Court graphics

[DreamTim]

Brien, how soon will you release EAGE which will work properly with courts? i' working on euroleague patch, and all stuff is ready except courts. When will you fix it?

[Brien]

Brien, how soon will you release EAGE which will work properly with courts? i' working on euroleague patch, and all stuff is ready except courts. When will you fix it?

I understand what the problem is, but EAGE is having a difficult time with it. LZ compression results in a variable length file. That is, no two 1 k files will be compressed to the same size. In the import wizard, EAGE just overwrites the old data. However, since we don't know how large the resulting compression will be, EAGE may corrupt the file.

DXT compression, for example, results in the same size compression everytime. So, the import wizard just does a copy/replace of the old data with the newly generated data. EAGE has handled LZ compression in the past by creating a new file and re-inserting it back into the viv file. This is problematic with these new files that have one subgraphic DXT compressed, while another subgraphic is LZ compressed, and these all appear within a viv file, and that viv file is inside another viv file. So, this is complicated.

My best response to this problem is to write a new app, rather than fixing EAGE. this means that EAGE (as it is now) may be replaced soon (RIP)

[DreamTim]

Yeah EAGE feels badly

[nba2kstuff]

i am not a 12 year old kid, Brien. i have had to make the long journey to the precipice of death. but i was told to return from the abyss for many reasons. as part of the bargain, i was entrusted with many burdens including the pain of 2nd site into the soul and nature of the universe and its creations.


believe me when i say, i know what it takes to engineer these types of technlogical evolutions. you and i, know the time it takes. you and i know the enormous study that is required. and we especially know the resources, costs, and expenses for engineering these types of technolgical deployments.

your users here must learn to understand and respect the value of professional developers time, like yours. it is a rare privilegde to have industy software or hardware expert professionals even participating in public boards ( like you - on boards like yours ) . of course, the younger children may not have had enough education yet to understand these sophistocated concepts, but it IS still surprising, that people of all ages
and levels, need to be reminded of these lessons once in a while.


you should know, i have only been here to help you Brien. And also, to hounor my friend Lutz and his legacy. not only is the development of a next generation GUI FSH/VIV editor an ardous task, but technical support, education, and training is also expensive and time consuming.


however, if there is enough pateince, respect, and courtesy, surely there could be a colloborative effort that might by synergized to accomplish this goal of a next generation FSH/VIV GUI editor. but we know, it is an expensive endeavour that consumes personal as well as professional time.


but i still may be able to make some time to offer assistance to help in this grand undertaking if you wish. it would not be done for myself, as there are ample tools currently available between EAGE 1.03 and NBA2KSTUFFs enhancements 2 NFSHTOOL for users to solve most problems already for the NBA series.

perhaps, we can pursue this collaboration over time, if there is time, and interest, and patience from users.

in anycase,
peace my friend, Brien!

[Brien]

Thanks for the kind words.

Truely, many people have no idea how time consuming this is. On rare occasion, I've gotten pretty pissed when someone wanted something NOW or was hateful about a bug.

Still, I think, at the price it's not too bad

EAGE was developed very slowly over the last seven years. In the early days, not much was really understood about the EA file format. In fact, much of what I thought was true regarding the format was not. So, over time, through active discovery I have updated EAGE, but it appears that the EAGraph engine is meeting its limits!

As such, I have decided to recode the whole engine anew. This new visual tool will be very different because almost everthing is undertood about the file format now. The main differences will be:

1. This will ONLY be a fsh editor. It will not understand viv formats. Some other tool will be necessary to extract files from what are becoming nested vivs.
2. The program will consist of a GUI and dlls that can be used by other programmers. Actually, there are few other programmers, but maybe there would be more if they could read and write files by using supplied libraries.

What is not decided at this point is what format these libraries should take. Arbitrarily, I have decided that only 32-bit bitmaps should be passed to the libraries. This works great because 32 - bit bitmaps have high color depth, and include an alpha channel. The negative is that few programs can read or create 32-bit bitmaps. There are other reasons for using 32 bits as well.

Anyway, I think we could collaborate by creating dlls that would be useful in a many different tasks. That way, code is not wasted on one project or another but can be shared between a number of programers. I program in pascal, you in C, but the dlls work on both platforms. So, the only challenge is to figure the one "right way" to do it. It only needs to be programmed once. For example, I envision a dll for parsing, and updating viv files. Sorta like converting EAZip to a dll that can be used by GUI or distributed with a small console app for patchers.

Also, in the future, only updated dlls need to be released. Not the whole front end which may work fine.

[LegoSHAQ]

Sounds good to me Brien ... EAZIP is a great tool to handle the VIV importing and exporting... and hopefully it won't even be needed with NBA Live 2004 if EA SPorts continue down the path of customisation they have started with NBA Live 2003... I look foward to seeing your new FSH editor... and appreciate the seven years you put into EAGE... It made my NBA Live gaming experience so much better... THANKS!!

[nba2kstuff]

yes very good. i am aware of evolving software through discoveryl! it beccomes a patchwork of exceptions due to the proprietary idiosynchracies! lol!

i also noticed EAGE was coded in pascal (Delphi) and wondered about the integration delimas.

however, i am still concerned over these changing file formats - year to year, as we already have seen this causes (impatince) and many times the most time consuming technical problems of decoding.

however i agree the dll approach seems to be the best idea for timing and variablity (different codecs/formats) as well.

also the segregation of the FSH manipulation seems to be the best way to organize it. there are already too many complexities. best to simplify and offload if possible. i many times use this approach to meet time constraints.

as for that 32 bit bmp issue. i have to think about that one. i agree to the issue of quality (and data structure) there, but some issues of visual/perceptable range and especially compatablity make me a little hestitant.

in anycase
let us try to persue this as we can and time permits!
and very good to see you again Brien!
peace!