Just one concern.

[durnurd]

Still at work right now.  Gonna leave in ~15 minutes, and then we shall see.  Having gotten the rain partially working, I think it will be a simple process to finish everything up.

[durnurd]

The weather effects are partially updated.  The attached file has the rain and fire rain effects implemented.  Due to the way textures are implemented in SGDK2.1, I had to move the images out of the binary data and into graphic sheets.  This mean that I can't generate or alter textures on the fly, which means I can't implement the snow effect using the dynamic snowflakes I had before.  The fade to black effect could probably be implemented easily enough, but I didn't bother.  Yet, anyway.

[TheLaw]

Hey, while your at it durnurd, could you allow the screen to not darken so much while it's raining. I didn't see a way to control the darkness (haven't looked at the new one yet...). Also, I wouldn't kibosh the snow effect - it's too good. If you had a sprite sheet with the various flakes on it, could you pull it off? I'd be happy to put one together for you based of the original web site's flakes, if it would help save the snow effect. I'd collect about 20 or 30 good looking flakes and you could choose at random. However, not being able to generate or alter textures on the fly is gonna cramp my style a bit. I'd rather see such functionality put back into the code.

Here's a stab in the dark, but if you get your fade back up, perhaps you could add lightning to the rain effect by zapping the background layer to white and back every once and a while at random. I suppose it could be a routine called Flash(), that users could add as part of a layers plan. Just putting it out there...

[durnurd]

When I say that I can't generate textures on the fly, that's not entirely accurate.  It's possible, but it would mean changing built-in code is the Display class, which would not make this plug-in a separate, single object, which could be imported no matter what you've already changed with the built-in code.  A suggestion to BlueMonk:  Add a TextureRef subclass that can generate textures directly from bitmaps instead of from names of built-in images.

It's certainly possible to get snowflakes in a graphic sheet and just choose from those.  Mostly, the reason I implemented the snow at all in the first place was to show off how cool things can get when you really get into it, generating content from the internet on the fly.  Which reminds me that I still have the project to get new content (i.e. maps) from the internet somewhere around here.

[bluemonkmn]

Well, bluemonkmn, I'm a ways off from writting a GUI, but I'm pretty sure I want to. To me - to do it right, I'd like to look into including Crazy Eddies GUI with your source code. Is there an area of your code that might accomodate such a beast? There's a c# version that uses opengl, so that's a start.

The Display class implemented in Display.cs is available both in the generated project and the SGDK2 IDE, and can be customized for individual projects.  That's where all of SGDK2's access to OpenGL takes place (via OpenTK, the .NET OpenGL wrapper SGDK2 uses).

[durnurd]

Attached is the version with all four weather types implemented in OpenGL.  The snow I changed to use simple white dots for the snowflakes, which then takes up much less size.  The rain effect also now has lightning, which by default is flashed randomly, but can be turned off.  It also has a function called FlashLightning to make a manual lightning flash.

[bluemonkmn]

Should I somehow make a category/property for OpenGL-based projects on the SGDK2 projects site, so you can post it there, but keep the old one too?  I haven't played with Joomla, much, so I'm not sure what options are available.

[SmartBoy16]

Should I somehow make a category/property for OpenGL-based projects on the SGDK2 projects site, so you can post it there, but keep the old one too?  I haven't played with Joomla, much, so I'm not sure what options are available.

create a section dedicated for 2.1?

[durnurd]

Perhaps a folder in the source code directory for each version.  That's really the only place that would warrant different templates for different SGDK2 versions.

[bluemonkmn]

Great, now if I could only remember my password.  Every time I go to that site I forget it because I only visit it like once every 3 months.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "source code directory".  There's a "Code" folder under Templates, but that's not where the current weather template even resides.  And there would probably also need to be separate folders under projects and samples, right?

[durnurd]

By "source code directory" I do mean "code", yes.  I don't remember quite why it's not in the code folder.  I think it might be because it fits into both the code and graphics categories.

I don't know about the samples and projects directories.  Those things have the full source code already in it, so either version would work, right?  Or something?

[bluemonkmn]

I don't think SGDK 2.1 can compile and run SGDK 2.0 DirectX projects.  I'm pretty sure I broke something there by removing all the hard-coded DirectX references from SGDK 2.1.  So I probably need a whole separate tree, or an attribute of each file that can indicate what version it's for.