Preparing a Vis. project... (Catyph)

1. you could load the scene & inside of an at begin of scene action; play the video. the black bit is the fade to scene part... there is no true game load for vs so you can change to a scene instantly or fade to a new scene. on scene open the active animations will load as they are playing or if you preload animations at the beginning or end of a scene then you may experience a bit of slow down in animations & the mouse movement until the animations have done loading.

2. the upcoming release has some new options for allowing the scene music & sounds to continue while a video is playing.

sorry for the random explanation in the first part. I just typed it out real quick off the top of my head which is why it's not very coherent.

No it was coherent, don't worry

1 - That's what I have been doing already, but there is still the very short black screen. I think it will be impossible to remove, it's like a blink of an eye. It's a shame, but not catastrophic !
I'll share a demo as soon as possible to illustrate the problem. but it's too early :p

2 - ok I'll have to wait the new release then. Can't wait ! I'd love to know more, but from what I read on the forums : it will come when it is ready, right ? hehe !

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it will come when it is ready, right ? hehe !

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indeed! or at least when Alex says it is ready...

Hey, generally would you say that a game that has been built into an EXE (ctrl+B) runs faster than a game that runs from the editor (ctrl+F9) ? Did someone notice a difference ?

hmm not sure but if you are running the game through the editor then you are using more processes than the biuld version of a game... so possibly?

Thanks AFRLme, according to my tests, the game seems to run slightly faster once compiled into exe. Good to know, even if it's almost imperceptible.

Well I now have almost created all my basic framework (main menu, main features, beginning of the game, opening movie, inventory, etc...). I feel a lot better !

Unfortunately I'm still stuck on the Save issue. When I save, it still goes to the first available slot and I don't know how to change this (something new about this in the next release ? Seems important to me.)

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check out my advanced menu template for a complex/professional style game menu example complete with correct way to make a save menu & various other things such as new game, resume game, bonus content etc & reading/writing from/to the config.ini file.

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I found something from you here : http://alternatingfrequencies.com/vs/quick_sld_menu_example.rar
But it seems that the link is dead. Is it the template you were refering to ?

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wgfa956ohxcfwya/xeniXXzdSy/advanc... - here you go...

Thanks ! Hope I can understand how it works. I knew that the savegame menu would be problematic for me.

I must be missing something... I have the exact same problem in your advanced menu template.

Example : you have 6 save slots. They're all Empty (E) :

1E 2E 3E
4E 5E 6E

You select the slot #5 because you want to save your game in slot 5.
So you click on the Empty slot 5, then you click on the "save" button.

Logically, you should obtain :

1E 2E 3E
4E 5S 6E (with S = Saved et E = Empty)

But instead, this is what happens !!

1S 2E 3E
4E 5E 6E

It is always saved in slot 1 (then 2, 3 ... by order), even if you select another slot. Is that normal ?

yeah because it saves in the first empty slot... technically you haven't created 6 save slots. you have created 6 access slots but infinite save slots because you can infinitely cycle through them to the left or right via the previous/next save action parts.

you can however: overwrite a currently selected save slot if a save already exists or you can load from selected save slot or delete a save; if one exists.

if you want to do what you have said then you would have to manually create your own save game system with the quicksaves instead & either have it display text or take a screenshot with lua & then use lua to display & shrink the screenshot - I've not tested to see if it is possible or not mind. you could for instance have premade images which will be displayed based on a value/condition linked to current scene or chapter of the game.

just a few (rough) ideas...

Ok great, thanks ! I thought this problem was solved in your template, and that I could get inspiration No problem, I'll try quicksaves + lua.

My guess is that an improved save system would be more than welcome in a future version of VS. Having the possibility to choose the slot where to save sounds like a basic necessity.

Another thing that would be welcome is a "scale option" on the layers. Instead of writing the lua code to resize an animation, it seems better for beginners to have a scale button where you can choose the size. Scaling an animation is very useful, I used it several times already to save memory.