sure, play the original kingsoft emerald mine 1 level 4. run up and you see a long line of ameuba across the top which are not all the same.HerzAusGold wrote:Hm, can you give an example?Dave wrote:
these are not animations. they are equivalent to decor or the 4 different steel/wall/etc images. these occur in caves from the beginning.
you've got it backwards. the point is what to do with the code #241 when converting older emerald mine caves to the BDCFF format. for some caves, it should be replaced with a BDCFF object 'copyright'. for other caves it should be replaced with a BDCFF object 'decor'.HerzAusGold wrote:The copyright letter is always CHAR_COPYRIGHT.Dave wrote:
the copyright letter also. some minor variations that make a big headache for an exact archiving of caves.
It's up to the graphic set to cover different variations.
if the BDCFF is to be used for archiving caves (which seems like a noble thing to do), it will have to be able to reproduce exactly what the original cave designer meant, unambiguously.
another problem is the number of seconds for playing a level in old caves. the EMC saw this too & solved it by creating a new variable in the new level format. the different times has to do with copy protection (which i found when i tried to use the original non-cracked emerald mine executable). the r'n'd loader tries to fix it with some ad-hoc tests, but i bet it needs human intervention in some cases.
depends on what you want to use it for i guess. i always thought of it as an archival thing. a way to store the old caves _exactly_ as they were originally made. a player that loaded a BDCFF cave would be free to treat a bunch of different objects the same if it wanted too. creating a table that maps all eg. ameuba objects to a single ameuba would be trivial in the player but disasterous for the actual level files because you would lose information perhaps forever.HerzAusGold wrote:To sum it up, if the behaviour is the same for playing we should have only
one "element code"!
Or (if really needed) a element code "ACID_RANDOM_WOBBLY" for a nice pattern.
Please don't blow up the BDCFF file format with "animations" or different "graphic".
note that my player & converter program in no way tries to address these problems. i keep a copy of both the Emerald_Mine_Club-2.0.0.7z archive, and the converted caves because it's not a 100% compatible conversion. i chose to use things that made the most caves playable and there were tradeoffs. the reason for the conversion instead of just leaving the files alone is that 50000 separate files is a pain to maintain and offers very little in the way of compressing them, which i consider important. it is the difference between 5 minutes and 100meg to copy (uncompressed, small separate files), and 20 seconds and 15meg (zipped, larger converted files).