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UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Fancase Maker
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Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
But I'm not doing reasonable things, and I wanted to learn more programming!
Suppose you want to embed elaborate Professor Layton-style puzzles, have smooth 3D object rotations, or otherwise extend the base idea of an "AA game." You can do some of that in PyWright, AAO, or even Ren'Py, but it'd be nice to have a framework that's a more open to extension in ambitious ways.
That brings me to UCANT.
What is UCANT?
In a few words: An Adventure VN engine for people who like to program, but also like having tools to make that easier. I would say it's harder to use than the existing casemakers (PyWright, AAO, and PWLib), but it does have some conveniences, especially when it comes to making custom user interfaces.
Where is it now?
Not complete, that's for sure. My first goal is to get UCANT in a position where it has all of the features needed for my AA fancase, including some special engines. I currently have an investigation gameplay demo, but still need to implement trial features (cross-examine) and a lot of conveniences.
On the other hand, a lot of progress has been made, as the demo below should show!
Influences
UCANT owes a major debt of inspiration to the casemakers that have come before. I've scripted in PyWright and made Ace Attorney Online cases, and UCANT is, in many ways, written based on those experiences. For example, the way UCANT uses the right side of the screen is highly influenced by Ace Attorney Online.
UCANT is also influenced by some text adventure authoring tools (Ink, Inform 7), as well as Ren'Py.
Gameplay Demo:
Here are simple demos of investigation gameplay, in zipped archives:
PC version (Updated June 1, 2018)
Mac version (Updated June 1, 2018)
Your computer may not recognize these executables as safe. On a Mac, you may need to control-click the unzipped archive to actually run it.
Unity Asset Package:
If you'd like to mess around with UCANT, here's an asset package that can be imported into version 2018.1 or later of the Unity Editor:
Asset Package
For now, you really need to know how Unity works to have any chance of using this, but documentation is on its way. I'll have that posted once I've gotten it into readable shape. For now, making a game in UCANT would probably be an exercise in frustration and/or careful imitation of the demo.
---
I'd be glad to hear any comments or suggestions! As this is something of a hobby project - I'm not a professional programmer at any level - I'm sure people with more experience will have good ideas.
Last edited by FerdieLance on Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:59 pm, edited 5 times in total.
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Gender: Male
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Joined: Tue Dec 29, 2009 12:08 pm
Posts: 367
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Fancase Maker
Gender: Male
Rank: Decisive Witness
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Gender: Male
Rank: Medium-in-training
Joined: Tue Dec 29, 2009 12:08 pm
Posts: 367
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Fancase Maker
Gender: Male
Rank: Decisive Witness
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
This is puzzling; it seems to work on a few other PCs. It sounds like the opening fade in didn't actually... fade-in. I'm going to dig into that now and see if there's any element of it that might be unreliable if the timing of a machine is different. In the meantime, would you be willing to look for this file on your machine and post/PM the contents if you have it?
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\LocalLow\DefaultCompany\UCANT\output_log.txt
Thank you again!
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Gender: Male
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Posts: 367
Spoiler: 1st computer
Spoiler: 2nd computer (more complicated code)
Maybe the problem lies in integrated graphics?
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Fancase Maker
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Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
Hypothesis: Does your computer use a decimal separator other than periods for decimals? Some machines (for example, Russian ones) use commas instead of decimal points. I should have anticipated that. This would explain why it fails on both of your computers and works on both of mine. So when I give a command to fade in for "1.0" seconds, you
The fix shouldn't be too hard for this, but I need to keep an eye out in general! I suspect this will not be the only place I run into this problem if this is really the cause, so I'd better go through my code and make sure it uses cultural invariants.
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
On a road to nowhere.
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Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Fancase Maker
Gender: Male
Rank: Decisive Witness
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
DrOcsid: I'm glad you like it - I'm going to see what I can do to document it more thoroughly so people can actually use it!
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Gender: Male
Rank: Medium-in-training
Joined: Tue Dec 29, 2009 12:08 pm
Posts: 367
FerdieLance wrote:
Hypothesis: Does your computer use a decimal separator other than periods for decimals? Some machines (for example, Russian ones) use commas instead of decimal points. I should have anticipated that. This would explain why it fails on both of your computers and works on both of mine.
Yes, we use commas in Poland (but we're not part of Russia!
).FerdieLance wrote:
Darth Wiader: I've uploaded a fix that might resolve the problem on at least one machine! If you get a chance, I'd love to hear if the new PC demo works. Thanks again for posting the log file!
It's working now, I'll give it a thorough look later, thanks!
Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
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There obviously wasn't much to test with these demos, and I don't think I'm still at the skill level to use this without documentation, but as someone who intends to learn Unity later on this does seem like it could be pretty useful later on, specially with Pywright development apparently being more or less dead now. I wonder if being in Unity also gives this the potential to let you port games to Android or other platforms?
Oh, and you should totally port Phantasmagoria of Betrayal to this, that case deserves to reach as wide of an audience as possible :p
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Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Mia Payne
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Re: UCANT Casemaker (Demo available)
Fancase Maker
Gender: Male
Rank: Decisive Witness
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
If you're interested, it might be good to have a tester who is working out of Poland in general... the localization bugs can be pretty severe, it seems, and I'd like this to run smoothly for as many people as possible.
Cesar Zero:
Yes, this can be ported to other platforms, but I'd be concerned about how to optimize performance on an Android or iOS phone. Right now, I've been programming for clarity and simplicity over performance. It works fine on a laptop a few years old, but a phone might be pushing it. I'd need to look at memory usage and reconsider how resources are loaded.
PoB is one of my planned porting projects!
Blizdi:
Yes! The delay is due to the gradual realization that I was forcing AAO to do things that AAO wasn't best-suited for, and that I really needed to either switch to PyWright or make my own system. I elected to make my own system.
---
Posted a project update adding foregrounds and making a lot of behind-the-scenes changes. I expect new bugs to appear in this one, even after a bit of testing, simply because of the breadth of the changes.
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