Hi there. I have an extension request. If one already exists, please point me to it. If one doesn't, then I'd like to request the creation of one, and if you wish, I can pay you.
Basically, this is the kind of object I am after: An object which can adjust the hue/saturation, brightness, contrast and gamma correction of both the entire screen and any active object at run time. So you could choose "set screen gamma correction to 100" or "-100" for positive or negative 100, or to set it to 0 to return to the original image. This would have to work for both individual active objects and the entire image and it's important that setting it back to 0 would restore the way the image originally was.
Also, a 'colour balance' feature would be included(this would be awesome for lighting effects in games) which would allow you to alter an object's RGB, e.g. "Set 'player's red balance to 100" would make the player appear bright red, or "Set 'player's green balance to 0" would make him appear magenta. Again,s ettting these back to 0 would be the original colour, allowing a nice fade towards different colours when approaching a light source.
The reason I wish to do this is because I am working on an advanced RPG/adventure game with very nice graphics and I wish to have lighting effects in caves and dungeons and such, and coloured lighting and such would be very nice, especially if I was able to just create a light effect on the backdrop in photoshop and change the active object's colour properties as it approaches the light source area rather than using cheesy semitransparent objects(and to be fair, the 'colour replace' option is highly primitive and hardly works, and is only really any good use on objecst which use MMF's 256colour pallette colours and very few of them, and only if you need to change it once). Also I wish to include a day/night engine in the game, where everything would become darker at night and turn a nice blue-ish colour, again, a large semitransparent objects look quite second rate for this, and with VRAM enabled(which I always like to use so that the blur is enabled to avoid pixellation when enlarging the screen/window and enlarging/rotating alpha channel objects) it makes everything run painfully slow anyway.
The extension would also be useful for other such things in people's games, like flashing a character a certain colour when taking damage, or turning green having been 'poisoned' or something.
So is anyone up for this? I would be willing to pay a sum of money via paypal for the hard work if it is required.
I've always wanted someone to remake or fix the Palette Object, it was damn useful, but it doesn't seem to work in Windows XP, that did brightness stuff.
This kind of thing isn't really possible in the MMF 1.x extension SDK. Hopefully it will be possible in MMF2 extensions though.
You can sort of do it in MMF 1.x, but you basically have to code the routines to do the colour shifts yourself, then overlay it on to the screen, which is slow as hell. If we could, for example, have direct access to MMF's DirectDraw layers, then we can do hardware gamma tweaks and stuff at a good speed.
Yes, it will work for Active Objects and with little performance hit, but they're the only object that it will work with. (Everything else would have to be a rectangle, just like collisions)
Full-screen filtering is slow, mainly because there's no hardware acceleration or access to DirectDraw functions. It would run acceptably under 320x240 (almost full speed if your processor is over 1GHz) but 640x480 would be too slow for most people.
That's sort of handy, since I am running the game in question at 320x240, heh. So would this active object gamma/hus/saturation/etc changer be possible to make?
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