LarkSS

Awesome.

I believe x86 versions of Vista and Windows 7 don't have the same problem of the OS forcing driver signing, but things may be different now. If your OS demands a driver signature, then the alternative is to test sign it in test mode so you can run it anyway.

For my input manager system (which has worked its way in the highly delayed 1.3 build of Delta), I used ControlX for keyboard as gsoft mentioned, and Joystick2 for controller devices. Joystick2 is very versatile and even includes force feedback support, but there are rare cases when it fails to detect a controller. In this case I used Joypad as a fallback. The reason I use both extensions is because the Joypad extension will introduce lag that seems to multiply based on how many input devices you have connected to your computer... so if your device recognizes Joystick2, it's best to use that. About the reverse of Joy2Key, PPJoy may do the trick, but it is a pain to install on Windows 7 x64.

MMF2 HWA uses Direct3D9 for many graphical operations so that the GPU can handle some of the load and improve performance where much of the lag was caused by drawing routines rather than expensive code. It also enables more precise scaling/rotation, alpha blending vs semi-transparency (double precision), and pixel shaders which you can import to make your own custom effects. Nice find DW. I found my performance with those kind of loops to increase when using the ForEach object, but your method seems to yield a much more substantial speedup. I rarely use MMF2 anymore myself, but those making big games with this program should definitely learn what's going on here.

You could give the 360 Movement Object a shot.

Looki's Shader Pack has a shader called Hole, which we used for the effect.

Is that a giant plunger?

The parallaxer object is meant to give an image per-line parallax for more advanced effects like 3D ocean water and hills with depth. For the background you're trying to set up, I'd just do as the others suggest and mess with MMF2's parallax technique. If you're wondering why Worlds does it differently, it's to avoid requiring a giant quickbackdrop object, as the background resizes itself to only be as big as what's necessary to fit the screen (more efficient).

Pretty much. Shove the important information into an array, save it if you went faster than your previous run, and load it at the start of the frame so you can race. Was just a bit of struggle trying to sync up and correctly save the ghost when dieing and respawning from a checkpoint.

MMF2 bugs out when you try to spread a value in the same event that you are starting a loop. Just duplicate the start of frame event, have the first event spread 0 through the ring spawners, and the second event start the loop. Should fix it right up.

Well I believe he was hoping for a way to achieve the effect without manually including graphics for every color mode Blazefire. How to do that in MMF2 though? The easiest way that comes to mind is to program some pixel shaders by searching for algorithms like USC mentioned. Otherwise, I think the only other way is to do it as Blazefire said.

A friend of mine uses vgm2opm to extract instruments from vgm/vgz files for use with VOPM and gets great results. You can get a ton of vgz files at Project 2612. Just dully note that with vgz files you may have to extract a file out first and add ".vgm" to the end (vgz files are actually vgm files compressed with winzip technology).

I'll try to see if I can and edit this post some time later if I manage to.

Well actually I knew the extension wasn't supported anymore when I chose to use it over the alternative. As I said in my first post though, Lua lag disappointed me (using only MMF2 events to fix everything would have resulted in a worse or nonexistent fix), and with 6 months of not working on the engine I just couldn't motivate myself to touch it anymore. That and I'm busy with other projects now. I wasn't going to post source code until slopes, static models, baked shadows, and a level editor was in place, so me releasing this now pretty much means I've given up on it. Sorry.

Looking great as always. I'm curious to how that boss looks like in motion too. Speaking of which, maybe the weakspot could alternate between his body parts with some kind of visual indicator alerting the player which piece needs to take damage.

Er by slopes I meant angled surfaces in general, sorry. The engine doesn't support angled collisions of any kind right now... or at least I never tested it. UnlimitedChaos, the shadows only work because it's not using Lua code. Investigate the rings I placed to find the ring that isn't casting a shadow. Any time you place a shadow caster on top of a stack of blocks, the shadow isn't placed correctly. Also, you have to set the shadow setting (data\config\prefs.ini) to 2 or 4 to activate the Lua procedure to observe the difference (most notably the increased overhead).

Slopes are possible, but the engine doesn't support collisions with it in its current state. I was supposed to add slopes eventually...around the time I planned to make a level editor for it so that slope creation didn't mean making a ton of unique objects and setting alterable values. In regards to 3D models, this particular opengl extension is supposed to support them as well as the ability to use vertex and pixel shaders, but I haven't messed with either. I think with the opengl extension I zipped up, one of the examples included shows how to use glsl shader materials, which in turn also shows how to load up a 3D model. The extension lacks code for rigged models however, so animations would mean loading up a ton of models for every frame... And yes the principal is the same. You just add the Z coordinate to the distance equation and calculate three speeds over two (speedX, speedY, and speedZ). Edit: I forgot to mention that I highly advise you use the standard MMF2 build when running this. In HWA parts of the Lua code fails to execute properly, namely that shadow settings 2 and 4 which use Lua code to properly cast shadows in all situations fails to actually be correct. (check out the ring on the big block, with shadow setting 1 or 3 the shadow of the ring is cast inside of it instead of on top). It also renders a little faster since it can skip the step of converting the OpenGL scene into a flat polygon in D3D.

http://larkss.thisisourcorner.net/files/INI1.5b.zip There you are, hopefully all is well now. If you have questions about the engine, feel free to drop them in this thread for all to reference.

Just tried this out and it's pretty awesome. The movement feels right and the engine is solid. The camera works well too though tilting it vertically in notches seems a bit awkward. About 2 minutes in I got it to crash when I tried spindashing into that tiny tunnle by the spinning platform with hangbars attached. I could not reproduce that crash though. Also when I was messing around in the water the game randomly faded to black and reset me to a checkpoint as if I died, but there was no drowning music nor did ragdoll mode kick in before the fadeout. For opinions, I'd prefer the camera to smoothly tilt vertically, as well as for it to be less lazy and turn with Sonic more than it does, so I can be lazier. ;> That's it really. The 2D mode was excellent and I couldn't break it this time around, so only positives in that regard (and toward the rest of the engine of course).

Bah I had a feeling that would cause problems. I used a beta version of the ini object that preloads animation data and uses a new technique in the extension to switch between data sets that are stored in memory to greatly improve the speed that the ini data is interpreted between objects. Unless you guys got it figured out already, I can upload my version of the ini extension as soon as I'm done babysitting.

Jeez and my little sister's birthday is in a few days too. Happy Birthday Strife!

Bah I remember sending it to someone else and they had the same problem. I sent them the same exact extensions I had too and made sure we both had the same build of MMF2, yet it still crashed for him but not for me. Everyone I've sent it to has managed to run the exe at least however, and it has worked on every computer I've tried too including my 2002 laptop. The requirements for it to run is OpenGL 1.4 support with GLSL shader support optionally for improved fog rendering. Even without a proper gpu though, it should still fall back to software rendering so you can at least run it. You could try updating your gpu drivers to see if you get more fortunate results. Besides that, all I can say is to make sure you extract everything before testing it, which I'm sure you did. If you want you can try contacting me over AIM/MSN and we can try to get it working for you.

Happy Birthday!

And here you are, the gift of a Happy Birthday greeting 3 hours before the day ends on Standard Eastern Time. ..., 3, 2, 1, Happy Birthday! ...Crap my computer clock was a few seconds slow. Maybe next year!

@UnlimitedChaos: Turn off Adblock Plus, also you may need to use Fusion Updater for some of the extensions. @Strife: I think I remember the author considering to do something else with that extension when I used it, but didn't expect any further progress. Here it is in any case. http://larkss.thisisourcorner.net/files/AdvSound.zip If anyone else absolutely cannot download specific extensions because they don't exist anymore, let me know. UnlimitedChaos, the Zip extension should come by default with MMF2 extension packs, which leaves me concerned if you are unable to get it. Please try to find the extensions again if you're still interested as I will not upload extensions which can still be retrieved, for the sake of the authors as well as for legal reasons since many extensions require a legit copy of MMF2 to be installed. Edit: If anyone is able to get it running but is confused about how to use it or want to ask questions about what it can even do (such as its lack of slope support), feel free to contact me via AIM or MSN. I might even help implement features if I have the time.