looking for intro/demo engine and plugin coder(s)

[AGS]

Hi,

I started an experimental project to make a new tool for creating oldschool demos and intros in a windowed editor GUI. I would like to see if there is any interest.

The project is split into four things:

a) the editor
b) the replay engine
c) the effect plugins
d) effect specific GUI pieces for effect parameters

Here is a screenshot how the editor looks so far. The top row of buttons will be replaced with toolbar icons if someone could supply or create them. The black box is a tooltip. The colorful icons on the left side of the tracks illustrate the type of the track, which can be further set up by clicking on them. I will use better images if someone can make them.



Here is a proposal for how the thing might work:

• Support one or more sequences with their own vertical split screen areas of definable vertical sizes and optional dualplayfield mode.
• A sequence can be considered as a demo part. And the areas can be considered as tracks.
• Multiple effects can be placed into a track, one after each, but effects cannot change the vertical size of the track.
• Only audio effects (e. g. mod replay) may continue cross sequences.
• Sequences and effects are timed. This means a sequence has a total duration and each effect has a duration. This timing is based on seconds.
• Dualplayfield option to link two tracks together and place two independent effects one over another. The dualplayfield option cannot change in the two combined tracks inside a sequence.
• Effects may have own gfx mode, colors and resolution.
• Where possible, threat copper effects as an own layer to combine them with other effects, e.g. copper in the back or in a particular color.
• Maybe let copper effects have their own vertical areas independent from the other content.
• Each effect plugin has its parameters in a block of data of a per-effect definable size. This data is generated by the editor and saved/loaded with a project.
• All fonts, logos, mods, scrolltexts, sine-tables, color-tables, etc are managed as 'media' in the projects' mediabank and have a type info and an id. The type is for checking compatibility of a media to an effect/requirement and the ids are saved within the effect parameters.
• Such things like „vertical blank interrupt routine pointer“ or „effect init function pointer“ can be organized through a taglist in the plugin. This makes the system flexible and easily extendable. Thus the plugins would either need to be relocable dos objects with a special plugin header that holds the taglist, or fully pc/register relative code with offsets to the functions in the taglist. The second variant would allow a more easy building of one-file exes with the engine and the used effects in it, or maybe making non-dos disk based demos. Also respect that an effect may be able to be used more than once at the same time, so then there all data has to go into an allocated instance memory block. Not every effect must support this, but think of a sequence with four scrolltexts ...

Feel free to comment this thread if you have better ideas.

For a first step into the right direction I suggest to make a mod replay effect (or The Player) and/or a simple scrolltext, and develop the editor so far that the main GUI and the effect-GUI can communicate when creating the blocks of data for the effect plugins. And make the engine able to replay these effects.

The API in detail needs some further development and there are still some other questions open.

Note: The GUI uses my own custom library, so we are not limited to elements supported by intuition. In fact the „tracks“ view is a class. If you want some demonstrations of the GUI lib then please follow the „XoXo“ link in my signature.