Greetings & Planned Patching

[ete]

D'oh, yeah, Ete, I reversed zooming in and zooming out, it should read:

(1) Use X to zoom out until until the exact point at which you can no longer scroll the screen horizontally by hold on mouse at the screen edges;
(2) Hit Z to zoom in once, to the first point where you can move the screen horizontally with the mouse;
(3) As you scroll through with the mouse, you see the updating, black parts of the map.

No problem, I figured it out .

Reworking the zoom code to adjust to screen resolution has fixed it for me--basically now it computes the zoom out level that will first show the entire map and sets that as max zoom out, computes the zoom in level that will show 6 tiles horizontally and sets that as the max zoom in, then adjusts the other zoom levels to fall evenly between the two.

Okay, that sounds sensible. Good to have the black screen thing gone.

I'm doing my changes a bit differently from Yitzi because I want my changes to work with both SMAC and SMAX, but I will make sure it is 100% compatible.  The only .exe changes are about 20 bytes to load the ac2.dll file that contains all my actual changes for both, the the .dll figures out which was it's been loaded by and hooks API's and modifies code in memory to work it's magic.  So Yitzi will just need to change those 20 bytes in his .exe once, and after that just downloading ac2.dll will get all my latest changes.  We'll just have to coordinate if we both want to modify the same function, but the nature of our different focuses--UI on my part and game logic on his part--that will probably be rare.

Ah, okay, that should avoid a lot of sending patches back and forth or dealing with edit conflicts. I think you're the first to use .dll injecting on SMAX.

[PlotinusRedux]

I've been tinkering with and polishing my general UI changes while I let how I want to do the graphics mods percolate in the back of mine.  Here's the change log for what I've got in final, tested form so far:

Windowed/Full Screen:
*Toggles between Full Screen and Windowed mode;
*Window is resizable;
*Configurable Full Screen resolution (any resolution can be used);
*Automatically switches system back to native resolution when windowed;
*<TAB> key toggles for systems that don't like <ALT><TAB> (like mine for some reason);
*DirectDraw .ini setting obsolete--DirectDraw is used only for movies;
*Opening and in game movies fully compatible.

Scrolling:
*Pixel-level scrolling (previously had to scroll at least a tile at a time);
*Right-Click and drag on terrain scrolls;
*Edge scroll zones scroll faster the closer to the edge the mouse is;
*Configurable zone sizes and scroll speed.

Zooming:
*Pixel-level re-centering--no more screen zigzag when scrolling in and out;
*Automatically sets reasonable min, max, and increment values for the current resolution;
*Mouse wheel zooms in and out.
*Configurable # of increments between min and max zoom.
*Resolves black areas after zooming defect.

View Mode:
*In view mode (key <V>), mouse over for unit and terrain info (don't have to Shift-Right Click).

[ete]

 

Looking forward to playing with these improvements.

[PlotinusRedux]

This list fixes most of what I found so annoying about the AC UI as to make the game painful to play.  The next stage, increasing color depth of the source textures, is going to be more complicated than I thought, and will likely take me a few months to complete given the other demands on my time.

So I think over the next couple of weeks I'm going to complete the last items on my list that don't involve increasing color depth--having the "T" key show the nutrient, production, and energy yields on all tiles; add the SMAX address so it works with both SMAC and SMAX; and adding some UI, either in-game or outside the game, to change all the settings I've added, and then release it. 

So expect a release in 1-3 weeks.

[Flux]

 

[ete]

With the reworking of zooming, do pods/resources/fungus no longer disappear when you zoom out a certain amount? I'm asking because I'd like to be able to screenshot full maps to display on-wiki, and currently when you zoom out sufficiently to do this for most maps most of the important detail is lost.

[PlotinusRedux]

Ete,

I didn't change that part, but it appears to be resolution-dependent.  I can zoom out to show the full map at 2560x1440 for small maps, and to nearly full for huge maps, without losing the details, but I lose them much faster at 1024x768.  It shouldn't be hard to find what's doing that and add an option to disable it, though.

[ete]

Okay, that would be appreciated .

[PlotinusRedux]

With the reworking of zooming, do pods/resources/fungus no longer disappear when you zoom out a certain amount? I'm asking because I'd like to be able to screenshot full maps to display on-wiki, and currently when you zoom out sufficiently to do this for most maps most of the important detail is lost.

You've got to have better eyes than me for this to be much good, but here's a fully zoomed out huge sized map with all the details preserved.

The forum shrank it from 2560x1440 to 1200x675, but if you click on it you can kind of see little dots where units are still....

[ete]

Awesome. Having details harder to spot is a vast improvement over those details just vanishing.

Can I volunteer to be an alpha tester so I can start using this for map screenshotting?

[PlotinusRedux]

Ete, I'm close to releasing.  I've got all the features I want for the first release in--everything from my original list except increasing the texture color depth and resolution.  I'm working on the in game dialog for the new settings now, and I still need to get the hook addresses for Alien XFire--I'm going to try to finish up this weekend.

[ete]

Cool, looking forward to it .

[hackerjack]

This looks awesome.  Can't wait to finally be able to do screenshots properly again thanks to alt-tab.

[PlotinusRedux]

I finally finished the SMAC version, just need to to add the hooks for SMAX over the next day or two.

[ete]

Awesome, that resource terrain overlay would've helped me a lot when I was starting out. I'm curious as to how potential resource is displayed, given the silly number of possible terraforming/base tile combinations.