Upgrading command.dat and other documents

[Howard_Casto]

I'm working on implementing background styles now.  They aren't hard to implement but as they greatly effect the look of the entry and the placment of text, it is taking a bit of thought on my part.

Here are the styles I've greated thus far:

0=Vertical pattern repeating, section spaced to the nearest page. 

With this one, the background image specified is scaled to the screen area and is tiled vertically.  Completely unrelated to that, the text in the various sections is padded at the end to the nearest "screen"  In other words if a character's move list is less than a full screen long, it will be spaced out so that that character's section is the only thing seen on the screen.  If the character's section is slightly longer, it will be padded to fill two pages ect... This is the default as I feel it looks best and is most readable. 

1=Vertical Pattern repeating, section spaced to the nearest vertical tile.

With this one, the image tiles are displayed the same, but the sections are not padded to the nearest screen, but rather the nearest vertical tile.  This is useful if you don't want the "every entry is on a single page" look, BUT your background tiles look odd if they are just cropped at any length.

2=Vertical Pattern repeating, section not padded

With this one the sections of text are just listed one after another.  If multiple continuous sections have the same image and this style specified, the background will just be tiled in one long section.  This would look exactly how a webpage with a scrolling background looks when there are multiple pages of text.



Now 1-2 all scale and paint the background images within the text area, which is forced to 4:3.  So if you view them on a 16:9 or 16:10 monitor you'll get black bars.  This is to maintain scaleability as a background image might wrap a border around a section of text, ect and it wouldn't line up if stretched to a different ratio.

I also intend to do 3-5, which will be identical to 0-2, but will scale the image to the screen, not the text area.   This would be implemented soley so that people could make supplemental 16:9/10 style sheets that alter the backgrounds to remove the black bars. 

Are there any other background styles we might need?  Comments?  Suggestions?

[Howard_Casto]

Man... interest fell away form this pretty quickly.

Anyway I haven't worked on this since my last post due to the holidays.  I will go ahead and throw an alpha release out there next week and you guys cna try it out.

[ed12]

for 1 i love your post's
and in complete side to myself to see your work
hope u had a good set of day's off

ed

[Howard_Casto]

I finally got a chance to look at this again. 

I went ahead and added "style sheet"  support in the form of an optional command line flag that loads the header from a sxml file (style xml).  That took like 2 minutes.    I still need to add the other two background styles in but I should be able to get to that tonight. 

As far as a proof of concept app goes it works pretty well.  I made a mk1 entry for both command.dat and info.dat as an example and a very ugly "mame" style to override the current one just to show how it can be done.  Expect an alpha test release within the next couple of days.  Then I'll make a converter. 

[nullPointer]

Wow, that's great news Howard!  I'm really looking forward to checking this out.   

[Howard_Casto]

Ok added remappable keys and three viewing modes:

Full:  Icons, Images, Text Sizing, Backgrounds

No Images:  No images are shown, just icons and backgrounds.....  text sizing still works.

No Formatting:  No images, icons, backgrounds or text sizing.... only text colors work because it's simply too ugly otherwise.

The three modes are implemented not because anyone would ever want to use anything other than full, but rather as proof of concept.... If you are writing a xinfo reader you can ignore as many of the flags you like and display as little or as much as needed.  Missing images and icons will be filled in with their alternate text, so a stripped document is still prefectly readable.  So mameui, for example, could still do that cruddy little black text in a tab if they didn't want to be bothered to upgrade. 

I want to add a two player viewing mode, again just for proof of concept... two players can view documents independantly of each other for fighting games and the like. 

So I have two more background modes to add and this two player mode and the thing will be essentially done.  I can't see this taking more than a day or so.

[Howard_Casto]

Ok I put up an alpha for everyone to play with. 

I can't stress this enough... it is ALPHA.... the icons for command.dat aren't even renamed yet!  There is only one game entry (mortal kombat)!

dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/files/xinfo1.0a.zip


The command line parameters are as follows:

xinfo.exe rom docName [StyleName]



The only entry included is mortal kombat, so your "rom" flag will always be "mk" for now.  DocName refers to any document in the "metadata\mk" folder, minus the xml extension.  I've included a command.xml and a info.xml as well as a couple of test xmls. 

StyleName is optional and it represents the name of a style sheet found in the rom folder or in the "default" folder.  I've included a "mame" style just for testing.

So to get things going type:

xinfo.exe mk command

or

xinfo.exe mk info

ect.....

Again, I don't intend for this viewer to really go anywhere other than a tool to visually assess a document made in the xinfo format.  There is a readme.txt included as well as a partial developers doc.  I STRONGLY SUGGEST you read at least the readme.txt before playing around.

If there are any issues or errors let me know. 

This is as far as I'm taking this project unless there is more interest.

[headkaze]

Howard: Why have you included the Command.dat graphics from CPWizard? I don't remember you asking me about it 

[Howard_Casto]

Sorry about that!

I didn't even know they were in there..... I was using them to make sure that you could change icons via styles and I forgot to remove them.   

[headkaze]

No problem! Honest mistake.

[ed12]

personally
i am now more then ever inspired
thk-u howard

ed