Tools for creating BOR mods.

Hi guys

Hopefully some of you will remember who I am. I was one of the original coders on OpenBOR back when it started around 2004.

I'm about to start my third and final year at university for which I'm required to take part in an individual research project. I have decided to research "Developing software for an online community" and hope to use the BOR community as my choice.

My aim is to find out what sort of tools the community is lacking and set about creating one or more of them (within my ability). To do this I would need to get ideas and feedback from the community as the tools would be made purely for them.

I will be starting out developing for the original BOR engine and then hopefully trying to keep up with OpenBOR at a later date. The project is quite long (ten months) and so development will be at a slow pace, but hopefully this will enable me to tailor the product to the needs of the BOR community and eliminate as many bugs as possible.

Please could you post here if you'd be willing to suggest ideas and give feedback at a later date via the forums (at your own pace, I won't be rushing anyone or demanding feedback). I just need to get an idea of who would be interested in some new BOR related tools so I can see if my project is viable.

Hopefully if this all works out the community can get a decent character, game layout or level editor out of this. Don't worry about my motivation, this project plays a large part of my final grade so I've got plenty to motivate me!

I'll be posting this on both Lavalit and Senileteam, if anyone can suggest any part of the BOR community I have missed please let me know.

Thanks for your interest in advance.

Pete N (Kirby2000)

An admirable project. Bravo!

Argh. My final project was statistical analysis of a survery among biotech companies determining blablabla.
You guys do stuff that is actually interesting. Then again, I didn't study programming/software development, so maybe that's where I went wrong

Thanks for the support guys.

For my next part of my project I'm going to need suggestions for tools, basically what would make life easier when creating a mod for BOR? What slows you down, what tools would you want to see? I've had a few suggestions for small tools at Lavalit, such as an animation preview where you could paste your animation text into a window and click a button to view how the anim would appear in game (without having to run BOR).

If someone has already suggested an idea, please post anyway so I can gauge how popular different tools are. Most of my project is based on interacting with the online community rather than building the tools, so feel free to make any comments at all (even if they are critical).

Thanks

The animation one is a good idea. If you combined it with a way of making sure that it followed the BOR guidelines (i.e. offsets, delays, frame limits, etc) that'd be helpful.

It's not necessary (because it's not hard in the first place), but maybe a frontend for music conversion could be something else for you to think about.

By the way, what university are you at, Kirby?

Not a very good one! Haha, what I mean is that I chose my university (Anglia Ruskin) as they have a campus close to my home and I don't have to move house rather than for its educational merits. I found that I could not get a job in the computing industry without either luck or a degree but I didn't want to move away from my friends, family and girlfriend. I may be doing a Masters degree at Queen Mary in London after I finish this year as my girlfriend is going there.

I'm at Sheffield Hallam (I'm not good enough to attend the "proper" university), and mine isn't very good either. Especially when one of the assignments for a module called "Professional Development" (despite there not being much emphasis on the word "professional") happens to be a poster advertising all the skills I've learnt while being at the university. I spent about half an hour on mine by way of protest because I saw it as completely demeaning and pointless (so much so that two of my friends flat out refused to do it) and my poster was a parody of the incredibly famous General Kitchener 1916 recruitment poster, complete with the mustached war crim... hero pointing at people walking past. I'm just glad no Germans were there, otherwise it may have been seen as a bit tasteless.

Also it doesn't help when the lecturer of said module treats students like they're still in primary school.

And I chose my university for pretty much the same reason as you - I didn't want to leave my friends. That's what's stopping me making the ultimate move to San Diego to live with my girlfriend.

Again, sorry for the double post at lavalit, but here is a quick update.

Hi guys.

First off, apologies for the lack of updates. This has been approved for my final year project, however much of the project is research. Unfortunately, for the last few months I've been busy with four other assignments as well as this.

Before I can start the software development I've been asked to look into various areas of developing for an online community. These areas include:

How tools are developed online:

- who is core audience?
- which comments from the community are valid, are some more valid than others
- what is considered good feedback
- should all users information be considered or just those who contribute to the scene / board
- Can forum members give feedback regularly, will sufficient feedback be available.

Research into other community developed software:

- What is open source
- How are changes submitted
- Who chooses what changes are valid
- Wikipedia - Abuse from allowing the public to edit it.

The idea behind this is that you can't please everyone and for software to be developed efficiently (especially reguarding the GUI) I need to have a good methodology for development.

I understand that to some of these questions, the answer is quite simple, especially in our community, but to get the higher marks on my work, I need to examine these areas in detail as well as devoloping the software.

Finally I have to choose the software to work on. From the tools mentioned earlier I have the following options:

Character editor
Level editor
Animation preview tool
Script checker
Gui designers (e.g. positioning lifebars, lives, score, text using the current font)

I also need to make the choice of making a package of smaller tools (e.g. the bottom 3 of the list) or concentrating on one larger tool. Obviously with a larger tool, the scope of the project will be a lot larger and harder to keep up to date, but more valuable to the community, whereas as selection of smaller tools will probably be updated less frequently and be easier to create and maintain.

Anyway I hope to get back to you soon as I start my second semester on Monday. I will try and put up a poll at Lavalit so people can vote on what they would like the most when I get a minute. If anyone has anymore feedback or ideas on what problems they have developing mods and what tools they would like feel free to post.

Is this "quick"? Looks like quite an extensive post to me.

Anyway, I have nothing to add but I thought I'd just post a reply so you don't get the feeling you're being ignored.

Great Project Kirby2000!
I'm looking forward to use the tools you will develop. Keep us informed about your progress.

Hi Kirby !
glad that you are still interested in this.
for me I would say :

- Character editor
- Level editor

I would LOVE to see those project happening !
it will be great to reduce time and tuning in developing mods.

P.S good Luck for your Studies ! 

Great news Kirby2000!!! good to know you are still around, I know I'm not the only one that feels that way. The tools that you mentioned could be extremely useful, thanks in advance.

Hey Roel !

is that a New AOTB Character in your avatar ?
or are you just happy to see me ?




*Soul-Fist Slams Table*

CONFESS !

I'm very happy to see you, Dynamis.

ohh I'm happy too ! 

I like your New Avatar better...
you know, the old one was constantly keeps on hypnotizing me everytime I visit the Forum.
when the effect's wore out I found myself in a very weird situations. "don't Ask"

Your monkey had a very weird way of thinking and im glad that "Entity" is gone !

Did I mention how similar your artwork resembles you ?
Long Live the Roel Sprite/Avatar/Character/Artwork AOTB related material !

Just a quick update for you guys. I'm starting to move onto the coding now. I'll probably be using Visual Studio because of the timeframe and most likely be working on a "level editor" (unless you guys think I should put up a poll to choose what to work on). As the level files for BOR are fairly simple, the main coding will be on the interface so I may end up posting some screen designs here to float a few ideas around.

I need a way to visually represent the levels that is easy to use. I'm thinking of having a scrollable area containing the levels background images (e.g the level layed out end to end) with enemies shown as either icons or their idle frames in their spawn positions. I'm not quite sure how I will show the scrollpos that activates them without it becomming a little messy, but thats one of the points of my assignment, working with the community to find the best way.

The enemies/items etc will be able to be selected and various values edited or they could be moved/deleted.

As for constructing the levels from background / foreground images, it could be tricky. It might be better to have one section for editing the background order and other details (with a tile pallet for selecting which piece is next) and one section for enemy/item/hole placement to keep it simple.

As I stated earlier, the initial versions will be BOR only, once the software is in a useable state, I can look at adding OpenBOR features such as platforms, walkable areas, etc.

If anyone has any ideas, or even things they want to avoid in the level editor. let me know.

As always I'll be posting this at both SenileTeam and Lavalit (sorry to make you read two threads!

Thanks for the suggestions Bloodbane, the scrollpos one is a great idea, but it will be quite far down the line before I am able to do this.

So far, I've only been coding for two days, but I've managed to get the text files to load into memory and to have a basic rendering of the level as shown below (I've yet to add neon or background effects).

I have to travel to London to see my girlfriend tomorrow but hopefully I'll be able to get back to work on this Monday and get back to you guys.

By only doing it for BOR, you're actually helping yourself with the report side, because it gives you a lot to write up for potential future development.

I don't know if it's the same for you, but for my final year project, the actual application itself is worth about 20%, meaning I could not hand in anything, but as long as my report was good, I'd still get a first mark. I'm not going to risk it though.

I'll also assume that you've also only got about a month and a half until your project submission date.