[ARCHIVE] Road to Live Release

Drawgroup editor WIP:


I'm going to try to make this as simple as possible. You will need to set up different sprite configurations for each rotation, but I'll add the option to automatically generate the layouts for the farther zooms if you don't need fine-grained control.

SPR2 bug. I changed it to take into account per frame palette ids, but I think it's wrong right now.

The DGRP and SPR2 editors will be fully functional in the next build, and those sprites should also be fixed. (SPR2 version 1000 uses the "Palette ID" field for something else, so the palette is always the default)

DGRP editing is working perfectly, with some nice automatic offset generations that match up with the Maxis sprites. DGRP management (making new and reordering) not quite yet.

Right now there aren't any plans to extend the original game formats. To recolour objects right now, you have to change the sprite and re-import it.

In related news, SPR/DGRP edit is COMPLETE, and Task 2 is now available for the evaluation! It's arguably the easiest and most fun out of all the tasks, so you probably won't regret it if you give it a shot! I've also posted some information about Task 5, and the survey. Thank you all for participating so far, I promise I'll be back to working on the game soon.

Click here to see the news post covering both.

We have our first custom object made entirely from scratch! I just whipped up a quick sprite in about 5 minutes, gave it an init and main function, set up a tree table with one interaction, and set up a single DGRP + SPR2. Here are some shots of the object and the process:





Still need to clean up a few things before I can release this. What I can give you is the object!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12239448/FirstObject.iff

Give it a shot (place in Content/Objects/)! You'll need to spawn it with the IDE - it is called "First FreeSO Object". The function is for you to try out.

I've figured out how to use the 3DS max sprite exporter. If anyone else has max 9, they'll be able to utilise this to make fully z-buffered objects with a sims-like quality. The SPR editor will eventually gain support for directly importing from this format... but for now I had to extract the z, alpha and colour channels manually.

Task 5 for the IDE will arrive tomorrow.

I'm pleased to announce that all tasks are now available, with the final addition of Task 5, which involves completing an entire object from scratch. You might think that this one is too challenging for you, but you'd be surprised! It's really just a case of putting everything together from all the previous tasks.

For more on this and the evaluation survey, check out the thread at:
http://forum.freeso.org/threads/evaluation-all-tasks-now-available.1141/

Here's the thread for task 5:
http://forum.freeso.org/threads/task-5-create-an-object-entirely-from-scratch.1140/

The evaluation survey is now available! It should be completed after you have completed all the tasks you feel that you can. It will take about 5-10 minutes for you to complete. These responses are incredibly important, and mandatory to complete the evaluation! Check out the thread here:

http://forum.freeso.org/threads/survey-evaluation-final-survey.1148/

I've added this clause to the evaluation, which should make getting the gold event object a little easier:
(IMPORTANT!) Task 5 Clause

If you complete task 5: "Make a new object from scratch", you do NOT need to complete task 4 to get the gold object! This is because task 4 was considered too hard and generally a bad idea in the first place.
​

Most of you will be pleased to know that this is the last post I'll be making here about the evaluation! Thanks for putting up with this, hopefully I can bring you some more interesting changes come April when the project deadline has passed. (until may, at which point I have like 8 exams)

Watching it right now, looks like two people used a toilet at the same time! That's never happened before...

(the rest of everything they did is pretty expected. )

Fixed people being able to Tom Sawyer fences. Should be a few crash fixes for attempting to build walls out of bounds too (users were accidentally triggering this)

Most freeze crashes should now stop their infinite loops at 500,000 primitives, display an error message and reset the thread in question. Thanks to this, I was able to debug the problem with pets, and they don't immediately crash the game anymore.