Announcing the Engine18 MaLa Plugin

[drventure]

 

Still workin' on it, but I haven't had much time lately. I started it when I was out of work, then found a job, sooo....

But it's coming. Got several plugin ideas that were thrown my way that I'm planning out.

[loadman]

Still workin' on it, but I haven't had much time lately. I started it when I was out of work, then found a job, sooo....

But it's coming. Got several plugin ideas that were thrown my way that I'm planning out.

I can relate   

[empardopo]

Congratulations drventura for your job!
I haven't much lucky and now I'm out of work! It is normal now in Spain!!!!!

[drventure]

@Empardopo

Sorry to hear that. The first part of the year seemed really slow. But things seem to have picked up over the last few months.

[empardopo]

I think that the worst is yet to come at least in Spain. I hope I'm wrong!
In the last three months I have thrown about 80 CV and have not received any calls; this is to mourn!
There is a Spanish phrase which says: "God squeezes but does not drown..." 
Greetings

[Stormrider]

With the new release of MALA, my setup is already perfect (to my liking), except for one thing: the lack of dynamic snapshots. I don't want to be annoying, but let me ask you: any progress with the plugin?

[drventure]

Hey Stormrider

Unfortunately, no, not much at all. Got sidetracked by a job search that went south, and then by that lightning strike.

I'm slowing getting back to all those things I'd dropped back early in the summer and the engine is one of them.

Just to backtrack a little, what was it you were looking for again?

If I recall correctly, you were mainly looking for a way to rotate through various images in a single "area" in the Mala screen, right?

If it's a fairly limited feature like that, I can see what I can do to just get that together and put out a .0001 release or something 

[Stormrider]

My idea was the in-game snapshot and the title snapshot in the sharing the same position on screen and with the same size. Every 2 seconds (configurable) the snapshot  is swapped. It would be great if I could get that feature working in my layout, even if there's no gui, help or way to configure it from the MaLa menus. My e-mail is stormrider@alvarezeninternet.com in case you want to pass me any file to test. Thanks.

[drventure]

Cool. That's what I thought.

Give me a bit and let me see if I can tidy that piece up a bit.

I got stymied by the videos in Mala (I actually have them working, but I couldn't figure out how to rotate them to match the Mala interface if it rotates).

Since you don't need that, it should be easy enough to just leave it out.

It may be a few days, just FYI

[Stormrider]

No videos, but I have both a horizontal and and a vertical layout, each of them with its gamelist, in case that's important for you to know.

[drventure]

Doh. I thought I'd implemented all the rotation handling stuff, then I came across this in my source...

    Private Sub CustomMalaPlugin_MaLaOrientationSwitch(ByVal Orientation As Integer) Handles Me.MaLaOrientationSwitch
        '---- nothing right now
    End Sub

Oops. Guess I hadn't gotten to that point yet 

So it may take a little longer than I first thought. Unless you don't REALLY need the rotation handling 

[drventure]

Well, I think I can get the rotating stuff, but....

Are you planning a fixed size layout or a scalable layout?

Here's the problem.

If it's scalable, MALA will scale your images as necessary. No big deal, UNLESS you're talking about a mask image, in which case if mala scales it, most likely it'll introduce noise into the masking color areas that will cause the mask to look terrible.

Ive done some playing with threshold levels for determining the mask color instead of just a fixed singular color, but, as expected, you can end up with bleedthrough where the algo things it should be transparent based on the threshold when it really shouldn't be.

The only way for that to work 100% is to NOT scale the image, which means you have to use a FIXED RES layout only.

I'll probably leave support in for scalable layouts, they just won't necessarily look good (at least if you're using a masking image).

[loadman]

...Let me know if there is any data I can add to the Plug-In API that may help you.

[drventure]

Thanks loadman.

For this prob, I'm not sure there's additional data that could help.

Can Mala itself accurately deal with transparent mask images when they get scaled? I hadn't checked, but I'd assume it either can't or you're doing some additional processing on the image as you scale it.

The prob is when an image is scaled up, the boundary between transparent area and non trans area is "blurred" a bit, and that's enough to make the mask area really blocky.

I have a few ideas I'm playing with now, though. We'll see where that goes

[Stormrider]

Fixed size layout here (320x240). The snaps are scaled, however.

[Stormrider]

Do you know a way to refresh the layout or a specific part of it while MaLa is running? I could write a simple script to rename my mame\snap folder to mame\snapt, and my mame\snapt to mame\snap (snap holds the in-game snapshots and snapt the title snapshots). Then I would just need to program a refresh of the layout every 2 or 3 seconds. That would do the trick. It's a little stupid way to make it but that's all I can afford.

[drventure]

Just a quick update on this project. I was moving along at a pretty good clip, and then I came across some sample WPF projects that just blew my mind....

Sooo....

I'm going to take a bit to explore what I might be able to do with WPF in conjunction with Mala. There's some very interesting possibilities there...

[Aithos]

I'd possibly be interested in working with you on this after I get Visual Studio set up at home again (I use it at work).  I was curious what version you are writing this in for .net 3.5?  I was considering writing a frontend of my own from scratch but it might just take me too long to get the inner workings since I haven't really looked at the MAME source previously.  I used to only be interested in SNES and Genesis emulation and ever since I decided to build a MAME cabinet this stuff is all very interesting to me

[drventure]

Hey Aithos

Sure, no probs at all. I considered the same, but there's A LOT of ground to cover to get even close to where LoadMan is with Mala.

That's why I'm thinking it'd be a path of +much+ less resistance to build a nice plugin framework for .net.

And yes, I'm targeting .net 3.5 (VB.net is what's it's currently in).

The basic architecture plan is for Engine18 to be an "actual" mala plugin, but it will then serve as host to any number of .net plugins, which can inherit lots of base functionality directly from Engine18 and not have to mess with the dirty details of Mala's low level plugin interface.

So far, I've got all of Mala's events firing, all of Mala's configuration exposed and read/writable, I'm working on getting the tree read writable, and I'm working on getting the details of how exactly Mala scales and rotates windows when it switches orientations.

That way, I can make floating "windows" available to other .net plugins easily to add controls, WPF effects etc.

At least, that's the plan. You know anything about WPF? I've found some great sample projects I'm looking to play with further....

[Aithos]

I haven't really worked with WPF but I'm a very fast learner, I do mostly asp.net and oracle database programming for work but there is a good amount of vb.net alongside that.  I'm going to do a bit of looking here this week and see if it is something that catches my interest.  I can't really do anything until I have my visual studio set up since I don't currently have it on my pc.  Just figured I would post to let you know I might be interested, I'll keep you posted if I feel like I might be able to be some help after I get everything up and going again.

[drventure]

No problems. It's not like there's a huge deadline on this 

WPF is a very different beast from WinForms, probably a bit more ASP'ish but it's still a lot to learn. But wow, I was playing last night. I had it playing videos and still clips in an arbitrarily rotated window in about 10 mins...

Cool stuff.

[loadman]

I hope you have not given up on this project 

[drventure]

Nope, not given up at all. Just finding the time to work on it has been tough lately.

But I'm pretty sure WPF is the way to go with it, so I'm working toward replacing the winform stuff with WPF right now.

The effects you can get out of WPF (like page flipping actual running video, a tons of transition effects for images) I think would make it worth it. Plus, I'd like to get into WPF a bit more.

[empardopo]

In which state is the project?

[drventure]

In which state is the project?

Hey Empardopo

I commented on the other thread you started about Mala Plugins, but I thought I'd follow up here as well. You could definitely use Engine18 for that. And it'd save you a LOT of the low level headache (to work with Mala, you normally have to deal with C style callbacks and structures, not hard, but not as easy as most of .net either)

Let me know and I can package it up for you.

I'd love to get some feedback on engine18 as well. I haven't released it opensource yet because there's still a few bits that I'd like to improve

[empardopo]

Thanks for answer me!
You could send it to me to empardopo at gmail.com if you want!

I hope find some documentation about make a plugin in MALA too! :-)
Thanks very much!

[drventure]

Best place for Docs is the Mala WIKI

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Mala_Plugins

I'll shoot you over the Engine18 stuff later today.