Project Tire Fire: SilverCreator v2.0b4 (a big disgusting cup of Cocoa)

[GMG Mike]

Some games run, sort of.

Some of the scripts run, sometimes, when it pleases them to do so.

All scripts and game text are now converted to Unix line endings. This is a breaking file format change; the file format version is incremented to 5.

The card properties window is now global for some monumentally stupid reason.

[pyxal]

Nice work, Mike! So how can I download this?
This is Alex Winter aka MindSoftPro (AOL SN) aka Sk8esp55 (AIM SN). I go by Pyxal now, as that is my web development group.

[GMG Mike]

Nice work, Mike! So how can I download this?
This is Alex Winter aka MindSoftPro (AOL SN) aka Sk8esp55 (AIM SN). I go by Pyxal now, as that is my web development group.

Hey Alex.

It's still way too early for any kind of release.

Even though SilverCreator v2.0 was never actually finished, maybe I'll call this v3.0 since it is going to be such a huge change. It's probably going to need several alpha and beta releases anyway.

I can just declare the current v2.0b3.1 to be "v2.0".

Anyway, games don't even have working graphics yet, so it's pretty useless.

[GMG Mike]

Update: The floating windows work a little better now: They don't disappear when you interact with the main window.

They are still showing when in  a script editor window, which is wrong. But now at least the editor is a lot more useful.

The main problem right now is graphics are basically broken when running the game.

Possibly, scripting variables are also broken. They don't seem to increment.

[pyxal]

Hey Alex.

It's still way too early for any kind of release.

Even though SilverCreator v2.0 was never actually finished, maybe I'll call this v3.0 since it is going to be such a huge change. It's probably going to need several alpha and beta releases anyway.

I can just declare the current v2.0b3.1 to be "v2.0".

Anyway, games don't even have working graphics yet, so it's pretty useless.

Gotcha. That's fair enough. Is the vision for this to be a clone of the original SilverCreator or are you planning to modernize it? Once it's ready for some sort of public beta then I'd like to play around with it.

[GMG Mike]

Good News: We are now compiling on 64 bit. Scripts are 3x faster!

Bad News: PICT support is totally f***ed on 64 bit. All old projects import with weird, demented sprites, and 4000 pixel wide card pictures.

Although this upcoming release of SilverCreator will transition the project file format to PNGs for all graphics, we still have to be able to import old project files.

[Gan]

Fantastic! Great work Mike! This is a really pleasant surprise. I'm looking forward to SilverCreator's future!

[GMG Mike]

Apparently it is a Xojo bug that occurs only when all of the following are true:

- on 64-bit builds
- does NOT have NSHighResolutionCapable
- importing PICT files

If I set HiDPI to true (i.e, claiming to support Retina) the PICTs import fine.

SilverCreator will not be fully supporting Retina though at this time due to numerous issues.

[Manual]

That seems odd. How would you go about fixing it, Mike?

[Al Staffieri]

Nice to see this is still being worked on.

[GMG Mike]

Apparently GMG Mike is just some kind of honorific title because I can't delete the spam post above.

[Gan]

Sorry Mike, you should now be an admin.

[GMG Mike]

That seems odd. How would you go about fixing it, Mike?

After doing considerable research* I have discovered that the NetPBM project meets the following requirements:
- Can open bitmap PICT files without distortion, and export them in a format which I can read easily.
- MIT licensed code (instead of GPL which would require me to open source all of SilverCreator).
- Compiles for 64-bit Intel into a stand-alone program (no other dependencies)

Therefore, SilverCreator will come bundled with the "picttoppm" portion of NetPBM, which will automatically be used with older projects to import the PICT files.

Saving projects has used PNG for some time now, so this mainly affects v1.5 stuff. It will also be used in my upcoming "GM Cocoaizer" (tentative name).

*This research included me actually writing small Objective-C command line programs that tested several ways to import PICTs and export TIFFs or PNGs. So I have now officially actually written Objective-C Cocoa programs. I did not care much for it. Swift looks a lot better, but ironically suffers from needing to bundle a large runtime library which is literally exactly what Xojo does.

[Gan]

Good work! Sorry about the large run times. Seems harder and harder to avoid.
I too no longer care for Obj-C. Swift does look pretty sweet.