Improvements for VS 5 or 6 or even later - just ideas

Hi!
I suggest that everyone who has ideas of improvements for the future of Visionaire adds them in this list. Maybe it could help the team?
I personally have lots of ideas when I work with VS of things that could be better, easier to use, or that are missing. Of course they are not always needed to create games (or sometimes it is already possible in a tricky way), but it would still be interesting to have them in a v5 or v6 maybe.

- new interface (there are many things that could be improved to have a better workflow)

- possibility to use vectorial masks (like in illustrator, photoshop, etc...) in order to hide part of an image for example.

- more realtime 3d? (I read somewhere that Wintermute Engine, currently in v1.9, plans to release someday a v2 allowing 3d environments)

- add more features for 1st person adventure games (360°, wave effects for the water, etc)

- allow to create easily infinite scrolling panoramas

- improved save/load system

- in a scene object (picture) properties, possibility to use variables instead of conditions (display the picture if variable = 0 or 1 or 2 or 3... and not only when condition is true or false).

- have the possibility to use dialog boxes instead of subtitles (like in Lumino City and many other games)

- allow to create dynamic puzzles where it is possible to move/scale/rotate an object (take a lever and move it, turn a wheel, etc - and you really do it yourself with your mouse in the game, it's not something predefined)

- when loading a graphic (image, animation...), have the possibility to write manually the path of the file (for the moment it's locked). It's sometimes faster to just copy/paste the path or name of a picture that you use several times.

- in the properties of the scenes, near the background music, add an environement fx (where we can easily play the waves of the sea, the birds...)

- add a text editor (with several options like allowing to center/justify the text). It would be great to use to create diaries.

- have the possibility to play directly in a selected scene (for debug purposes) - for example, select a scene, and go to Tools / Run selected scene.

And many more to say probably, but I have to go!

Good ideas.

Some of these are technically already possible.

Scaling, rotating & moving an object or animation is already possible with the new to() & startObjectTween() functions.

With a loop you can easily make things follow the mouse too.

In the next public build, you can define which interfaces should remain visible during cut-scenes. This means that it will be possible to create a simple script for displaying speech bubbles or a fixed position dialog box for displaying text inside of, although the latter is much easier to do.

I believe that you meant values & not variables. I think this would be a great idea as it's a lot more flexible than using conditions.

I've mentioned the background music thing before. I think it would just be nice to be able to create/add up to a specific amount of sounds to the background. That way you could define loop-able music & environment sounds. Although I think 4 channels would be plenty enough for most situations. Remember though that the background music does not actually have to be music. Most games benefit from sparse music cues instead which I believe are better being triggered by actions or triggered dynamically via a loop & random pause time values.

You can actually use the display object text action part found under miscellaneous for diary text etc, as it won't close until you manually close it with an action part. The thing I want to see for text is transitions (fade in/out, typewriter effect, etc) & the ability to change specific words in the texts into different colors (key words).

P.S: we do have a dev/bug tracker which we use for adding ideas, goals & bugs to. Unfortunately it's not open to the public.

If there are any ideas that sound promising or doable, then I'll add them to the tracker & then the devs can take a look in their own time & decide whether they are possible or not.

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- improved save/load system

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Don't understand this yet. What exactly is missing to you here in the current system ?

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- possibility to use vectorial masks (like in illustrator, photoshop, etc...) in order to hide part of an image for example.

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Vector graphics are expensive, they must be prerendered, that is slow. I can add masks, but we probably won't add vector graphics support.

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- add more features for 1st person adventure games (360°, wave effects for the water, etc)

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360 ist a point I've encountered before, I may be looking how other games do that. Wave effects can already be done with the shader toolkit.

Some further options for work with text would be great. There is an object text action part, but it's not much flexible and it needs to be called.
Great would be some option besides creating normal objects in scene to create "text object"
this object could be moved and with some options like font, text-align.
But it's not actually necessary, all can be done easily wtih images.

I believe the save system could be made more flexible by providing more options such as text input naming, with possibility of time stamping & linking to a value that could contain a score or game completion percentage. Also the ability to not display thumbnails etc...

- improved save/load system: exactly what AFRLme said. In the current state, it works very well, but it could be more flexible, offer more possibilities!

- vector masks: it was just an idea but I understand. Adding simple masks would be great too!

- water effect: yes I know it can be done with the shader, but what is missing (or maybe it exists and I don't know yet) is the possibility to define easily where to apply the water effect. When I was using Adventure Maker, it was possible to paint in black/white directly on the scene the area where to apply the effect. Well I don't need to paint directly in VS, but a system of mask as said above would probably help a lot.

- more options to work with texts: it would be awesome!

- speech bubbles: I don't see well how you do them AFRLme (I will probably ask you again someday -- I don't need them right now). Are they bubbles that resize automatically depending on the quantity of text inside? This is important as it has a strong aesthetic aspect.

Other ideas that were said above are important too, such as having the possibility to edit manually the path of a picture or file, in order to copy-paste this path, or just change the number of a picture in the path (example rename image01.jpg to image02.jpg). I can hardly explain why I want this feature, but I know that everytime I need it I am frustrated (just a little!)

No I don't think the speech bubbles will really be scalable. VS has no option to draw shapes. I don't think there is anything in the data structure to check the width of the text. You could use the automatic line break option to control the max width of the text or you could create manual line breaks in the text yourself & use a value to determine which speech bubble size/shape to use for each text. It would be as simple as set value then display text.

The wave/water effect can be done by simply (I say simple, but it's not that simple) applying one of the ripple effects to the object file containing the water image/animation.

I repeat old my suggestion : TURN CHARACTER BEFORE WALKING

My wish to all next versions: better testing before release. In last 10 years I have tried Visionaire 3 times. 2006 I think, 2010 and now. And every time I gived up after some days of trial. It is very frustrating if you are bombarded with many bugs and inconsistencies.

Most of the bugs are wxwidget related. There's nothing much the devs can do about that until a new version of wxwidgets is released.