My suggestions

Post about what you like and dislike on AAO and suggest new features and improvements.

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fanfreak247
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My suggestions

Post by fanfreak247 »

My suggestions for the server are simple ones, but they would make it more like Ace Attorney
1. Replace the Press, Dialogue, Back, and Present button with ripped versions. (including the background ones for conversations). Of course, add AAI as well and make us able to select which ones we specifically want to use.

2. When you present a piece of evidence, make it so they have the scrolling in the background with a face-up sprite on the bottom
of the screen like in the games.

3. Possibly add a Logic feature? That would be pretty cool wouldn't it? Of course, you could leave it up to the case-makers to set the variables necessary in order to continue once all the pieces have been put together.

4. Make it so that AAO will automatically play the song that has been played last when loading a save file. That way, when I save midgame, there won't be text with no music, just like in the games.

5. While you're at it, why not add the Logic Chess feature as well? All you'd really need to do is make a timer, and maybe do some coding with the text to change it like in AAI. Of course, this would also involve a bunch of other coding which I'm not aware of.
If you're worrying about the background rips, I gotcha covered (thanks to Mariofan5000) which can be found here

Well, if I have any more suggestions I'll make sure to update this! Thanks
-fanfreak247
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ThePaSch
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Re: My suggestions

Post by ThePaSch »

These are all pretty cool, though I have thoughts/concerns about most of them.
fanfreak247 wrote:1. Replace the Press, Dialogue, Back, and Present button with ripped versions. (including the background ones for conversations). Of course, add AAI as well and make us able to select which ones we specifically want to use.
I think the approach Unas (AAO's main developer) is looking to take with V6 is "function over form" - if I recall correctly, ripped graphics were used in V5 of AAO, but apart from certain icons (like the Magatama) and obviously stuff like profiles/evidence, the entire V6 interface is realized through HTML and CSS alone. When V6 was first developed, there wasn't an easy way to accomplish cut corners with CSS; the CR header uses a nifty trick with background gradients to achieve the hard corner effect, but using it for all of the other buttons would require "splitting" all of them in three, which would be veeeery messy. However, things have somewhat changed and developed in the past years, and it looks like there are indeed ways to make it happen now.

I've read mentions of a border-corner-shape experimental CSS property that would achieve this effect relatively easily, but it doesn't seem to have fully made the specification yet, and I was unable to find any data on browser support. As Unas is big on supporting all major browsers, that option would likely be considered unacceptable. However, there seems to be another way to achieve what you're looking for in pure CSS, which is the clip-path property. That one is also still experimental, but all major versions of Firefox, Chrome and Opera seem to support it fine (though no version of IE/Edge does, which may be a roadblock). It would basically allow one to define a mask for the respective press/present button elements using SVG, and you could draw an AA-style pentagon with it to make the buttons look like in the games. Though that's all speculation and I haven't actually tried anything yet, I'll see if I can fiddle around with it on my local sandbox repository and maybe even create a pull request for the feature.

As for allowing to change the style of those buttons to that of the different games, I'm pretty sure there's already some infrastructure in place to allow for that. It's not fully implemented, though, and there's no way to change styles yet.
fanfreak247 wrote:2. When you present a piece of evidence, make it so they have the scrolling in the background with a face-up sprite on the bottom
of the screen like in the games.
I believe Unas has spoken out against modifying the bottom screen, simply because there is absolutely no architecture in place to easily allow to do so (though I may be wrong on this). It would be a much larger task than it'd ultimately be worth.
fanfreak247 wrote:3. Possibly add a Logic feature? That would be pretty cool wouldn't it? Of course, you could leave it up to the case-makers to set the variables necessary in order to continue once all the pieces have been put together.
Logic has actually been planned for AAO for a while, though getting basic court/investigation functionality set up had obviously been higher priority, and Unas has a lot less time on his hands now than he did when V6 was still in full production, so it's hard to say if and when the feature might find its way into the editor and player. There's obviously the possibility of someone from the community implementing the feature, but it would be a fairly monumental task, as you'd have to design Editor and Player UIs for the feature and implement and extend a whole bunch of Editor and Player gameplay logic. It's certainly not as easy as it may seem.
fanfreak247 wrote:4. Make it so that AAO will automatically play the song that has been played last when loading a save file. That way, when I save midgame, there won't be text with no music, just like in the games.
I'm pretty sure that should already be the case. If music is playing on a frame when you're saving it, loading the save should start playing that same music. Are you sure it doesn't happen for you?
fanfreak247 wrote:5. While you're at it, why not add the Logic Chess feature as well? All you'd really need to do is make a timer, and maybe do some coding with the text to change it like in AAI. Of course, this would also involve a bunch of other coding which I'm not aware of.
If you're worrying about the background rips, I gotcha covered (thanks to Mariofan5000) which can be found here
As always in programming, things that may seem simple may end up not being that simple at all. Implementing Logic Chess like in the game would once more require modification of the bottom screen to display the timer, and also a way to make it consistent across multiple frames (which would make a simple "display timer" action complicated and convoluted as actions are currently confined to the frame they're defined for), so the cleanest (and therefore best) way to do it would probably be to define a dedicated event block for Logic Chess, which would end up being a fairly large task for something that can already be simulated with a bit of editor and expression trickery.
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Enthalpy
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Re: My suggestions

Post by Enthalpy »

First, procedural points: In future, post in Comments and Ideas, not the v6 subforum. Split separate suggestions into separate topics, otherwise this becomes a disorganized mess.

1 and 2. I'm not familiar with details of how the display work. About all I can say is that even if this is doable with a reasonable amount of effort (and per ThePasch's post, that may not be the case), this just isn't very high priority for me.
3 and 5. As ThePasch said, those features are far harder than you're giving them credit for. I'd like to see them done, but it might be a while.
4. I just tested, and I find that the music does play when loading a save. This is a bug if real, but are you sure your report is right?
[D]isordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. ~ Ben Jonson
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ThePaSch
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Re: My suggestions

Post by ThePaSch »

I followed up on the cut corners thing, and it seems like it wouldn't be possible currently without some ugly workarounds, and it's due to browser compatibility. First, there's the issue that a clip path is applied after the underlying element has already been drawn, which means that borders are cut off, making the whole thing look rather odd. Of course, you could alleviate that by "faking" a border, nesting the button in another element that's just a few pixels wider than the button itself, has its background color set to the desired color the border should have, and then applying a clip path to that element as well, but even if you did, there's another problem; namely, the differing functional support that the major browsers offer currently.

While Chrome supports defining an SVG path within the CSS itself, Firefox currently only supports the url() syntax, which means you'll have to define an SVG block with your desired path - either inline or external - and then point to that. At the same time, Chrome, Safari and Opera do not support external SVG paths - only inline - which means that we A) can't define our desired paths in the CSS itself, because Firefox doesn't support that, and B) we can't load all those paths into an external SVG file and then point to that either, because Chrome, Safari and Opera don't support that (not to mention that IE doesn't support the clip-path property at all). Our only options at this point are to either use ::before and/or ::after along with the content CSS property in order to insert an SVG block into the page through CSS that is then read from (which is horrible practice) or to include the contents of an external SVG file (that also corresponds to the currently applied style) into the player's DOM using PHP (which would be ugly and convoluted).

So until browser support for that CSS feature improves, you'll have to settle for rounded corners, I'm afraid.
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TheDoctor
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Re: My suggestions

Post by TheDoctor »

fanfreak247 wrote:2. When you present a piece of evidence, make it so they have the scrolling in the background with a face-up sprite on the bottom of the screen like in the games.
You can achieve a similar effect by using the "ask the player to point to [a section of the screen?]" action. Just define the background as the objecting attorney with the scrolling lines, and make sure that if a player clicks anywhere on the screen during this time to immediately advance to the next frame. Not ideal, but it's something.
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fanfreak247
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Re: My suggestions

Post by fanfreak247 »

TheDoctor wrote:
fanfreak247 wrote:2. When you present a piece of evidence, make it so they have the scrolling in the background with a face-up sprite on the bottom of the screen like in the games.
You can achieve a similar effect by using the "ask the player to point to [a section of the screen?]" action. Just define the background as the objecting attorney with the scrolling lines, and make sure that if a player clicks anywhere on the screen during this time to immediately advance to the next frame. Not ideal, but it's something.
I'm confused. So right after they click somewhere on the screen, you'll have the background with the face up sprites and then they
will go back to normal?
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