Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: )p( on July 19, 2003, 05:03:07 pm
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Because I go this question a few times...I made a small demo how to setup the cylarcade interface as a wheel similar to Utracade.
more info cab be found here:
http://echo.messageboard.nl/2243/viewtopic.php?t=177
(http://www.i-modernist.com/vegaswheel2.jpg)
peter
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Thanks a million. That might come in handy. Is there a limit on the number of games you can display at once?
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Thanks a million. That might come in handy. Is there a limit on the number of games you can display at once?
you mean on the wheel...yes...it uses cylarcade which is set by default to 9 models and is currently not exposed to the skinner to change it...
peter
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Having some more fun with wheels...here is a big wheel version...I will try to put a zip with this skin together during lunch brake or tonight ;-)
(http://www.i-modernist.com/vegasbigwheel.jpg)
here is a movie capture how it works for me:
http://www.i-modernist.com/bigwheeldemo.MOV
peter
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OH great indeed!
I'm sorry to say this but i like the "wheel" and dislike the rest of the interface... :-[
Can i "skin it" to my taste!? Sorry to say this too but can i well Mamewah or it's like impossible due to the !code writting!? :)
Great job man! I wonder when arcade 3d gets better too! ;D
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OH great indeed!
I'm sorry to say this but i like the "wheel" and dislike the rest of the interface... :-[
Can i "skin it" to my taste!? Sorry to say this too but can i well Mamewah or it's like impossible due to the !code writting!? :)
Great job man! I wonder when arcade 3d gets better too! ;D
Quoting myself from above "I will try to put a zip with this skin together during lunch brake or tonight ;-)" nitice the word "skin" in there ;-) ...so yeah emulaxian is completey skinnable... ;D
peter
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Sorry for my unattencion...
You shall Punish me sire for i have sinned... ;D ;D
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here it is:
http://www.i-modernist.com/emulaxianwheeldemo3.zip
how to install:
-first unzip a fresh install of 0.82 in a new folder
-then unzip this zip over it
-then go to the cfg menu...select list manager...click on mame in the second field...select edit...then adjust your mame and artwork paths
-run fe3darcade.exe
-left and right will spin the wheel...all jump, search and filter functions works as normally
-hit 4 to go to the gamelist selection wheel
-hit 6 to switch between the will and the list menu
optionally:
-fast pc then in the general cfg menu you can set rotsteps to a higher value for smoother wheel rotation
-if you have video's then set also glvideo to true
-move the font files to your windows font folder
peter
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Can this be controlled with the mouse? Is there both slow and fast switching by pressing up and down or left and right?
I just ask cuz I know this option is available on some other emus.
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Can this be controlled with the mouse? Is there both slow and fast switching by pressing up and down or left and right?
I just ask cuz I know this option is available on some other emus.
mouse..no not directly the mouse is used for camera control as the primary use of this mode is cylarcade...not a steady top view ;-)
switching between what? gamesa? then you can jump by letter, 5 and 10 games further or backwards...and jump to games directly with the search function...
or switching between gamelists? then default key 4 switches to another wheel to select another gamelist.
peter
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That's awesome! How games can it on a gamelist before it starts to slow down? (Or is this even a relevant question?)
In other words, could I put my whole MAME collection on one wheel or would it be more beneficial to have seperate wheels for different genres?
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That's awesome! How games can it on a gamelist before it starts to slow down? (Or is this even a relevant question?)
In other words, could I put my whole MAME collection on one wheel or would it be more beneficial to have seperate wheels for different genres?
? it rotates through any size gamelist...I mainly use my favorites list and mame split up in basic categories...but almost anything goes..the format is vey flexible...
i always use this menu style in combination with the listmenu with larger lists...you can switch between them instantly...
edit: speed and gamelist size are not related...speed depends mostly on type of skin (ie back drops and overlay can slow things down) cpu, vidcard and how fast you can load bitmaps from your hd... (because this skin uses a big backdrop texture older vidcards will not like it because a lot of them have limited max texture sizes...)
peter
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Would a Radeon 7000 be sufficient? Bought it on sale. Couldn't resist. Didn't find out til afterwards that it performs about as well (at least in real world tests) as my 3-yr old Matrox G400 (which I already sold away).
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Would a Radeon 7000 be sufficient? Bought it on sale. Couldn't resist. Didn't find out til afterwards that it performs about as well (at least in real world tests) as my 3-yr old Matrox G400 (which I already sold away).
don't know that card...but radeon normally work well with the fe using the opengl renderer...just try it ;-)
i used a p3 850 with a geforce 2mx in that movie above...
and use 32 bit desktop not 16 bit or at least on both my geforces backdrops in the 3d sprite don't show up in 16bit mode but do in 32 bit mode...overlays work in both...video card drivers are strange things 8)
peter
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That's odd. Maybe that's the problem I've been having with Dragon King. I always use 16bit mode and never see anything but a black screen. Never even tried with 32bit mode before... (That's a bit OT.)
Can't wait to give the whole thing a try when I get home from work.
Is it possible to create a pane for the cab model?
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I just watched the video. Looks like some of your screen captures keep changing. Are those videos or are they simply rotating screen shots?
On a total side note... I just realised I think too fast for my typing. I end up skipping entire words in some of my posts. ???
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I just watched the video. Looks like some of your screen captures keep changing. Are those videos or are they simply rotating screen shots?
on the left bitmap are video's and on the wheel for the selected game a video and the other games on the wheel rotating bitmaps...so lot off stuff going on ;)
peter
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almost look like Ultracade. How about the coin feature and the Attract mode feature or use an animated one in a loop (looks like in the video, is it ? ).. Great Job...
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almost look like Ultracade. How about the coin feature and the Attract mode feature or use an animated one in a loop (looks like in the video, is it ? ).. Great Job...
yup it's attractmode video's in the video above...this is just cylarcade in my fe so everything it does works with it!
i took the zip down for a bit...want to update the skin a bit more...noitced i used the wrong borders compared to the listmenu part of the skin ;-)
i never saw an ultracade what is that coin feature?
edit: zip is back online...i also added a second background bitmap and changed the stretch of the left sprite to orientation-stretch so it fits in with the behavior in the listmenu in the skin...yeah i like consistency in design ;-) (the png's make the skin pretty big...5mb)
http://www.i-modernist.com/emulaxianwheeldemo3.zip
peter
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almost look like Ultracade. How about the coin feature and the Attract mode feature or use an animated one in a loop (looks like in the video, is it ? ).. Great Job...
i never saw an ultracade what is that coin feature?
peter
You can insert coin in the Menu then you select a game and use that Credits you have put in, and if any left credits and back in the Menu, the credits left stays and can be used in any game you load. Heh, thats waht everyone want to do in their FE and Cabs...Long time ago..
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I don't think that's really possible (refering to the coin idea). At least not without creating some sort of shell to launch games in that would keep track of credits and pass key-presses into the game.
Sounds like even in a best-case scenario it's going to cause some sort of overhead while running a game.
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Pressing left and right cycled me through the games, but up and down made the whole wheel zoom in and out. Is there a way to avoid this???
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Pressing left and right cycled me through the games, but up and down made the whole wheel zoom in and out. Is there a way to avoid this???
yeah...for now don't map those keys...normally in cylarcade you use up and down to zoom in and out of the cabs...
some default keys are z and x jump by letter q,w,a,s jump x number games
v = search and b= on the fly filters
peter
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Being that it rotates on a vertical axis, could I remap the up and down to rotate the wheel and the left and right to jump by letter?
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Being that it rotates on a vertical axis, could I remap the up and down to rotate the wheel and the left and right to jump by letter?
yeah just go into the cfg utility, pagedown, select general configuration, and change the keys to your likings...kgotoaz to left, kgotoza to right , kgameleft to down, kgameright to up also be sure to map kgameup andf kgamedown to none since you don't want to use them...
peter
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I did not like how the wheel was updated offscreen when using for example jump by letter or the other jump and search functions...
Now they seamlessly rotate with the wheel...difficult to explain but it works amazingly well even with big lists...
Also removed the interdependency of camera and skin rotation...now the scrollbars in the infoscreen are correct again...
if you allready got the previous http://www.i-modernist.com/emulaxianwheeldemo3.zip
then is here a zip without the skin png's containing only the updated exe and skin cfg file:
http://www.i-modernist.com/fe3darcadewheelupdate.zip
peter
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You're really on a roll here. Can't wait to get home to try it out. (Hell, I probably try it out once I get to work.)
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You're really on a roll here. Can't wait to get home to try it out. (Hell, I probably try it out once I get to work.)
actually this was just a case of not hiding the updating process...but I must say i like the wheel thing more and more...I planned to add it to my cab fo my nephew...as the wheel seemed to be ideal for his favorites list...but I think I like it so much that I will use it alongside my default setup of cylarcade/listmenu...
note this is beta...I now changed some stuff to make the wheel view work better...have not checked what it does with more regular skins ;)
peter
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Let me say I really like this. I'm going to be using a front-end soon (my cab is nearing completion), and this interface is by far the best one I've seen.
Though, it's not clear to me how to cycle through different lists?
-VA
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Let me say I really like this. I'm going to be using a front-end soon (my cab is nearing completion), and this interface is by far the best one I've seen.
Though, it's not clear to me how to cycle through different lists?
-VA
may ways but keeping the wheel format...you get another wheel now instead of games...the gamelists...hit 4 gamelist selection menu which is in this skin just another wheel...
peter
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alan.... the radeon 7000 specifically doesn't support high texture sizes like the rest of the radeon family. To get it to work in dk you need to edit your frontend.ini and put dk in full software mode.
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alan.... the radeon 7000 specifically doesn't support high texture sizes like the rest of the radeon family. To get it to work in dk you need to edit your frontend.ini and put dk in full software mode.
Damn... at least I only paid $15 for it...
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Well I've got the thing running smooth and it's really pretty. I'm going to try modifying the skin to suit my theme colors.
Can I speed it up, though? It seems to be going a bit slow. It pauses every time it hits a game. Plus, the animations are smooth when it rotates, but it just goes about half the speed I want it to go at. I increased my rotation steps to make a smoother rotation. Is that slowing it down? Even choosing advancing to the next letter goes through every game and takes a pause. Is it my video card or can this somehow be sped up?
Edit: found the button to switch to list view. Scrolls alot faster that way. I like this whole thing. Works pretty darn well!! It's a true pain in the ass to configure, but once it's finished it's really nice. I found a 1.25hr long electronic set that I play instead of the arcade background music. I like it more since it doesn't have that "in the arcade" feel to it anymore.
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Well I've got the thing running smooth and it's really pretty. I'm going to try modifying the skin to suit my theme colors.
Can I speed it up, though? It seems to be going a bit slow. It pauses every time it hits a game. Plus, the animations are smooth when it rotates, but it just goes about half the speed I want it to go at. I increased my rotation steps to make a smoother rotation. Is that slowing it down? Even choosing advancing to the next letter goes through every game and takes a pause. Is it my video card or can this somehow be sped up?
if it's a bit slow on your system (and after what howerd said that is to be expected ;-) ) it will be faster to lower the rotsteps to 3 or so. 3 will be 3 times faster then for example 9. The wheel is faster for you in in the gamelist selection menu because the bitmaps I added to the zip in the dummys folder to represent the lists are smaller then your average screenshot and marquee. If you don't allready did it resizing your screenshots and marquees to 256x256 can do miracles as texturizing goes much faster with powers of 2 bitmaps. You on't see any difference in quality...
that the wheel ticks on every game is by design...it works like this...a new games is added invisible, the bitmaps are loaded from hd and then the wheel is smoothly rotated so the new one comes in view...so how long the tick takes depends on how fast you can load textures from the hd...combination of cpu, hd and especially as mentioned above your vidcard.
peter
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Ok then I'll guess I'll just have to live with it. Found out how to switch to that other menu, though. That helps. I already converted my images over to 256X256, though. At least I hgad at one point. Maybe I'm using an old set again... Guess it never hurts to check. I'll give that a try.
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Ok the images aren't converted. My bad. I reinstalled them all at some point. What's the program to batch convert them? Can you get me a link?
If all goes well I hope to be the first person to be using your wheel in a cab with customization and a different skin. (Of course by saying that someone is now going to try to outdo me, but that's ok.)
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Ok the images aren't converted. My bad. I reinstalled them all at some point. What's the program to batch convert them? Can you get me a link?
If all goes well I hope to be the first person to be using your wheel in a cab with customization and a different skin. (Of course by saying that someone is now going to try to outdo me, but that's ok.)
irfanview a link and how to here: http://3darcade.mameworld.net/frontend/fereadme.htm#Install
I will try to get this finished over the weekend...there are still some interdependencys because of the wheel is rotated differently then the skin and you don't want other models to show up in the wheel when they are available for a game but you do in the other menu types etc...i will move those options to section two of the arcade cfg files i think...
peter
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Wow. Can I get fries with that?
What image file format do you recommend?
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Wow. Can I get fries with that?
What image file format do you recommend?
for the screenshots and marquees...256x256 png's
peter
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Why is the marquee fuzzy/blurry when it's in the "select" position? As it come sinto position it seems to be in focus but it gets blurrier until it's hard to read by the time it gets into the primary position. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?
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adjust your antitrospic (spelling?) filtering in your video card settings. That should get rid of it. :)
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Is that a front-end option or do you mean literally in my video card settings?
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Why is the marquee fuzzy/blurry when it's in the "select" position? As it come sinto position it seems to be in focus but it gets blurrier until it's hard to read by the time it gets into the primary position. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?
Might be the filtering of the bitmap...while moving your eye sees it diffrently...one of the things i have to make optional because it actually might look worse as it apprently does for you...
Try turning on anisotropic filtering for your vidcard in your graphics driver settings that will help...
peter
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hehe corssposting...yeah in your graphics driver setting not in the fe.
here is a pic how it looks for me:
http://www.i-modernist.com/vegasbigwheel.png
i can get even slightly beter results by turning filtering (biliniar) inside the fe off (not accessable yet to the user) and upping the anisptropic setting in the graphics driver some more...
here is another pic with the normal build you also got but with quility setting upped to the max in the graphics driver, framerate is exactly the same. again this is using opengl. directx looks a bit better and is faster but somehow does not feel as smooth to me:
http://www.i-modernist.com/vegasbigwheel2.png
peter
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Both those images you posted are infinitely clearer than mine. Plus I've been using OpenGL with my Radeon 7000, but I see you mentioned that DirectX can be clearer and faster? Would you recommend I give that a shot? (I already intend to mess with the anisptropic settings.)
One other question (until I can come up with more)... Will increasing that video setting cause my performance to take a hit? There's usually a trade off between performance and quality.
P.S. I appreciate the time and attention you've given to getting this thing working for just one person.
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Both those images you posted are infinitely clearer than mine. Plus I've been using OpenGL with my Radeon 7000, but I see you mentioned that DirectX can be clearer and faster? Would you recommend I give that a shot? (I already intend to mess with the anisptropic settings.)
One other question (until I can come up with more)... Will increasing that video setting cause my performance to take a hit? There's usually a trade off between performance and quality.
just try it go to the general cfg menu and select it from the poup list...opengl is much more robust in my experience though...
on my card i don't see any difference in framerate even with anisotropic at 8x but i usually have it on 2.
i also enable anti-aliaising on to remove jadged edges on models. Also in the graphic card driver not the fe!
peter
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Took me a lil while but I found the anisotropic filtering. Only had two options - automatic and 16X so i switched it over to 16X. Makes a lil bit of an improvement, but still a bit blurry. I'ts acceptable, though. The thing is performing like a champ.
I know Powerstrip (which I actually use for quick mode switching) has the ability to overclock the video processor and memory. Can anybody tell me if they've tried this? Is it actually beneficial? I have no problem with just leaving it alone if it's too much of an issue.
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to get less blur changing the lighting might help...you could try to go to the list mananger...click on vegasredbigwheel in the arcades section..choose edit...then in section 5. change lightposition1 to light1position|-70 90 0|
peter
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Oh I found the problem. The OpenGL and Direct3D have there own setting for anisotropic filtering (duh). So I changed them both to be sure and it's crystal clear.
I was using Direct3D for the speed but it was switching back to software mode after I exitted a game so I went back to OpenGL. It doesn't seem to be quite so fast, but it's more reliable. Plus this way I won't have to reload my list every time I exit a game. The wierd thing is that it wasn't doing that ealier in Direct3D but it is now... Happens in both versions... Oh well...
I'm gonna rebuild my lists a lil later. Not gonna work on that tonight, though. Gonna wait til I get my other emulators. Plus I wanna make some pretty icons for the menu screens. I'll do that this weekend, though (if I can find the time).
If I have any other questions I'll be sure to bring them up. One thing I wanna work on is animations or rotating images for a selected game without using a video file. My computer isn't the fastest and it tends to trip. I'm pretty sure I heard you mention something of this sort before. Any suggestions?
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if you don't use the fpsarcade there is an easy solution for your problem with direct-x...in the general configuration menu in section 4 set renderfix to true...but still I would prefer opengl at least on my geforces.
video tends to trip? no i don't know what you mean?
peter
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Well when the video starts it oftens pauses the background music and the first couple frames get a bit choppy or it takes a lil while to start. The speech never messes up, though. I tries holding the speech to see if that would affect performance, but it really didn't.
Actually when you get all those sounds in there together it starts to get a bit busy, anyways.
I was considering using rederfix, but I wasn't sure how long that would take eveyr time I come back from a game. I'll give it a shot to see hwo it turns out.
If you need any testing done then I'm your guinea pig.
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Well when the video starts it oftens pauses the background music and the first couple frames get a bit choppy or it takes a lil while to start. The speech never messes up, though. I tries holding the speech to see if that would affect performance, but it really didn't.
Actually when you get all those sounds in there together it starts to get a bit busy, anyways.
I was considering using rederfix, but I wasn't sure how long that would take eveyr time I come back from a game. I'll give it a shot to see hwo it turns out.
If you need any testing done then I'm your guinea pig.
you could try the altsound|true| to use the laternative sound system...but yeah with all that stuff going slower system probably will have difficulty to keep up... ;)
renderfix will probably not be noticable in cylarcade....only in fpsarcade you might see it because it will reinstantiate all textures...
over the weekend i plan to make a new real beta available...that will then also have the definitive new options to make life with the "wheel" view of cylarcade easier in it...then you can try to crash it 8)
peter
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Sounds like a plan to me! Does this mean I'll have to reinstall from scratch? I suppose it's not a big deal if I do. I'm getting pretty familiar with all the settings I like. I may want to install from scratch, anyways.
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Sounds like a plan to me! Does this mean I'll have to reinstall from scratch? I suppose it's not a big deal if I do. I'm getting pretty familiar with all the settings I like. I may want to install from scratch, anyways.
I don't know if you changed the vegasredbigwheel skin and or arcade cfg file? I moved the optional wheel rotation and default model options to the arcade cfg file so you have to adjust that...they get automatically added to the arcade cfg template...so if you adjust it in the listmanager these options will be there to set to your likings...but if you did not change much i would just use the new versions of those two cfg files as a startpoint...
peter
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here it is:
http://www.i-modernist.com/fe3darcade083beta1.zip
See the install notes for what is new and how to install. I also included the complete vegasredwheel skin this makes the file so big (7mb)
Also try it with the normal default arcade cfg file (arcades\defalut.cfg) and skin (skins\horizontal.cfg) to see if I did not screw up while adding the new stuff 8)
peter
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and here is why it was a beta... ;)
found a bug...using search (v) or filter (b) gave errors in beta1!
why...splitting cylarcade and fpsarcade in the skins results in different objectnames to call...i forgot to update them in those ;-)
new beta:
http://www.i-modernist.com/fe3darcade083beta.zip
last post about beta's in this thread...
peter
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Would this problem be reflected in my series of upgrades? I noticed something wierd with the search, but I can't remember what the problem was now. I'm not at that computer, though, so I can't say for sure. (Maybe the problem is a faulty user.)
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Would this problem be reflected in my series of upgrades? I noticed something wierd with the search, but I can't remember what the problem was now. I'm not at that computer, though, so I can't say for sure. (Maybe the problem is a faulty user.)
sure it could...the first builds were just demo's and i moved stuff to different places...so ignore those...
reports of bugs in the beta are very welcome...but use beta2 now...i tested beta1 prettty thorougly and the above bug was the only one i could find...not bad to bad :D
peter
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Well I'm really good at breaking stuff, so maybe I'll find something...
(I'm single-handedly keeping all your threads busy, aren't I?)
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Well I'm really good at breaking stuff, so maybe I'll find something...
(I'm single-handedly keeping all your threads busy, aren't I?)
surely looks like that... 8)
peter
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Ok I'll shut up and leave you alone so you can get some work done...