Sil graphics

[Bill Peterson]

I came back to the forums to see if anything has changed and find that Sil has been forked and is undergoing some development, so I'm interested again. I note that it says that graphics don't work, but the menu buttons function and I see graphics on the screen. Apparently the problem is that the items defined in the .txt files don't have correct entries in the .prf files.

I've worked with these files on other 'bands and really don't like playing with ascii so I've started to clean up graf-dvg.prf so I can play with the David Gervais tiles (my favorite). Luckily the tutorial has a lot of constant placed items and creatures, so I can confirm the images.

Has anyone compiled Sil with the Microsoft compiler? Is there a post about it here, or someone's web page? I want to put it in Visual Studio because I want a code analyzer rather than desiring to change any code.

[Quirk]

Sorry for being slow to get round to replying to this. I haven't been around much lately; a lot going on including an unexpected stay in hospital. Got a release more or less ready to go when I have time to make a couple more tweaks and write up the changelog.

But: no, I haven't tried compiling with MSVC - and Makefile.win uses the seriously antiquated Borland. I have not really touched the Makefiles so far except to clean up the mingw / Cygwin one; it shouldn't be too nightmarish to make a new MSVC project but there might be a certain amount of messing round needed to get the resources working. Unfortunately I don't have MSVC on my current dev machine so probably won't be doing it myself any time soon, but I would accept any pull requests along these lines.

[Bill Peterson]

Sorry for being slow to get round to replying to this. I haven't been around much lately; a lot going on including an unexpected stay in hospital. Got a release more or less ready to go when I have time to make a couple more tweaks and write up the changelog.

But: no, I haven't tried compiling with MSVC - and Makefile.win uses the seriously antiquated Borland. I have not really touched the Makefiles so far except to clean up the mingw / Cygwin one; it shouldn't be too nightmarish to make a new MSVC project but there might be a certain amount of messing round needed to get the resources working. Unfortunately I don't have MSVC on my current dev machine so probably won't be doing it myself any time soon, but I would accept any pull requests along these lines.

No problem, I can see that this forum is lightly followed, figured you'd be back eventually. I gave up on the idea of using MSVC when I found that Eclipse is quite adequate for looking at code. Are you saying that mingw and Cygwin use the same makefile? I installed mingw and would rather not have all the Cygwin system if I can avoid it.

I'm about finished fixing graf-dvg.prf. Midway through I found that the 32x32.bmp file really didn't have enough birds and bats for Sil so I switched to a file from NPP-0.5.4. The file that's been attached to Sil had replaced a lot of monsters with architecture and outdoor tiles. And, regardless of the note, 32x32.bmp is the file that the code uses, not 32x32.png. All I really need to do is revisit all the monsters and items to see if anything got messed up with the new bmp file.

The one thing I can't fix are all the potions, rings, etc. that use flavors. Whoever forked Sil from NPP (Half?) seems to have broken the connection with the graphics files. Vanilla and NPP show the correct images from flvr-dvg.prf, Sil does not. Maybe when I get the compiler set up properly I'll try to understand how all this works.

[Pete Mack]

I posted the usual MINGW/CYGWIN makefile to some time ago with no difficulties. MSVC is potentially more difficult if there are significant C99 uses, as MS sort of stopped supporting C.

[Bill Peterson]

It's all good. A little bit of a learning curve with Eclipse, but I can compile it now.

And I believe I've found the situation (no problem) with the flavors. I had not noticed flavor.txt in the edit folder. I should be able to fix fix things while I'm not watching football.

[saeniel]

Hello! My name is Eugene.
Quirk directed me to this thread from here:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8852

My question is what about sound content in Sil?
I'm music producer and sound designer, maybe it will be great to add some ambient background to emphasize the atmosphere of Angband fortress. Or make some sounds for monsters, when using (r)ecall.
Please, let me know what you think.

[Bill Peterson]

Hello! My name is Eugene.
Quirk directed me to this thread from here:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8852

My question is what about sound content in Sil?
I'm music producer and sound designer, maybe it will be great to add some ambient background to emphasize the atmosphere of Angband fortress. Or make some sounds for monsters, when using (r)ecall.
Please, let me know what you think.

Eugene, I'm not sure that I can be much help to you. Sil contains code inherited from Vanilla Angband and auxiliary files (in the lib/pref folder) to place graphical tiles on the screen. Unfortunately, the developer(s) who forked Sil from Angband did not appear to concern themselves with graphical tiles and broke much of the graphics system. In fact, when I first came to Sil I thought that it only supported ASCII graphics and was surprised when the graphics menu item actually did something. I had hope that I could just change the .prf files to point at the correct images, but the Sil developers had added objects and creatures that would have obliged me to change files in the lib/edit folder. I really wasn't prepared to do that until I could be sure that those files wouldn't change.

Enough about me though. Sil has a small number of sounds for things like hitting and being hit and such. All are contained in lib/xtra/sound. But you should look at Angband which has many sounds. I'm not sure how the sound generating events are defined in the code. But the sound generation really doesn't have any connection with the graphics, it's driven by game events.

[saeniel]

Thanks for information. It will not be as easy, as I thought.
I'm going to add some sound content in Sil-Q. If I succeed - I'll create here topic with details of realization.