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Phoenix Wright: Attorney Who Is Familiar With Various LawsTopic%20Title
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Well, one of the primary reasons I joined this forum was because I started tinkering around with PWLib, and what point would it have if I were to do such admirable work without showing it off to the general public?

After weeks and weeks of slaving over a flaming hot, remorseless keyboard, I feel that my little project has reached the stage of completion that one would normally associate with a completely frozen hamburger (apologies to any vegetarians I offended).

But enough with the stupid food analogies. Download the public beta v0.0.1.0005. 3,743,258 bytes.

A couple of notes before you copy that floppy: first, I packed the game (it's more like an interactive monologue - where you interact by clicking to advance the text) into a standalone executable. I have had several people try it (none of whom have PWLib installed), and for all of them it works fine (you do need d3d_34.dll if you don't have it because AIGE requires it, but that is simple to find with a google search). This was done with a program called Molebox Pro, which, unfortunately, is not free. While I understand that KSA_Tech has voiced dislike for the idea of PWLib fancases being distributed as *.exe's, I think it is one of the more convenient ways for the cases to be distributed (compared to Damion Shard's ~80mb download for people who don't have PWLib installed). While I understand that some-many will be hesitant to run a foreign program on their computer (what with potential viruses and all), if you have pwlib installed, you can simply redirect it to the source I included, if you even care. That, and I promise this is not a virus.

Secondly, it devolves into a loop, eventually. I am completely aware of this, and it is supposed to do that.

I did this mostly to play around with a bunch of PWLib's functions, as well as to see how well PWLib in a Nutshell covered and explained them. I discovered a couple of things that don't line up with the documentation, or don't work properly, so even though many people have probably already pointed out these errors (and a lot of them are probably being addressed in PWLib 1.2), I'm just going to stick them in spoiler tags and if you're interested you can read them.

Spoiler: tl;dr
First of all, PWLib in a Nutshell lists placefadescreenex()'s colors as being in the order color_R, color_G, color_B, color_A. I couldn't get that function to work at all, but I assumed setmsgboxtextcolor() would be the same, although it was actually in the order color_A, color_R, color_G, color_B.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a function that allows a line of text to have words of different colors in it. I don't know if this has been implemented in 1.2, but if it hasn't, and it is easy to do, then I'd request it to be done. That'd be cool.

Next, to actually do a fadescreen, the function placefade() has to be called, (since fadescreen() doesn't work) and rather inversely to my logic, at least, a fade style of "I" fades in to black, and "O" out of black. I'm used to things being the other way around ("O" fading out to black, and vice versa), but maybe I'm just insane or something.

Speaking of logic, does this scripting engine support operators besides if()? I think that some kind of while() loop implementation (or even for() loop would add some very interesting functionality to the game). I can think of several instances where a while loop might be much more convenient than using an if() operator.

I was also wondering if it would be simple to implement constant incrementation of a variable (something along the lines of "var++"), which, although I can't think of a something that would make it necessary (or even useful, necessarily) would add extra functionality.

Of course, these are probably available in AIGEHLS, or one of the more advanced scripting languages, and the proper use of functions actually negates the need for any of them (considering that each function is in itself a loop)

One last thing, I created an edited Phoenix sprite for this that happens to be about 10 pixels taller than Phoenix. I created its texture and animations (lol wut) in the pwlib\data\pw_phoenixwright.hlsl file, however when it is shown in court, it gets vertically compacted to the same height as Phoenix's regular sprites. (I'm pretty sure that I declared its size properly, so I'm wondering if this is caused by some other function that I didn't notice (I'll post the source for that later, if anyone cares).

To finish this up: I might be a rambling moron, and most of these problems have probably been fixed without my knowledge, but at least I'm good at rambling even if I'm a moron.
Re: Phoenix Wright: Attorney Who Is Familiar With Various LawsTopic%20Title
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LuAA Developer

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80 mb?!

Check your numbers please, I doubt KSA_Tech would allow PWlib to require 80 mb of space as a simple casemaker. I have a copy of PWlib at the moment with 55 mb within it, still breaking loose in terms of space requirement though.

I'm currently using 2 mb with all in-game images included in a stand-alone ROM...

Image
priceless.
Re: Phoenix Wright: Attorney Who Is Familiar With Various LawsTopic%20Title
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AIGE/PWLib Casemaker Developer

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Check PWLib topic for current PWLib 1.2's folder size.

Oh, and PWLib is very far from a simple casemaker.
PWLib 1.2 Under Development

PWLib Casemaker (Version 1.1) at http://forums.court-records.net/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8788
Re: Phoenix Wright: Attorney Who Is Familiar With Various LawsTopic%20Title
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I wasn't talking about PWLib itself, I was more referring to the Damion Shard Case 1 Demo, (the version that comes with the full PWLib) which is 77,356,030 bytes (~77 megabytes) in size (of course, it contains a fair larger number of graphics than PWLib 1.1 with Graphics pack 2.0 contain, but I think that's mostly due to it having more of the character sprites included. This means that a copy of PWLib that has complete graphics and sounds would actually (probably) be a larger file than that, seeing as how the script file sizes are more or less negligible).

However, I'm not saying that the analogy holds up, as my failed attempt at making my own game (not really a "game" per se, as stated) does not include any large portion of edited or added graphics, and thus requires less files to be included. In fact, I'm not really sure what point I was trying to make by bringing up file size in the first place, because 80MB is 80MB, regardless of whether it's a zip or an exe.

I guess the main reason I like this is because I find it more aesthetically pleasing, as it reduces the amount of directories with files and more directories in them (although, I think I read something about KSA_Tech eventually wanting to make AIGE use some kind of dat file setup rather than having all the files spread out). I guess that's not much of a basis for promoting this, but it's the way I'm going to do it for now until I find a method I like better.

As far as ROMs are concerned (I don't know a ton on the subject) but they tend to use various types of archiving for files, which allows them to store data in a format that can be read by the DS, but which makes the files more or less useless. For compatibility's sake, converting the images to a universal format (such as PNG) is simply useful and convenient (and to be honest, nowadays, 80MB is like a drop in the ocean). I think the smallest rom I have seen was like 7mb rar'd, so 2mb is a rather impressive sized. Unless you are talking about something completely different, in which case I am an idiot anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: Phoenix Wright: Attorney Who Is Familiar With Various LawsTopic%20Title
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AIGE/PWLib Casemaker Developer

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Considering AIGE runs on 32bit color, the files are larger then using their low 256 color version (that uses color tables, thus making them even smaller, similar to what gif does).

Also exe-ing the game efficiently kills the autoupdating.

There are plans for a library format (pre-compiled scripts, .alib, also serving as a protection) and data holders in the future.
PWLib 1.2 Under Development

PWLib Casemaker (Version 1.1) at http://forums.court-records.net/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8788
Re: Phoenix Wright: Attorney Who Is Familiar With Various LawsTopic%20Title
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What is my liiiife?!?

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It's pretty obvious that Damian Shard's code isn't optimised, but that's to do with the creator of the case, not the system. (Especially as KSA's working hard to make PWlib cases smaller as it is.) Also, yes. Auto-Update will be a very important feature in the future, so turning the files into executables aren't the best option.

(Also, people need to find a better .rar makers, some do wonders for compression)
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