Procedural script drawing system!

[jph_wacheski]

I have an idea for a procedural script drawing system that we could use in the bitmapExpressions,.

It would basicly be a simple paint interface that could be built in the Zeditor or externally,. the user would paint normally with whatever tools we could come up with,. line, circle, star, superforumla!, blur, sharpen, tint, splater, spray, etc. and instead of saving a bitmap the system would save a ZExpression that would re-draw the users creation.

It is what this little NDS painter does,. and it save little files,. that can even be plaved back like a video of the creation of the painting,.

http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/

[aside] I know you have a DS ville do you have the R4? I d/l the ZGE source and when lookng at the free pascal compiler got interested in doing a DS game,. or music app. [/aside]

The reason I think this would be quite cool is, it could allow for small file sized hi-ish res. sprite creation in ZGE,. that would be cool for 2d games with neet-o hand-drawn looking sprites and of course textures,. with a nice procedural implementation.

I guess that start point for this is to get a bunch of drawing script fragments together,. the trick will be to implement it is such a way that small bits of code can re-draw all the drawing steps,. .

I realise this is sort-a what can be done in the editor now,. but it is a bit limited, and not that easy to 'draw' stuff with,.

Code: Select all

ZZDC<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<Bitmap Name="Bitmap1" Width="4" Height="4">
  <Producers>
    <Repeat Count="10">
      <OnIteration>
        <BitmapZoomRotate Rotation="0.025"/>
        <BitmapRect Color="0 1 0 1" Size="-0.6 -0.6 0.6 0.6"/>
      </OnIteration>
    </Repeat>
    <BitmapRect Color="1 1 0 1" Size="-0.1 -0.3 0.1 0.3"/>
    <BitmapRect Color="1 1 0 1" Size="-0.3 -0.1 0.3 0.1"/>
  </Producers>
</Bitmap>

[Kjell]

Hey jph,

Keep in mind that the DS makes use of OpenGL|ES + instructions need to be send to either the ARM9 or ARM7 processor, so you'll need to alter the ZGE source quite a bit before you'll be able to build DS executables.

K

[jph_wacheski]

oh i was just thnking to to a simple freepascal game not outputing from ZGE..,

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Nintendo_DS

although perhaps that would a relly good first source spin-off from the cross-platform main ver. of ZGE,. . as the DS is a hardware specific target, we could get rid of the stuff that just would not fit, and foucss on adding support for all that could work on a DS,. Of course that is a big huge project,. and we are understafed at both the ZGE and interationGAMES! lol . where are those interns I ordered???

[Kjell]

Hej jph,

Ah alright I don't have any experience coding for consoles in Delphi, but I can imagine it's not all that different from C++.

And I'd personally rather see a PS3 or Wii port / build of ZGE, because of their online distribution platforms. Both are based on OpenGL|ES too actually .. but a additional problem is that both use CG as their shading language, not GLSL.

Anyway, Joystick support and proper Collision Detection are first in line

K

[VilleK]

An NDS-port of ZGE could certainly be investigated as Freepascal, SDL and OpenGL are available for NDS although in down-stripped form.

A interactive editor for bitmaps in ZGE-designer would be nice. The editor could generate lists of BitmapRects and code for BitmapExpressions. I once had an idea that you could load a normal bitmap and the editor could transform it into many BitmapRects after analyzing the bitmap for rectangular areas of the same color.

The benefit of such a editor compared to just loading a BitmapFromFile would be that it is procedural, so it can be scaled smoothly, and generated slightly differently each time. So yes, a nice feature, let's assign it to our army of summer-interns