Reality Factory

I finally got some work done tonight. More drag and drop programming, and I have made a change to the button/title selection window. With all the different buttons on each menu screen, and each needing an individual variable to account for it in the program, this window was becoming ridiculous fast! So. . .tabbed interface to the rescue again!!

Hey I like that interface. I'm curious are you using wxwidgets?

Thanks, Jonas!

I've heard of wxwidgets, but I've never used them. Just straight vb.net 2003. I looked them up, and it looks like a good system.

Which is the status ???
Exist date for release ??? (or date estimate)...

Date estimate is hopefully by the end of the year. My work schedule has changed and I can't get my sleep pattern corrected. Pile that on top of the fact that we home school our 3 boys, and my wife is working more hours, which leaves me to take care of a fair portion of the schooling. . .so I have little time for dev work.

I am still commited to finishing this, because I feel it would be a great boon to the community. So have no fears about that. It's the same reason I haven't been on here as much as usual when I'm at home.

Even though I am the dad, school being back in session puts a bind on you when you home school.

Lost. All lost. No back up copies at all. My system took a nosedive and I had to reformat and re-install windows. a good 60+ hrs of programming.

However, I have some new devilishly clever ideas to make the new program more compact and easier to handle. Of course, I have re-download RF as well. All gone. . .

OMG, NOOOOOO! I noticed that there are alot of hard drive or computer error to you guys. What system are you using, FAT32 or NTS(I hope I wrote is like it is...) because I'm using NTS and there were no hard drive or computer error and I'm using computer for 10 years(not the same one...)

NTFS. The most stable system yet created. But we mess with our systems a lot too, I'd guess.

It sucks, but there is nothing I can do about it. I just started re-programming this morning. I think I have some ideas which will make it even more user friendly.

New title!! - - - - RF Easy Menu Creator. What do you think?

Ohh bummer. It always sucks to lose such an amount of work.
But life goes on and, as you said, now you have the oppoturnity to make it even better.

BTW, I love the new title, it's much better than the previous.

Thanks, Juutis. I'm stubborn, and even though the last name didn't quite fit. . .I probably would have stuck to it.

Here are some new shots of the new design. You can pick all 14 background bitmaps at once, then select from the combo, click the radio button beside a menu choice, and see what you think. You can toggle backgrounds back and forth easily this way.

Wow, looking nice! Sorry to hear your sleepings all messed up, but i completely sympathise with you on the back to school thing Also i was wondering, will your menu making machine be able to use gifs? cause i think animated menues look much nicer but with the current way of making menues i cant seem to get gifs to work witch is most problematic when it comes to my background witch is going to be animateded.

Oh and SOOOOO sorry to hear of the crash, mines (hard drive+mobo+powersupply+CPU) went a while ago aswell (it was actually really cool explosion ) but i know what its like to loose work and it can make you very dispondent, and im glad to hear your still on track! good luck!

hard drive+mobo+powersupply+CPU

Hehe, that must've been one heck of a boom!


Ohh the new design is nice. I think it will indeed be more user-friendly.

And about those gifs... I don't think the 'menu making machine' will be able to use gifs. After all, it's up to RF whether gifs can be used in menus or not, and if you can't use them when you modify the menu.ini by hand, then you won't be able to use them with this wondermachine either.

i like your new design, one comment i would make is the menus at the bottom will limit the creator to those menus only? how about doing a microsoft exell style tab sstem, at the bottom it has 3 tabs for 3 sheets as standard, if required tho new tabs can be added and it uses a scroler to go through them all as im sure that there will be one user that will complain because it doesnt have the menu they wanted

Thanks guys.

@ scott - Those are just all the menus specifically spelled out in the menu.ini. When I was working on the last version, I tried to run RF with a truncated version of a menu.ini that the program had created, thinking it would just give me the menus I'd created so far, but it would run because it was looking to references for each of these menus. Whether the creator of the game utilizes them all or not, is up to them. On each screen, you just use or not use buttons based on whether or not to use a menu. Like, leave out the conrols button if you don't want the user customizing these controls. I do not know if you can randomly 'create' menus or not. I'd believe you would have to do some coding to RF to tell it to read the custom menu names from the ini file.

@ juutis - I have used GIF's for the intro screen, but wasn't happy. It ran to the end of the GIF and just sat there. The user had to press the esc or enter (I don't recall) to continue on, while avi files ran and then RF continued on on it's own. I do not know how a GIF would work as say the background for a menu. I can test it out, but I have defaulted to using only bitmaps as I know they work already.

@ psyco - "hard drive+mobo+powersupply+CPU" - ouch! Reminds me of my friend telling me the story of his power supply blowing up. he was getting out of the shower and heard this loud bbfffff! sound. He came out and could smell the burned smell and his computer was dead. Yeck!

An animated background for the Menu would be great ! Something like the Menu of Battlefield were a video loop is played...