AltSci3D Manga Director

Change Log

Version 0.14 ChangeLog 03/10/03 06:22 pm

Oops, I didn't do the ChangeLog like I should have. I'll do it later. Releasing the source on Source Forge is one huge change. CVS, also.

Version 0.13 ChangeLog 03/10/03 06:22 pm

Oops, I didn't do the ChangeLog like I should have. I'll do it later.

Version 0.12 ChangeLog 03/10/03 06:22 pm

Oops, I didn't do the ChangeLog like I should have. I'll do it later.

Version 0.11 ChangeLog 03/10/03 06:22 pm

Amazing how I keep on producing version after version, isn't it? I can't keep up this pace forever or I'd be doing a mythic man month or some such. I ported AS3D Engine (and thus Manga Director and Terrain Works) to SDL. What do you know, it only took two hours. It was pretty cool because SDL is awesome and my code just happened to be structured very similar to the SDL tutorials out there. You know what that means, right? A Windows Port is not far away. As soon as I can install MinGW or another open source, free software, SDL compatible compiler, I'll compile it and release the source. Any changes to the functionality of AS3D? Fullscreen may or may not work. I forgot to explain before that resizing the window doesn't work. *shrug* Next version. If you're wondering why I pretty much skipped v0.10, it's because I believe that SDL is worth a major revision change. If I say that 0.10.1 is glX and 0.10.2 is SDL, I'll get strange looks. Probably even stranger than the ones I'm getting for skipping v0.10. I mean, v0.10 was the creation of the AS3D Engine and the porting of Terrain Works, that's good enough by itself. Today's Making Of JF is good enough to link. EG4 got a really good part in JF. You don't remember him? EG1 (the leader) told him to guard the door and don't smoke. He replies: "OK." He takes out a cigarette and starts smoking. Five seconds later he's hit in the face and has his legs kicked out from under him. Jav knocks him unconscious and then duct tapes him to the ground. What a role! He'll get academy yet. I just saw him lying there on the floor and I thought it would be humorous and topical. Does guarding/trafficking an illegal assault weapons cache deserve the abuse that EG4 got? You say yes, EG4 says no.

Version 0.10.1 ChangeLog 02/14/03 10:55 pm

Small, unnoticable changes to AS3D. Almost no changes to Manga Director itself. Why is a minor revision? Because I wrote Terrain Works and found that it needed a bit of revision.

What is amazing is that I was able to write Terrain Works in 4 hours. Of course, AS3D Engine was written, the Terrain class was written, and I had a working example that took 20 hours to write. But it certainly tells me that writing programs using the AS3D Engine is going to be easy and fun. If you want to use the AS3D, checking the difference between as3dapp.cpp in Terrain Works and Manga Director is a good first step. E-mailing me at jvoss@u.washington.edu is a good second step. The idea that two very different programs can be made with two very similar files. One of the coolest things that I found is that by making AS3DTerrain inherit a few MilkShapeModel attributes, I could make Terrain be accepted as a model for the Hierarchy. This is a big step forward meaning you can actually add a very odd class like a plug-in. If you made an object (say a physics object) that inherited some of Hierarchy classes, you could add it to the heirarchy structure. And remember that Hierarchy is (even it's it current privimitive state) extremely flexible with room for infinite levels of subobjects, with each object having a 3D path and rotation and current matrix. My plan is to allow objects to have subobjects which at attached, for example a weapon that is a subobject of a person's arm which is a subobject of the elbow, shoulder, and finally the person. So then when they move their arm they move the weapon. Then the weapon can be controlled by a specialized object that can be fired, thrown, holstered, etc.

Version 0.10.0 ChangeLog 02/14/03 10:55 pm

It's pretty amazing how quickly I was able to make AltSci3D Engine. Version 0.10.0 of AltSci3D is equivalent to Version 0.10.0 of AltSci3D Manga Director. Why is that? Because the engine really isn't useful without some type of tutorial. In the distance future, I plan to comment my source code well enough that someone can use the Manga Director source as the basis for their program. Actually, that's my exact plan: to use my ASMD source to create two programs this weekend. If I find the AltSci3D Engine lacking in places, I can change it and the the changes will propagate back to AltSci3D Manga Director. What wonders reusable code can give us. Today I was trying to get Xine to work. It won't yet, but I found that it was quite amazing that the software is built as a library with a choice of a dozen user interfaces, all written by different people. So that's almost, kinda sorta what I want to do with AltSci3D. AS3D will be a static library and people will be able to write small programs that are very powerful using the classes and their own data.

Version 0.9.6 ChangeLog 02/14/03 10:55 pm

I started a new project in KDevelop 2.1.5 and did everything like it told me. This is something that has been bugging me for a while. So now it's pretty standard. The only thing missing is the short GPL in every page, but expect to see that soon.

Version 0.9.5 ChangeLog 02/14/03 03:00 pm

Almost invisible to the user, one bug has been fixed and one helpful argument parser class has been added. The argument parser is very cool. I'm going to use it wherever I go because it is very flexible and easily used. Pretty much, now you can do: AS3DMD -v -v -v to get memory instead of doing AS3DMD -vvv. Not very useful, is it? Wait until there are twenty arguments like AS3DMD -xvvzf -q 8 -type ogg -type png -f data/as3dmdv4r10.asd test.tar.gz. You'll be happy that it works at all with that much crap. More likely, the final version of AS3DMD will look like "AS3DMD -vvvz -f data/as3dmdv4r10.asd test.tar.gz". The "-vvv" is verbosity as it currently is. The "-z" means it's a gzip file. "-f file.asd" picks an asd file out of the tarball file and the "test.tar.gz" is the tarball file with all data in it. Don't ask when I'm going to add tarball and gzip support or you'll see it in the next version.

My current plan for 0.10.0 is to seperate AS3D from AS3DMD. I have a 5 day weekend, so let's see. I may finish Terrain Works and Particle Works by then, too.

Version 0.9.4 ChangeLog 02/09/03 07:06 pm

I decided to implement adding cues. It works really well. Sadly, it's almost invisible to someone who doesn't know what asmd is doing. As usual, click the object you want to add a cue for and then click AddC or press "k". If you didn't select an object, you get an error in the console. Still no way to delete cues, but that's what I said about adding cues two days ago.

Version 0.9.3 ChangeLog 02/09/03 06:33 pm

A few more big changes. The camera is controlled by cues. This is an important part of ASMD, since the box is defined by the point in time, which includes your camera position. How does it work? When you click the vcr controls, the camera will move also. You can still move the camera with wasd, but when you click the vcr, it will snap to that point in the manga.

Version 0.9.2 ChangeLog 02/07/03 07:06 pm

A few usability changes. The major one is the editing tools. Clicking 1stC says that you are going to be editing the first Cue of the selected object. The shortcut is the "i" key. NextC ("o" key) changes the edited cue to the next cue. If click next past the end, it will not edit. It will not loop around. That may change in the future, but not yet. The major update is the new AddC button ("k" key). This actually adds a cue to the currently selected object where the camera is. It will not allow you to add a cue between two existing cues, but again, it may be in future versions. So this may make you wonder: how do I select an object? Easy, there are three ways. The easiest is to click the name of the object that you want to edit. There is a list of them on the far right. For example, to edit Jav's Cues, click the "Jav" button. After you do that, be sure to click 1stC to start editing the first cue or it will not respond (and might spit an error out at you). The second way is to press the key that is associated with that button. The top button is associated with the "1" key, the second button down is the "2" key, etc. The third way is less stable. That is to click on the screen at the cue. If you move, you will see a line is be drawn from your position to where you clicked. If it worked, you will have access to that object and the cue that you clicked.

Important addition: Save now works. Press F7 to save over as3dv4r9.asd. If you get a good one, _back up_! Just copy it to a new directory underneath data. Really, as3dv4r9.asd is only a temporary file. Don't rely on it at all. What you are supposed to do when you are actually using this at production level where an accidental erase is worth several hours, you can simply give AS3DMD a filename to load from (and not save to). For example, my scene 1 scripts are all in a directory scene1 under data, named b15s01p##t##.asd where b15 means book 15, s01 is Scene 1 of course, the p## is the page number and t## is the take number. Depending on how you visualize the hierarchy of your manga, you should also have some type of directory/file system. Then I type in "AS3DMD ./data/scene1/b15s01p01t24.asd" in the console and it gives me the correct scene/page/take. When I'm done with the scene, I can move the directory to another directory entirely and gzip it up. Did I mention that AS3D files all tar and/or gzip up pretty well? You may see tar and/or gzip integrated into AS3D in later/different versions just because it's so convenient to use a single tar.gz instead of a couple dozen asd, ms3d, png, and bmp files.

You might notice that the Logo is different to match my change in Graphics API and Operating System since the first three versions of AS3D. I run Slackware if you're interested in where that pipe came from. That's one of the two mascots of Slackware (the other is an indigo circle S). The Javantea's Fate logo and the AltSci Goggles are actually both two 3d objects I created in my spare time. Anyway, it should just look better. Go to http://www.slackware.com/ for info on my favorite Linux Distrobution.

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