Welcome to the future !

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kwando1313
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by kwando1313 »

Personally, I'm just wanting to add some features (like custom blips for characters, and other things like that) which aren't huge huge important issues, but are things that I would like to have. xP
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by GanonZD »

@Unas: I don't quite see your last point, actually. What is wrong with each module having two parts: A part that modify the editor, and a part which (if necessary) adds the corresponding feature to the player?
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Singidava »

Unas wrote:What, however, I would be happy to do is to integrate new functionalities in the AAO engine even if they are not coming from AA games - provided these features have enough potential to be reused by many people.
Given that people have been using AAO for all sort of visual novels aside from the AA universe, it could make sense to include new features from other games, or even original features.
Well, if you are willing to extend AAO to visual novel side, I suppose the obvious new features would include the possibility to change the screen size to larger, and advancement by clicking the image rather than a separate box that mimics the DS. Oh, and making the text boxes of the size of an entire image, text pauses requiring a click in the middle of it aaaaaand...

Hm. These ideas just seem to keep coming... I can't wait until the code is released. If I have time I might even contribute~
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Unas »

kwando : that kind of change you'll be able to do directly in the editor code, no need for modules :-)

Ganon : nothing wrong in itself, it's a good approach on big projects. ;-)
But for a feature-oriented modular approach to be useful, you need each feature module to be independent of the rest, or have a few explicitly defined dependencies : if you edit, enable or disable one module, you don't want it to have a potential impact on all the other ones nor on the common UI.

This implies specifying precisely the way a module can interact with other modules or with the core application, which is a loss of flexibilty compared to the current way in which I just plug code where I need it. (I would probably need to revamp everything to go for an event-driven model in the player if I wanted it to be modular but still reasonably flexible.)

This also requires a fluid UI : a UI which can display an unlimited number of information (you don't want to rethink the UI every time someone adds a new module) without knowing their nature. Hence a loss of flexibilty on the UI design.


As a (bad) example, think of it this way : currently, the editor knows exactly what set of features it has to expose for a frame, so I can place them exactly as I wish. Screen on the left, music and sound on top of each other, etc.
If you take a modular approach on these features, it means the editor main interface should be able to load and handle abstract modules without knowing what they contain. The editor just knows that it has to render something for each module it loads, but delegate the rendering to the module's own code.
So, if screen, sound and music are three modules, how would the editor know that the sound and music modules are both small enough (and related enough) to be fit together ? And if I edit the music module to add an option, the corresponding area in the editor will be bigger : how will the UI adapt to that, so that the sound module is not hidden ?

Of course, it's only a silly example - you're not suggesting to split apart frame components as features, I believe. But I hope you get the idea.

While I use a modular architecture in the V6 code, it's oriented towards technical components (some modules for screen rendering, some modules for action management, some modules for editor interface, etc) : going for a well designed feature-oriented approach would be considerably more complex, and probably not needed given the size of the project !


Sing : yes, all of this would be possible improvements :-)
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kwando1313
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by kwando1313 »

Oh yeah, I know that. xP

I was more merely talking about what I plan to do when forking, not modules.
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Gamer2002 »

Unas, since AAO goes open source, I propose you would create new forum section dedicated to development of AAO.

Together we will make AAO bigger than Twine and allow stuff made here to be sold on Steam.
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by GanonZD »

I support the former idea, not the latter one.
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Gamer2002 »

Come on, think about media coverage! ;D
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by GanonZD »

Yes, let us do as much as we can to attract Capcom's attention. :-D
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Gamer2002 »

Oh well, there is simple solution.

Let's fork AAO elsewhere and steal entire safely take away spotlight from Unas.
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by GanonZD »

True, let us show our gratitude towards Unas by creating our own AAO and steal his entire community. :-D
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by kwando1313 »

Oh right. Quick question. Any reason it's on bitbucket rather than github? (I'm just purely curious, so...)
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Unas »

I was sure somebody would ask :-D

The first reason is that we have recently started using Atlassian Stash (the corporate equivalent of Bitbucket) in my company and I've been generally impressed with it so far. Because of that, I expect Bitbucket to offer a very good experience, and decided to give it a try.

Additionally, Bitbucket has the advantage of allowing private repositories in a free project. This will allow me to host there some files which I cannot release publicly, because of security or licensing issues. Think of the media repository with sprite and music that I shouldn't redistribute, for example. Or the actual server configuration of AAO, if I decide to version it, etc...

At last, BitBucket allows instant account creation and login for everyone who has a Google, Facebook, Twitter... or GitHub account ! It seems the simplest so that anyone who wants to contribute can login easily.
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by kwando1313 »

Uggggh jira is awful though ;_;

But aside from that, understandable enough.
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Re: Welcome to the future !

Post by Unas »

Yeah, we have started using Jira as well and I'm not that impressed with it, but I don't really care.
It's not like we will use Jira for AAO after all :-P
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Si le savoir peut créer des problèmes, ce n'est pas l'ignorance qui les résoudra. ( Isaac Asimov )
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