Reality Factory

Work in progress thread for RF version 0.80

completed
work in progress
not started

new features in RF
New logging system
Physics system using PAL PhysX
CEGUI library for gui (menu, inventory, messages,conversation, hud)
Level loading progress bar
Configurable key descriptions in the options menu
Script variables to get keys as configured in the options menu
Hud: radar with mini map (texture), alternate compass

Tools
RF Script Editor updated to SciTE 1.79
ttf2font: options to select character set (default, russian, turkish, etc)
new (due to CEGUI library):
FontStudio for generating bitmap fonts in CEGUI (or just use truetype fonts )
CEImageSetEditor
CELayoutEditor

GREAT¡¡¡, very nice news QoD

oh yeah very good news!

It looks great, the new version as always surpassing its predecessor, thanks felicitacones and by so great job, you're a god.

dx9? (really, really, really, really, really really, really would like this hint )

saying that dx11 is not too far away i belive

The RF 1.0 roadmap:

0.76 - Tools update (May 2008)
0.80 - Physics system (Q3/Q4 2008)
0.85 - Genesis3D 2.0 [Phoenix]
0.90 - Multiplayer
0.95 - Major bugfixing
1.00 - Minor bugfixing

And I believe dx9 would fall into the category 'Genesis3D 2.0'. So I think we'll have to wait a while.

Welcome back, btw. Nice to see you posting again.

ahh, i missed that post (just found it) well im sure the genesis 2.0 should make things better, that actualy answers one of my questions i posted.

What's PAL physics system? Is it better than the NGD?

OooOhoh I cannot wait!

I think this is what QOD is going to use

The Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) provides a unified interface to a number of different physics engines. This enables the use of multiple physics engines within one application. It is not just a simple physics wrapper, but provides an extensible plug-in architecture for the physics system, as well as extended functionality for common simulation components.

This is from their web site http://www.adrianboeing.com/pal/index.html

It lets you choose the physics engine you want to use and therefore lets you choose the license you want to use. NGD wasn't included into the official RF because QoD didn't want to enforce the NGD license on all users of RF, even those who don't use physics at all.

Puh... long time no post in here. Development of RF was going really slow during the last months but motivation is increasing again and I hope that it'll stay like this for some time.
So what has been done for the next release you may ask.

First, I've added a completely new logging class to RF that allows 5 different levels of output detail:
debug, info, notice, warning, error and critical
[debug] will show you a lot of the stuff internally going on during a program run, like loading of resource files, parsing of an ini file etc. This level should be used when you encounter a problem with your game.
[info] outputs just some more information in addition to the main program events, e.g usage of deprecated functionality.
[notice] is the default level and outputs the main events during a program run, all warnings, errors and critical errors.
[warning] warnings are generated for minor mistakes that have been made in the game setup (e.g. missing resources) but RF can still run (though probably not as expected). This level writes only warnings, errors and critical errors to the log file.
[error] errors have a severe impact on the game, however the program may still be able to recover from them.
[critical] this level outputs only critical errors which inevitably lead to a program termination.

The integration of the CEGUI library has been started. This will affect the current methods for setting up and displaying the menu, inventory, hud, conversations and messages (i.e. ini files will change a lot, most configurations will be done through CEGUI's xml files).

The integration of the PhysX library has been started. Unfortunately this is still in a rather early stage.


Quite a bit of work has gone into code reorganisation and other changes that won't be noticed by the average user (e.g. the replacement of c-style casts with c++ casts).
RF coders will be glad to hear that I've reduced include file dependencies tremendously by reducing the includes in the main header file to a minimum. So full recompiles will occur less often.
On a side note: I've also automatized version number updates for the project; the version number now follows the scheme: major.minor.revision.build [pre-release], e.g. for the current release this would be "0.76.0.0", another example would be "0.80.0.56 beta"

Speaking about releases, due to integrating the cegui library and physx there may be a 0.78 release prior to 0.80 including only the cegui or physx library, depending on which one gets finished first.
In any case there will be a beta version and maybe even a rc version prior to the final release due to the amount of new and modified code.

Currently intended release date is early September.

I guess that's all for now...

Early Septmeber... that sound promissing. We need a boost at the momement as the forum is very quiet. Keep up the good work.

QoD, that's awesome! I'm really glad you're motivated again. Can't wait for the new version.

Just curious...for CEGUI, did you make a Genesis 3D renderer or did you expose the D3D object?

paradoxnj wrote:Just curious...for CEGUI, did you make a Genesis 3D renderer or did you expose the D3D object?

I made a Genesis3D renderer using the geEngine_RenderPoly function. This was a bit tricky because this function requires the textures to be added to a geWorld and we don't have a world loaded when the program starts into the menu. I solved this by adding a dummy 'NULL' world to the engine that just serves as a texture container. Not the most elegant way but it works so far...