Hello There!
Time for a news post.
New Website
Our new website is live! We discussed the main new features in our last announcement, so we won't rehash those here. Our previous site was built with Blogger, which is a platform... but our current website is something we built from the ground up using modern web tooling, which makes development much easier on us. Now that it is complete, the dev working on it will be transitioning to working on the needed launcher changes, prepping that for release sometime later this year.
With the new website available, our news will be made for and published to the website instead of to our Discord. We will still continue to make announcements of new posts in the cwaemu-news channel, pinging cwaemu-alerts for most, but not all, posts.
Audio Service
A somewhat important element we needed to implement is the audio system. This month we began working on our implementation, called the Audio Service. This is essentially one component that is responsible for managing all active sounds, that any other part of our game can call into and play a sound by supplying only an identifier.
The primary motivation behind creating this service in the way that we are is to handle all of the additional data that CWA defined for sounds. The original game had an .XML file that defined all of the data related to sounds, including default volume, mixer target, multiple files to randomly choose from, if it loops, and more. By creating a single place to play sounds from, we ensure that we will always handle the additional data correctly. Interestingly, looking through this data revealed that CWA had 42 total mixer targets, but that only 3 of those were controllable by the user. As of right now, we do not plan to expand the number of controllable audio category knobs in the UI, but we may look into that at a later date.
Development Bottleneck: UI
Of all of the remaining development needed to resume Alpha Updates, the piece that takes the most time is the UI. In many previous posts, we have talked about tools we have built, such as the Flash Tool, that help us convert the UI elements into what we need them as. This tool saves us a tremendous amount of time when working on the UI. However, the related scripting we need to do has been taking more time than expected.
When we convert a specific .SWF, there are generally 4 steps we need to take:
- Use the Flash Tool to convert the visual elements into our representation.
- Translate the relevant Lua middleware code to our system as needed.
- Translate the ActionScript contained in the SWF to our system, making improvements and adjustments where needed.
- Finalization by utilizing already existing components, ensuring functionality and correct linkages.
Of the above steps, Step 1 is now the fastest and simplest part of the process. Step 4 can be done quickly for smaller .SWFs, but will get more time consuming for larger .SWFs, such as the Store. Step 2 is also a somewhat simple process most of the time, as most of the original Lua can be ignored, but it requires some thought, and the exact cases for what can be ingored are not obvious or easy to describe.
Step 3 is where the majority of our development time is now spent when doing a conversion. To be clear, it isn't that it is a super complex, dynamic programming problem requiring smart algorithms and complex data structures. Rather, it is more of a social problem of reading and trying to understand the purpose and intent of code for which you have no documentation other than the code itself. Then, even if you do gain an understanding of the original ActionScript, you need to translate that into C# code and Unity engine calls, for systems that may not exist yet, while possibly improving the implementation or choosing a different way of doing things all together.
We would love for additional help in this area, though do note that C# experience is expected at minimum and some knowledge of ActionScript/JavaScript is extremely useful. Our new developer applications page can be found here, though it currently does not link to our application form. Check back in about a week and there should be an update to that link. To anyone who has previously submitted an application to our google form, we may reach out to you in the next couple of weeks.
Gallery
Note: The window offset and the unique camera perspective for the character window haven't been implemented yet.
Character Customization now available in the main UI!
That's it for this one. I did want to include a section about another system we are working on, with a fun interactive visualization, but decided to hold off due to personal time constraints. Share your thoughts in the usual locations in our Discord. May the Force be with you!