroying items, also fixed a bug with stackable items. It turned out that 0.8.0 looks at DB fields that 0.5.5 doesn't.

- I think for the lighting I'm going to allow a "sunresponse" number or something similar to be assigned to each object. Polygon-level control would be ideal, but that would be a real nightmare for the engine to handle. I might start taking a stab at it tomorrow.

[Lothrian]

Any new updates Windcatcher?

[Lothrian]

hey windcatcher are you still working on this at all? can we get a status update?

[DrWIggly]

I'd like to know to. How hard would it be to port to Lazerus?