It's always good to start out with good tools to make a good program :). Very nice indeed, I wish I had the patience to make some nice tools for myself :).

Billy

sounds good, even great! the rendered pictures looks cool...but not the green-cyan background! :) I'm sorry to say that but it kills all the atmosphere.

anyway very nice work

Nice!

Sound like you really need more artwork :o))
But good work anyway despite the poor visual interface ! Any place where we can download your good work ?

Why dont you use a kind of transparence for the interface ? (and a smaller one !)

Your Bones tool sounds great !

Keep on coding on the good way!

It looks Nice~~^^*

Nicely done...I've never seen such detail put into a level editor, which is very nice. If you think about it, someone is going to spend many many hours using it, and if it looks good, then that is definitly a good thing. That is 4 different screenshots pasted together, right?

Kanda, it looks like a pretty nice visual interface. Except that I would have to agree with WD40. That green background is a little annoying. Mabye a more subtle pattern with grays would be good.

WOO HOO! EIGHTH!

I don't have much to say, BUT EIGHTH! WHOO HOO!!!!!!

YAY!!!!!!!!!!

OH YEAH BABY!

BTW, what's claustrophobia?

-Greg

Looks like the production of a great RPG. It reminds me of the old school RPG's back when I had a Tandy 1000HX. Definately a good start for a great game!

(LAXGoalie: a good indication of it being 4 seperate screens is the Windows Taskbar/Start Menu in the lower right shot)

LacrosseGoalie-> I think there's too much contrast between the interface luminosity and the 3D scéne ! A thing i didn't like in Everquest before Scare of Velious was the too big interface, and when you walk in the night, its the kills all the atmosphere as said WD40 !
And that' not so obvious too move in the night when the screen borders are so lighten. And some shadow on the buttons (with PaintShopPro)would be great (looks too flat).
The interface is nice because he did it himself anyway. Something to says about the windows controls the game interface...humm...Some artwork would be better here no ?
Anyway maybe Tim is planning for some improvements on this ?

By the way, nice 3d shadows !
I really d'like to try your work Tim :op

yey, 8b!
fear of closed places?

Hi there,

Nice images. About your programming question, though, I *really* wouldn't recommend using the set system colours API to change the system colours, because that will REALLY piss off the players. Even if you change them back, etc., if the program crashes it'll be annoying to fix them again.

Instead, simply create some owner drawn buttons. They're really easy to do, and you'll be able to cater them to your own needs a lot easier later on down the line. While I'm not a Delphi guy, I'm sure it isn't any harder to do in Delphi than C++.

For example, you might want to texture them the same as your background - SetSystemColours could never do that. If you've made your own button class, you could easily implement that.

My 2 cents :)

James.

Your post made me curious. I am just beginning in game programming and I have been curious about how people implement a Button class. Do you try for the same functionality that the MFC Button class has or do you just go for what you need in one particular game? Does anyone have some example code of a simple Button class that they have done in the past? I know these probably seem like simple questions to experienced programmers, but I am still working on the basics.

Thanx for the comments.

The green is gone. The top and left margins are gone. The portrait panels are on top of the 3D window, so the view is a little larger.

I don't want to do transparent windows. Why write code for 3D list boxes etc. when Delphi VCL works fine.

James, you're right, I should just make my own button class. It's just annoying re-registering a component all the time when you're making it, because you have to remove the older versions. I'll bite the bullet but.

no i mean, what's the project? game or engine?

-Greg

how about a thin interface thingie at the top, make it nice with all slide-out gadgets and all that, an most important buttons like pause on it

-Greg

really nice work....
I have a question to the technical stuff..
I have written somthing similar some time back (not that tool, but that thing which combines the hair and body etc)
I had the problem that it never looks like on model, but like that it really was: 2 models wich are put eachoother... how do you do such nice "connections"

Nilientes,
Sorry if I misled you but my meshes aren't really connected. They share vertex buffers, but don't share vertices.

There are a few problems with using modifiable hair, beards, clothes etc. Firstly, my meshes are fairly low poly count (less than 500 triangles). My different heads (human, lizardman, wolfman etc.) are all designed to specs so they will merge onto the chest at the same point. They use the same matrices for animation. A higher poly count mesh would not be able to do this because they'd be too different, if you know what I mean.
Some of the clothing simply changes the color of the rendered texture(see their pants). That chainmail shirt in the pic is a different mesh however. It is drawn instead of the chest and arm body parts. The problem with hair is that if the head just below it is rendered, you can lose Z accuracy (I forget what it's called, you know, z-fighting). I have a full bald head mesh and a face mesh which is missing the top of its head.

To remove joins completely, you could merge edge vertices and weight them, I suppose, but then when you change helmets for example, you'd have to recalculate real time (unless you have different gear for different heads I s'pose).

Anyway, I am happy with my level of quality, as I'm a one man team with a day job and a mid range computer. My only hope is game play not top range graphics.

Thanks again to everyone.

So.. you have a nice engine there. Do you have a nice game system and world to go with it?

email me, I'd love to chat!