Updating Old Apps? WZCK, Pie Slicer, et al.

[Stratadrake]

Well, Pie Slicer is currently having a possibly blocker-level issue in that the inclusion of the DirectX 9 library (which is built against the .Net 1.1 library) is causing VS2010's LoaderLock MDA to throw an exception. Pie Slicer itself still seems to start up and shut down properly if I simply ignore it, but the fact it is throwing an MDA exception is not good either. I may have to switch to the XNA library which is compatible with the current .Net frameworks (3.5 and 4.0), but that steps up my difficulty a little because XNA is geared towards C#, and although it looks like it's still possible to do the same in VB.net (basically, as long as you don't have to pass raw memory pointers it should be fine) though there aren't many tutorials written in the VB.net flavor ... I may have to be doing the syntax translation myself.

[Emdek]

Stratadrake, maybe it's best possibility to switch away from platform dependent technologies?

[Andrie]

Yea!
And use Python!

[Lord Apocalypse]

Python isn't the answer to everything.

[Emdek]

Lord Apocalypse, yeah, the answer to everything is 42.
If someone would ask me, then I would say... Qt (pyQt / pySide could be good choice too).

[Stratadrake]

Yea!
And use Python!

Sorry, I kinda prefer Mantis. At least for my VTOL's.

[Andrie]

Ok I mean Python!

[Andrie]

Are you going to stop "Updating Old Apps"??

[Lord Apocalypse]

Nothing new from strata on the redemption svn... real life strikes again I think.

[Stratadrake]

Well, November has the odd distinction of being simultaneously a very productive month and a very UN-productive month, depending on whether or not you happen to be a "plot bunny".

Pie Slicer: Currently, if I just disable VS2010's MDA I can get it compiling and executing correctly, though I'm not sure I want to do that. Then I can work on building the editing tools, and its new renderer.

WZCK: I would rather completely rebuild this one from the ground up.

Beyond that, yes there is real life to attend to (fulltime job, for one).

Good news, though: Wiping old installation residue from XP's Installer folder freed up half the primary HD.

[MaNGusT]

Is there a possibility to load-edit-save pie2 models with texture animation in latest pie slicer?

[Stratadrake]

Define "animation" -- texture flag 0x4000, for one, has always been supported. And yes, the whole idea behind Pie Slicer was (and still is) a tool for directly load/edit/saving PIE files.

As for the file formats themselves, obviously it needs to be upped to the current (3.x compatible) PIE 2 format, but I'm thinking of maybe keeping the 1.x compatible PIE 2 format as a legacy option, and soon as I'm aware of all the specs, 3.x compatible PIE 3 format.

[MaNGusT]

Define "animation" -- texture flag 0x4000, for one, has always been supported. And yes, the whole idea behind Pie Slicer was (and still is) a tool for directly load/edit/saving PIE files.

I mean that will I be able to load a model and its png and then edit texture anim's parameters(play it, check, edit) then save the fixed pie2 file?
Since there are no other tools that can edit pies with texture animation, it'd be awesome to have one for wz's artists.

[Mysteryem]

In PIE Slicer, texture animation is handled in exactly the same way as the pre-TCMask teamcolours (it is actually the Team Colours area in the Texture Editor) . Once you've selected the texture for that polygon, you set the width of next frame and then the number of frames. If the next frame's texture hits the far right edge of the texpage, it will go down by the value that you set the height as and start again on this new line from x position 0. Do note that not everything may be identical between Warzone and PIE Slicer, I can remember having some problems with animated helicopter blades that I did in it. iirc, when I made it have 3 frames, Warzone played the 3rd frame twice.

[Berg]

when I made it have 3 frames, Warzone played the 3rd frame twice.

Playing the frames correctly has been fixed in 3.1.0