I did a lot of OSDM demos recently and thought that I should share some tips and tricks about the tool, especially the scripting feature, which I use almost exclusively for controlling the flow of my own OSDM production. I would like to start with high-lighting some of the new cool feature that became available with the April or June, 2010 versions of the Oldskool Demomaker tool by Peace/Testaware.. You can find all my own production at the special OSDM section here on my site. There you can also find additional resources, tools and more related to the Oldskool Demomaker, like my OSDM Script Cheat Sheet, Tutorials and my VOBJ Vector Object manipulation tool and more. Table of Contents Dynamic Layer Ordering Vector Object Control Addition to (Sprite) Cloning Feature Macros Dynamic Layer Ordering I remember when I first checked out OSDM. The interface was not very intuitive, but what???s new when it comes to scene stuff (Elite has to suffer or something like that hehe) and I struggled with a couple specific issues. One of which was the rendering order of effects on the screen (= what is in front and what is in the back ground etc.) Only when Peace himself explained to me in detail how the ???Storyboard??? page in the ???Regie??? tab worked, did I finally realized how this is being accomplished. It didn???t even occur to me when I looked at the interface myself that you can do more on that page than just controlling
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Welcome to a new installment of my ASCII to Unicode/HTML converter tool. I renamed it to ???Suite???, because there are actually three individual tools part of the whole package. Main focus is still the conversion of ???High-ASCII??? or ???Block ASCII??? art for the display on your web site, but it offers a few more things than that also. Release Notes A little toolset that converts MS DOS ASCII files, such as NFO???s or FILE_ID.DIZ text files (Code Page 437, USA and other) to HTML encoded Unicode (Output is still an ASCII file) that can be used to display the ASCII art, specifically the ???High ASCII??? or?? block ASCII art on a web site. You can also convert the ASCII files to real Unicode Text files for the use in Windows Apps. There are 3 different programs. ???batchconvert2.exe??? is the ASCII to Unicode converter with a simple step by step user interface (see the image, file name: ???Batch-ASCII2WebOrUniCode-Steps20.jpg??? in the sub-folder ???screenshots??? for illustration. ???batchconvert2cli.exe??? provides the same features as ???batchconvert2.exe??? but as an command-line tool for easy batch processing from a .BAT script etc. ???ASCIIConverterExtendedGUI1.exe??? is a new version of my tool with a more user friendly single screen user interface. This version also provides some new features not available in the other two programs. You can convert Unicode text files or HTML encoded Unicode ASCII to MS-DOS ASCII text files. See some screen shots of the interface in the ???screenshots??? sub folder. I decided to only include the .VBS[…]
Well, if you have tried to check my site about a week ago, then you would have noticed that it was not there. Okay, it was still ???there???, but the there was somewhere off the public accessible Internet and thus for all intends and purposes ???gone???. This site and also the Blog were hosted on an old dedicated web server of mine which came into its years. It just suddenly decided that it is time for it to go. Admitted, it was not all that suddenly. The server had accumulated various minor ???diseases??? and flukes over the past seven years while it was running 24/7. It even crashed before, but until recently never ???fatally???. A few days down and stuff like a new HD brought it always back up and running again. Not so this time. May it rest in peace. Web Server Fatal and Permanent Crash ??? Site and Blog Move I also have to admit that I was kind of dragging along the well overdue move to a different server for way to long. Always came something else up and I simply did not do it. Well, now I had no more liberty to choose the when and how. That decision was done for me. Coincidently also Google discontinued their FTP feature for Google/Blogger blogs for webmasters who wanted to host the actual blog media and content files on their own web server rather than having it hosted at blogspot.com or running on a sub-domain like blog.website.com with
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Here is a little tutorial for OSDM. I will add it later to the OSDM Wiki as well. Oldskool Demomaker does not support animated GIFs or any other animation/video format, but it is capable of rendering something like an animation via the work-around, which is called ???Frame Animation Images???. This is basically a generic flat image in PNG, JPG or other format supported by OSDM, which contains all frames for the animation. The only thing you have to do is tell OSDM how many frames the image contains and it will automatically slice up the image into equal size pieces, which are then shown one after another, with the speed of changing from one frame to another, depending on the value for ???delay??? that also needs to be specified for a frame animation image. The Logo feature supports ???Vertical Frame Animations??? and the Sprites and Bounce Bobs features support ???Horizontal Frame Animations???. The difference between the two is how the frames are arranged within the image; Vertical means on top of each other and horizontal means that they are arranged next to each other. Example: Frame animation image dimensions: 200??200 pixels, Number of frames: 2 – Vertical Frame Animation Frame Size: 200??100 pixels or – Horizontal Frame Animation Frame Size: 100??200 pixels Creating Frame Animations Now, those frame animation images are hard to create by hand, because you have to be very precise. It is also virtually impossible to proper align the content within each frame to get a smooth
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I wrote a couple months ago a tutorial for the OSDM Wiki for the creation of my Oldskool Demomaker multi-part demo production ???New World Order???. Unfortunately does it appear to be the case that the tutorial was not indexed by search engines like Google yet, so I decided to republish it at my personal blog once more that people will be able to find it, if they are searching for content like this. Overview New World Order??? – Multipart Demo by Roy/SAC Created in January 2010 with the Oldskool Demomaker (OSDM) V2.01.140 by Peace/Testaware Watch the Video Capture of the Demo and download the Win32 executable here. OSDM Settings File Location: Data\Prefs\Roy – NewWorldOrder-fs.ini (zip download NWOPrefsIni.zip (6.84 KiB) Download All Resources, Images, Objects, Ini, Screen Shots, Tutorial in TXT format and Win32 Exe of the Demo in one ZIP archive here NWO TUt.zip NWO (4.9 MB) The Demo Parts First a break-down of the individual demo parts and which OSDM effects were used for each of those parts. 1. Roy/SAC is Back – Bounce Bobs Effect 2. Roy/SAC Proudly Presents – Sprites Effect – 3D Ball Effect 3. NWO Logo Animation – Sprites Effect 4. Vector Stars – 3D Vector Effect 5. Text and Copper Bars – Mask Effect – Star field Effect – Copper Bars Effect – Amiga Text Effect 6. 3D Balls Carpet – Plasma Effect – Star field Effect – 3D Ball Effect 7. Big Scroller – Plasma Effect – Star field Effect – Scroll Text
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