Soldat PolyWorks v1.4.0.17 with source code

[Anna]

Hmm I have a question for you. Are you from Poland?

My parents are.

It looks like I'm rewriting PolyWorks in C# and I'd like to take this opportunity to redesign some of the interface. I already have a good idea of how it will be but I also want to hear everyone's complaints and suggestions on what changes to make.

Keron was lame and showed me a screenshot. Not looking bad, not at all. My main suggestion though, which I've been thinking about for a while, is programmable brushes / paint bucket tools.

I decided not to use those custom painted controls (like the Soldat style tabs), so PW2 probably won't look anything like the screen shot you saw. About programmable brushes/paint buckets: it sounds interesting, but if what you want is the ability to change the hue/saturation/brightness of the vertex colours or additional blend modes then it would probably be easier for me to implement that directly rather than doing the scripting stuff. I'll put it in my to-do list as something nice to have though, and if I find that it's not too hard to implement then I'll do it.

[Lachlandavis]

I get this error when i try to run poly works

Component MBMouse.ocx or one of its dependancies is not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid

, now i put MBMouse into system 32, and the other 2 files included were already there, so i dunno

[VirtualTT]

So here are some of my thoughts about PolyWorks interface and stuff:

Basic layout:

• 1-Working area
• 2-Adaptive combinated Action panel - displays only actions and info that is currently  necessary depending on current tool and selection. This Panel should have variable height and occupy all available space between toolbar and display panel depending on current windows height. Subpanels should have some kind of separators instead of captions.
  
  Now much more detailed description:
  
  subpanel 1: Palette with more colour slots and load/save pallete buttons.
  subpanel 2: Blend mode control and Vertex colouring control.
  subpanel 3: Light Height slider control.
  subpanel 4: Radius slider control./Collider Radius
  subpanel 5: Opacity slider control.
  subpanel 6: Polygon type;
  subpanel 7: Big scenery preview box and level control, no used sceneries list. I think large right-click scenery list is Ok. Selected scenery info should be displayed in status bar.
  subpanel 8: Size/rotation controls.
  subpanel 9: Waypoints - direction, action and path of the selected waypoint.
  subpanel 10: Map properties.
  
  I didn't mentioned texture panel - I'm not sure whether it is necessary...
• 3-Display panel - fixed height.
• 4-One-line toolbar, with some additinal action buttons such as standard New, Open, Save, Compile, Run, Copy, Cut, Paste, and some functions from menu such as arrange, flip/rotate, sever connections.
• 5-StatusBar - currently it has a lot of unused space, so it seems possible to add there some addtional info, for example amount of sceneries/polygons/waypoints selected, selected scenery/polygon info etc...
• 6-TitleBar&Main Menu

Some additional functions: possibility to open sceneries in Image-editing program, auto removing of thin polygons (with two merged vertices), auto *clear unused* sceneries on map compile.

I hope this is understandable...
//I'll update this post later...

[toRch]

well, i think it would be very nice if you could use multi-texturing much easier.
without "texture quad"(how is it called again?), and this other complicated stuff which i dont know at the moment xd.
hmm, what else.. ah! if i transform my whole map, i have to reset my waypoints, sceneries etc. it would be very great if all this stuff gets moved, too!
perhaps you could save all the settings like opacity and color etc. for each tool, so you dont have to change settings like opacity every time you change your tool.
and as virtualtt said, some buttons with the most used functions would be usefull, too.

[tntnik]

hey, ive beem working with Polyworks for a while now and its great. However I can not open one of my maps that i have created a while ago. I can open it with the usual Soldat Map Maker and its fine, but when i try to "Open Compiled" in polyworks it gives me a few errors such as:
"Error Rendering with Direct3D     D3DERR_INVALIDCALL"
"Error opening compiled map   Automation error"

could anybody help me out plz? I really need to fix a bunch of things in the map :\

ps: all the other maps are opening fine.

[Anna]

preview:


edit: new features/planned features:

• scenery window, waypoints window, colouring options combined into one "tool options" window that shows the options of the current tool
• variable size colour palette
• more display options
• distinction between alpha (0-255) and opacity (%)
• alpha tools
• new quad tool
• support for multiple languages
• various tweaks to the interface

[jrgp]

That looks a million times better, Anna.
Thanks for the preview.

[cooz]

i think i saw it somewhere already...
yeah, at one of first 'old' pw screenshots, like ~2 years ago

history repeats itself

[Anna]

This is the oldest screenie I have. I think there was an older one but I don't have it anymore

[cooz]

no, that's not this one,
it was also with snowman, but without window and all those other things

edit:
btw "Soldat MapWorks"

[Lachlandavis]

New Problem, i got Polyworks to workbut everytime i create a poly i get a "run time error "75"" path file/ access error

[mortal_soldier]

i installed polyworks on my school library computer...heres what happens:

i start the app...i only get a black box with grey bottom and top bars and error message "bad file or number"...i click ok...then i get something like "object variable not set or with block....blah blah"....that message doesnt go away even by holding alt+f4....only ctrl+alt+del and end process can quit the app....whats wrong....i would like to map during school breaks and/or after school since i have nothing else to do around here =P

please help

[Wraithlike]

Ok, To fix your problem, open your polyworks folder. In it there should be a file named polyworks.ini. You want to open this with wordpad, and the first thing you should see is this:

Code: [Select]

[Preferences]
Dir=(this should show your soldat directory)
If the Dir entry is not the location of your soldat folder, you must change it to be that. (Default: C:\Soldat)

If that doesn't work, you should try re-installing in different places, and make sure you haven't installed it onto the desktop.

[Snow]

i installed polyworks on my school library computer...heres what happens:

i start the app...i only get a black box with grey bottom and top bars and error message "bad file or number"...i click ok...then i get something like "object variable not set or with block....blah blah"....that message doesnt go away even by holding alt+f4....only ctrl+alt+del and end process can quit the app....whats wrong....i would like to map during school breaks and/or after school since i have nothing else to do around here =P

please help

K, I had the same problem happen on my Win2k machine. After editing the ini file (and being able to save the changes) I found out these weird little quirks...

First unzip right straight into the Soldat directory, don't unzip in another directory or other drive first. On my computer it seemed to do something with the ini and I wasn't even able to edit it. Strange.

Second, when you get the "bad file or number" problem, open the ini and ONLY CHANGE THE DRIVE LETTER of the directory NOT the whole line. If you type in "c:\soldat" you may still get the same error. If I can remember it should say "*drive-letter*:\soldat-beta" or something like that.

Change the letter then save and that should be that.

Good luck. I edit at school too during breaks.

--Snow

[Anna]

I've updated PW. If you load a map and it's invisible, select all the polys and change the opacity in the properties window to 100%. Maps that are invisible in PolyWorks will also appear invisible in the next version of Soldat, so they should be edited and recompiled.

[GluLm]

Thanks a lot for the updates Anna!

Needless to say it's a real pity that all these maps will have to get recompiled. I can barely imagine all the time we'll spend recompiling more than 200 maps... >:(
Do any of you know why this bug occurs anyway? At least it's good news that invisible polygons may finally work fine in the game...

By the way, did you also get the weird errors when opening maps like Bigfalls? "Error loading map Key is not unique in collection error loading scenery elements"... and then lots of "Error rendering in Direct3D D3DERR_INVALIDCALL" every second.
Oh well, this is probably not the right place to beta test it, just out of curiosity though...

[Mistercharles]

OH MY GOD

I can't wait for Soldat 1.3.2! ALPHA POLYGONS!

Edit: Light range is nice too.

[Anna]

@GluLm: Earlier versions of PW didn't set the vertex alpha so it was always 0 (an oversight on my part). I fixed the error with BigFalls, which was caused when there were duplicates of the first scenery in the scenery list, it'll be fixed in the next version.

edit: I can probably make a tool that would go through all the maps in a maps folder and set the vertex alphas to be opaque.

[mar77a]

If it's in C#, does that mean you need the 1.1 .NET Framework which can't be installed in win98se?

[fishfood]

Direct3D D3DERR_INVALIDCALL

My colors are set to 32 bit, and it still does this.  It did it for a while, then it worked fine, and now it's screwed up again.  It stopped working after I restarted.  It sounds like I'm having the same issue GluLm is having... maybe?  Is there an error with my map?  I can open other maps just fine, just not mine.  If I uploaded it or sent it over email maybe could somebody convert it so I can continue editing?

Thanks!