[WIP] Zeus: Pre-alpha 1 release

[kiddten]

It would be nice if you had password protection for maps. so you can enter a password specific to each map and be able to edit, presuming it was protected with Zeus of course.

[Sparky]

Hey spark, Can you tell me if you(think you) can still convert the halo 2 maps to demo/full?

Yes, I think I can convert halo 2 vista maps to demo/full.

It would be nice if you had password protection for maps. so you can enter a password specific to each map and be able to edit, presuming it was protected with Zeus of course.

I thought briefly about this, but how would it work the best way? An encrypted password hash somewhere in the map file? It could work pretty well.

[kiddten]

I've no clue on the technical aspect on maps, just whatever actually works... works.

[Sparky]

If the program were to make changes to the map file, then the changes would need to be independent from the game data. And of course, the limitation would only be with Zeus, not any other modding program. So it wouldn't be adding anonymity to tag names nor mangling the map files so they are illegible to the game. I think the best idea would be to have an encrypted password placed somewhere outside the game data in the map file. And that's it. I'll probably stick it in the middle of the "random gibberish" header. (I put that in quotes because I'm not treating it as random gibberish.)

By the way, I wonder how Dirk is doing on reverse-engineering the shaders...

[Sparky]

I request your opinion on this matter: should Zeus be "expandable" like Eschaton is with plugins, or should the map file reading code be coded into the source files? This might be a moot question, since it could be considered amendable as open-source code.

[kiddten]

Plugins work well, as we have seen with eschaton. is there a negative aspect of plugins I'm missing though?

[Mgalekgolo]

I find that expanding takes time. its almost as stupid as recompiling with tool...................

[kiddten]

Not that expand you muppet.
Expand as in adding new plugins like eschaton already does.

[Mgalekgolo]

Not that expand you muppet.
Expand as in adding new plugins like eschaton already does.

oh lol. sureeeee.

[Sparky]

You were both correct, so no point in making fun of each other.

[Sparky]

Plugins work well, as we have seen with eschaton. is there a negative aspect of plugins I'm missing though?

I'll just leave it opensauce and it can be modified through the sourcecode.

OK, very significant question here as I'm about to pounce on the code: which OS and architecture should this support?

10.4+? Intel or PPC? How many people do we have here using 10.3 or 10.4 still? I'd prefer 10.6+ as long as it means Zeus can still be used by this community...

[Mgalekgolo]

I use snow leopard. I would prefer 1.6 support becuase of the newer code and more features (i thinks)

[kiddten]

You might get me back into modding if you release it for windows

[Sparky]

Ok, it looks like I'm making it for 10.6+ and intel, then converting to PPC 10.4+, then converting to Windows by using Cocotron, which is what Samuco posted about earlier.
This should make the whole project much easier, although I'm going to make memory management handled using Garbage Collection and manually anyway, to experiment with the two systems. I'll probably decide to not use Garbage Collection just for the coding experience... and make the release build with optional Garbage Collection so I don't need to do anything fancy to the code to make it run under 10.4 and PPC and then under Windows, because I don't think Cocotron allows Garbage Collection anyway.

Thanks for the guidance via poll and comments.

Now comes the map parsing code, first of the Halo 1 game platforms.

EDIT: I'm including Spotlight functionality so that you can search for maps and tags within maps using Spotlight based upon their metadata. For example, if you have a map with snow in it, you could search for "snow" in spotlight and your snowy map would be a result because of its tag named "snow". Dynamic searching will help pinpoint related metadata values also.

[Samuco_]

Ok, it looks like I'm making it for 10.6+ and intel, then converting to PPC 10.4+

If you want to have a tiger version, it's probably best to make it for tiger then convert to Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard is designed to run tiger things.

I'm going to make memory management handled using Garbage Collection and manually anyway

That isn't how garbage collection works. You enable it at the start of your project, and completely forget about the memory.
If garbage collection is enabled, you cannot [object release] or [object autorelease] etc or it will screw up.

release build with optional Garbage Collection

You turn on garbage collection at the start, not the end.

I'll just leave it opensauce and it can be modified through the sourcecode.

Don't make it GPL or LGPL. They are the worst licenses ever.

PPC

Lion no longer runs PPC Code.

Don't forget Lion ^^