Well the program I'm using, UnFREEz, only makes it a .gif and when I tried putting the images in it, and error came up not letting me convert it. I guess I'll just wait till the newer realese.

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Newer release is not going to read a badly formatted gif. I know gimp, which is free, can convert your files to the right format. Open it in gimp, and then save it again, making sure to choose to save as an animation, and save in 8 bit color (gimp will open the malformed gif, but won't let you save it that way)

One of your animations doesn't have the wrong color format. How did you make that one? If you make the second one in the same way, I would think it would work just fine.

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Yeah, that's what I don't get. The first animation works and the rest doesn't even though I did exactly the same thing. Anyway, I guess I'll download gimp.

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What did you use to draw the frames in the first place? I think that is probably the culprit rather than your animation maker.

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Well, I made the sprites in paint, saved as a .png, then copied them to paint.net and removed the backgrounds and saved those as .gifs.

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Wait,wait,wait...
I thought you can just use sheet files...Am I wrong...?
Please,someone,explain how to make your character in PyWright
Pleeeeeeeeeeeaseeeeeeeeeeeeee

WARNING: LONG

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You can use sheet files, provided the frames are organized properly on the sheet. Particularly, one sheet needs to contain only one animation (or two if you are putting talk and blink in the same file), and the WIDTH of each frame needs to be consistent. If you have an animation where the character starts with their arms pulled in, and then they get excited and stretch them out, you will need to make all the frames be as wide as the stretched out frame. There should be no pixels at all separating the frames.

Here is an example.

This is how most spritesheets I have seen on CR are formatted.

As a human it is easy to see where each frame should be placed on screen. The computer on the other hand, has no way of knowing.

Here is how the spritesheet has to be formatted instead:

Note the blue line. There shouldn't actually be a line on the borders in your sheet, but this is to show that all the frames will be cut out of the sheet in this way.

The BEST way to handle this situation, is to make your sprite positioned according to a phoenix wright screen. So each frame should be 256 x 192. If you do that, you will be least likely to run into problems.

Sprite sheets must be jpg or png. If jpg, the color [255,0,255] is background. If png, it should have an alpha channel and use alpha for background. ([255,0,255] bg color will also work in a png, if and only if it does NOT have an alpha channel, but it's best to just use the alpha in png's anyway)

Also for a sprite sheet you will need to make a text file, like so:
name of animation: surprise(talk).jpg
text file: surprise(talk).txt
contents of text file (if describing the example sprite shown above)

There are 2 horizontal columns of frames, 1 vertical row of frames, and 2 frames in total. You have to provide the length, because you may have a situation with 2 rows, but you only use the first frame in the second row.

Finally, if you didn't make your frames 256x192, you may need to provide offset values to position your sprite where it needs to be on screen. For defense or prosecutor sprites, if they aren't placed within their frame to fit behind the bench, you will need to use offsetx and offset y commands to move them over onto the bench. Non defense/prosecutor portraits will be centered correctly if their framesize is not 256x192, but... Save yourself the hassle.

MAKE ALL FRAMES SIZED 256x192

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Anyway, that's sheets. Complicated. Much easier is to make a gif animation, and just use that. You will need a emotion(talk).gif and emotion(blink).gif for most emotions, unless it is one of those special animations that aren't supposed to loop (just use emotion.gif for those). Recently there was a bug with gifs, but it has been solved. As long as your gif is properly formatted, it just works.

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Next version of PyWright (part of the code refactoring) will be a little more flexible in what sheets can be used, however this is a tradeoff. With the current method, you do have to do a bit more work to position frames and manage the art side of things. To make the artwork more flexible, you will have to do the same work, it's just you will have to do it from code rather than an image program. This is more the method that pwlib goes for (not mentioned above, but pwlib sprites can also be used). PyWright b11 will support both styles. Also, at some point there will be an editor to allow you to see in realtime if the portrait is working or not, and adjust things like the frame offsets or what size to grab for a frame off of a sprite sheet. I've begun work on it, but haven't gotten very far yet.

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I downloaded Gimp and I don't see the 8 bit 256 colors thing...

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Method1:
Open your old animation in gimp.
Save file again.
It will ask you two questions, whether to save as an animation (which you want) and how to convert the colors (choose to convert to indexed).

Method2:
Or, you can load it in gimp, go to the image menu, select mode, and then choose indexed. The settings there determine how to map the range of 65,000+ colors to just 256. The default settings tend to work fine. Then save the image again, and choose to save as an animation.

Method2 is more work, but if you actually did use more than 256 colors in making the image, like if you copied in a jpg you downloaded from the web or a photo etc, then this will help you make sure the result will come out OK. (In your case, I'm not sure why paint.net, or the other program screwed things up, but I'm certain you are under the color limit and method1 should be fine.)

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Hooray! It works! Thanks a lot!
Uhh... 1 more question.

For the characters you get in the downloader, how do you know what their emotions are? Is there a note or something I missed?

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No note, you'll have to look at the files that are available in pywright/art/port. Glad you got your character to work. He looks great! If you need any more help with your other sprites or case programming let me know.

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Ahh, I see...

And thanks!

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I hope you didn't miss my comment... I want dualscreen to work!

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Sorry GolemdX. I got caught up in answering other questions to respond to yours :( It's the evidence screen with the bug, not dualscreen. Apparently it can be added more than once. When added more than once, the back button does not clear both screens properly, and so it gets stuck. This happens in both screen modes. I'll definitely clean that up when I get a chance.

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Also noticed that with the invalid character 'blocker' doesn't allow spaces for game creation.

EDIT: Actually, it detects anything as an invalid character.

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Solution: create new folder yourself :)

I'll seriously look at the editor after I finish the core simplification. So far I would say I'm about 10% done with that. The first change is that when loading an image, it will actually load the metafile (the .txt file that goes with images) first, allowing the metafile to further alter the load process. Next is to tidy up the sprite and object classes.

I do have some changes in mind for the editor, namely to create a better file browsing widget and use that for all of the various situations that need files; and then a command selector to drag and drop commands into the script (complete with whatever wizard is appropriate for the command). I am most unsure about how to handle macros in the editor, but I probably won't get that far until sometime next year. The goal of course is for more programmer types to be able to customize everything, and non-programmer types to be able to easily use any custom things other people make while still being able to make a full case by just clicking stuff together. Some of the problems here are not easy, which is why the editor has been taking so long together; besides the fact that the engine has continually needed major revision.

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Back already? Yes, I have a question.


Why doesn't this work?

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You set Larry to hide... and you didn't add him at all the second time.

Alright, I fixed that, but I have another question...

Whenever I set it to hide, then X out of the editor, the hide disappears and everyone is visable and I have to redo it all. Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

Also, the {nametag=Namehere} doesn't work for me, it just comes up blank.

...1 more question. I was having a conversation with Larry and Phoenix and I wanted to know do I constaly put in "char phoenix hide" for phoenix to be able to talk? Also, does that mean the same for Larry because it looks kinda weird with the animation making him go back to his normal pose before the emotion I picked...

...Sorry to be a bother again..

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Right, I forgot - put a when you first make a character (different one per person) and then to set which character is talking.

I know creating a folder works. There just are many many n00bs around here...

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This should work for ya yoshirider.


You were probably actually typing in "{nametag=blah}", the {} in doc.txt signifies that a command is not required. As shown above, you want just "nametag=blah" without the {} (and without those quotes too).

I am planning on making this kind of situation even simpler in a future version. Here is how it will look in future:



This will be an optional new way to do things, the old way will still work. Enter and exit will most likely be macros, even "character:" will probably be a macro, but with the current parser is there is no way to support placing it where I placed it above.

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Last edited by saluk on Wed Dec 10, 2008 2:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

Also making the editor's preview box load the previous background when changing characters would be nice.

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GolemdX: yeah, it would be nice. Unfortunately, not so easy. But I have been thinking about how to do it for a while.

The editor deleting the hides can't be fixed until the new object backend is finished. "hide" is a part of the command and not saved to the object itself, so when it is imported as an object in the editor it doesn't remember that it was hidden. Anyway, beta 11 is going to change a lot of things...

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Can't you just have it save the background in a variable and then call it up later?

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In the simplest case yes, but not in all cases (labels, jumps, and macros cause problems). I suppose I could just add the simple version and who cares about more advanced stuff for now.

My main problem with the editor is to support all of pywright features while still adding in the user friendly stuff. The object display is one example of the discrepancy, but it isn't the first problem I have run into. I could change the editor to be more focused on new users, where it pretty much only supports a limited syntax, but I think that some of the tools would still be useful for advanced users.

Thanks for your input!

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Yay! It worked! Thanks again.

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If you include the simple syntax, you should still keep the old one.

Is there a command for screen shaking?

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How the simple syntax would work basically, is "whatever:" will be rewritten as "char whatever", and then I will have to allow a command to be on the same line as a textbox. So yeah, I'm not doing away with the old code at all. The other issue with the characters reverting to their default emotions is actually a bug, and wouldn't be fixed by the new syntax anyway. But it's the kind of bug that in all likelihood will just "go away" with the major updating I am doing, so I don't want to take the time to fix it in it's current state.

Shake screen with "{s}" in text. Outside of text, I don't think screen can be shaken. I'm not sure if I ever hooked it in. This is the kind of issue that I am doing the core refactor to get away from, trying to take all of the special case functions and make everything more general and reusable.

New core work is going well. I have sprites loading in the new system, with much more ways to define how a sprite is loaded. The remaining work is a bit tougher than that though. I have to alter every current game system and interface to fit the new methods. Still, I think I can finish that in about a week, which would put me on schedule to release beta 11 by Christmas (well, before I leave for vacation a few days before Christmas actually). I may have to hold off on some of the bigger changes I was planning in order to get it out the door, we'll see how things go.

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GolemdX, I just released beta 10.75 where I patched in a fix for the better sceneview widget (still playing with different things to call it, lol). It remembers any objects added with previous commands up to a label, while not allowing you to actually edit those objects in that view. A further expansion would be some way to indicate which objects you can actually edit (maybe do the diagonal lines over the inaccessible things), and a way to cycle which object you are moving without having to click (if something is behind). Oh, and of course a gui way to add objects in.

The nametags are also smart in a similar way to the sceneview, in that they can see what the name actually should be. It still might not work in some cases, I haven't tested it extensively.

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@saluk : do you mind if you get a question from me? i've been making a case...

1a) does PYWright always requires the user to be connected to the internet? because i can't run it offline
1b) is there a way to run PYWright on offline state? (i mean internet offline, not power offline, of course) like, maybe a way to turn off the updater?
2) my editor keeps crashing if i use fade for any picture, or right-clicking to test the animation with fade on it. here's the error log :


for your info, i use Windows XP SP3.

Thanks for posting the log file ryuichi35, and cluing me in on the internet update problem.

I wasn't able to get things to crash with fade, except in the case you posted with the right click. Is that the only crash or was there another situation that made it crash? It doesn't quite display right, because the scene is not rendered in exactly the same way as a game scene is rendered, so fades aren't going to display properly in the editor. I'm not sure if this is what you meant by the other problem. If you only meant the crash on right click, that is fixed.

You'll of course have to be connected to the internet to get the fix :) The game should bypass the update if no internet connection is found now though. Sorry for the trouble.


Progress on beta 11: Still working on sprites and haven't gotten to the object system yet. In the new design, everything is going to be an object or collection of objects, as opposed to the evidence menu being one type of thing, with code on how to draw the evidence buttons; and then the examine menu being another kind of thing; and characters being a very complicated sort of thing; etc. Anyway, taking my time to do the sprites (which is the loading and drawing part of objects) and trying to make things a bit simpler. Also, I am working on new documentation as I develop. It will be in html format, and looks really nice so far. Of course, trying to do more means it will take me a while to finish everything :(

Anyway, the project now has a bug reporting system. You can create an account and post bugs or feature requests there. You can also check up on all of the stuff I am working on for the next release, I will tend to create a bug there first as I work on something.
Here is the address: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/bugs/

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The automated character download was still freezing preventing games from being played without internet, latest update disables automatic character downloading. It may still freeze when you run pywright if you have no internet connection, but if you leave it it will eventually time out and continue on. Better solution for the internet features to come.

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Hey,I have a little problem...When you check the Court Records,and try to go out(by pressing button back)you can't!
I even tried pressing the TAB button,but none result....
Any ideas?

There is a bug where multiple evidence screens can be added, and you will be unable to back out of all but the most recently added evidence screen. Don't press tab twice :)

If you are unable to back out of evidence in ANY situation, then something else is going on.

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I can now,thanks

I have a problem that i haven't seen any bug reports on, and havent heard anyone talk about in here...

Every time i try to launch it (after updating to 10.77), it tells me to look in the PyWright log file. Fair enough.

After taking a look, it gives me this exact message:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "PyWright.py", line 4, in <module>
File "core\libengine.py", line 1462, in run
if spl[0]=="music_volume": assets.music_volume = float(spl[1])
File "core\core.py", line 210, in smus
pygame.mixer.music.set_volume(v/100.0)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'music'

At first i thought it was a Vista problem, but running it with administrator didn't fix anything. Then i thought that it could be because the music folder was empty, but i filled it with the proper .ogg files. I even tried redownloading it, but only to get the same problem. I'm at the end of my rope here... any help?

At first I was inclined to think one of the files got corrupted, but you said you redownloaded it already. The only way I can repeat the error is if I delete one of the files from inside library.zip.

In any case, if you place this file in your pywright/core folder you should be able to play again, but you probably will still be stuck without sound or music:

http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/fixes/musicvolume/core.py

Let me know if that still doesn't help or if you continue to have other problems.

I'll see if I can work out what really went wrong though. Did you have working music before you updated?

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Well, actually, the farthest i ever really got was the starting splash screen. After that, it auto-downloaded the update and then i got the error. HOWEVER, the new core file you gave me fixed it. Thanks for the save!

Could you give me some system details so I can try to figure out why sound is broken on your system?

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