ENIGMA Development Environment

That grayed out options thing usually means that the .dll (compileEGMf.dll) didn't compile or if it did, then it is out of date. I'll try a fresh install from portable zip.

Another game you could try get running is Sun and Moon (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=3479). I just saw it on Total Biscuit's channel (as it's a steam game now), but it was made for Ludum Dare and has source available. There is some problem with draw_set_font(font) when parsing, but when I comment that line out the game runs. So it only needed one change for compile to work. But nothing but the window shows on screen and music plays. The buttons for toggling music also works, but nothing else. There is some use of uninitialized variables that might be the problem. Maybe I will get it working when I have the time.

Regarding animation, GM treats GIFs as sub-images in sprites, so there's no timing information. We could probably hack that in, if desired.

I think what Josh meant is that GIF's support MANY options, like interlacing, uncompressed gifs, blocks and so on, so what of those options do your loader support? I personally don't care about those and if it loads a regular run of the mill gif, then I'm fine with that.

The current image_load does something like this:

I know that previously we didn't check for errors, even if the image_load_ functions returned them. But now it seems we do. The image_load returns an error when it couldn't load the file. Right now we call image_load_png when image_load_bmp fails, so this won't work if we have many formats as we will have to daisy chain those functions. Maybe a for cycle with all the formats would be better. image_load_png on the other hand returns NULL on fail. Then image_load() actually returns the NULL back even further into places like sprite_add_to_index() were we check for error:
     unsigned char *pxdata = image_load(filename, &width, &height, &fullwidth, &fullheight, false);
        if (pxdata == NULL) { printf("ERROR - Failed to append sprite to index!\n"); return; }Not sure where we crash. Will have to investigate.

Hello! I guess ENIGMA facebook page is not looked at for questions, as rarely anyone posts there.

Anyway, it's weird that the first code runs, because the problem is actually there too. It's only possible the first code to run is if the file is empty or only has one line.

The problem is that file_text_read_string() doesn't actually advance the "read head". Basically if you call file_text_read_string() several times, it will return the same thing. So the while(){} loop will never finish and the loop will freeze the game. You need file_text_readln() function to actually go to the next line. For this the GM manual is more detailed that ours (http://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/file%20handling/files/file_text_read_string.html) So this should not freeze:
// get_file_line(filepath, line number)

file = file_text_open_read(argument0);
var num = 0;
while (!file_text_eoln(file))
{
file_text[num] = file_text_read_string(file); // here's the error!! when the script tries to read a line, the game freezes.
        file_text_readln(file);
num++;
}
file_text_close(file);

return file_text[real(argument1)];Also, this will be very slow. I suggest loading the file once and keeping the array file_text[] to use it later when needed.

lol - if that were the case then a lot of microsoft word users are breaking the law.  So by that definition if I use a font in word and print a document I am illegal ? If it were illegal don't you think many companies would be trouble ? All those developer tools with fonts support, illegal too ?

How many fonts in the MS word are under monetary license? The answer is 0, because if there were, then they wouldn't be included in word or windows. For most fonts MS owns the copyright. Also, you mistake copyright with license. Copyright doesn't mean that you can't use it, it means you cannot say "I made it" and even worse, get money from that without consent of the copyright holder. Which basically means that the copyright holder has the main right to decide on who can and cannot use his work. Licenses on the other hand can be all different kinds, like GPL or MPL or BSD or whatever. This means that you can make a font, for which you automatically hold a copyright (under Berne Convention you get a copyright automatically and there isn't a process in which you need to get it), and then you can release that font freely with a license saying that anyone can copy it, modify it, and even sell it. If you don't allow a person to sell it, but they do, then you can get compensation and/or get them to stop, because you still hold the copyright no matter the license.

So normally you can still enforce the license even if the person has converted your vector font to a bitmap one. But that depends on the license.

Why did you have ffi and pthreads .dll's externally? Did you use threading? OpenAL also didn't have to be external. You maybe didn't build using >Build button either?

I liked the game. Later levels with all the fancy explosions looked like a bullet hell game.

I consider it stable but there are a lot of
features I'd like to see implemented but first most a way to add a splash screen
by choosing an image. A lot of Game's and software contain this now days.

We didn't add a loading screen initially just for the the reason that ENIGMA usually loaded so fast, that you wouldn't be able to see it anyway. Of course if the project is more complicated, then the frozen black window can be seen for a split second now, so we might need to add this. There are several ways we can do this. The most basic way includes modifying ENIGMAsystem/Shell/Universal_System/loading.cpp. That is the file that has initialize_everything() in it. The resources are loaded starting at line 75. So we need a way to load the splash screen, and draw it before that line. GL context should be up and running at that point, so we could just add the splash screen as a background resource and draw that background with draw_background(). The window can be resized to match the size of the background and the window buttons and boarders can be temporarily disabled.

Basically all we need is LGM to pass that loading images to use via the plugin. Then we should be able to do this. This is Roberts territory now.

I would actually prefer if a user had some kind of control over the whole thing, like if a user could make a room which he can then assign as a loading screen. Then there he could render lots of stuff while the loading happened in another thread. So he could do all kinds of fancy animations for it.

Also, you can do it manually if you load external files, so you can make a first room "rm_loading" and then just show a splash or something while the resources are loaded.