Welcome to the Riley Entertainment website! "The Movies" is much more than just a video game for the PC - it's the medium with which I express my creativity. This website will showcase all my creations, from my films to my artwork to my mods.

Tenth entry for the Riley AA-Prop Maker application.

So I see that someone decided to get me added to the list of "cool sites" links on the TMOA/TMU forums. I can only presume this was an attempt to ferret me out of hiding to give a status update. ;) Progress on this application has admittedly been slow lately. I work on bits of it every few evenings, but I've been both busy and distracted.

I've got a fair bit of the input controls working. There's a ton of potential user options to consider, though, so there's a lot more to go. I have most of the GUI going for the costume and head options, and am currently working on the hair options. After that, I'll be dealing with accessory and animation options. The accessory options will be somewhat tricky to deal with, as it involves dynamically creating input controls based on the costume choice.

I'm putting strong consideration into including a more complex "chooser" interface for costumes, heads, and hair styles. Currently, the user can choose these from a big long drop-down list; but can also filter the list by era, type, or gender. These filters work reasonably well for costumes, but don't really give much visual information when choosing heads or hair styles. My plan is to include a little button next to the drop-down list, which would open up a dialog box that actually displays all the choices. Since the game already has thumbnail images for its own interface, this shouldn't be too difficult -- just that it adds some more time to development.

There was one other complexity that I hadn't fully accounted for when I started this project: Age. Actors in the game are given an age, and it has a significant impact on the actor's appearance. I've figured out how I'll be dealing with this, but it too adds some time to development. Essentially, it involves mixing textures at the correct ratio for the skin, head, eyes, and hair. (For example, look at hair_20s_f1.dds and hair_20s_f1_gy.dds... for a 45-year-old actor, you have to mix these at about 50/50.)

I've now had two people indicate that the Texture Manager fails during startup. The application works for most of you, but for those unlucky among you, here's a little something that will help me figure out how to get it working for you.

Download this file diagnostics application. Extract the EXE file, run it, and then copy and paste the results displayed in the window into a comment here on this post.

Ninth entry for the Riley AA-Prop Maker application.

The Animated Actor Prop Maker application is slowly but surely coming along. There have been a number of things I've had to code that don't directly have to do with the user interface. This includes:

• Updating the LHTS reader code, which is used to translate text into the user's language. As you can see from the screenshot below, I'm using the same text as the game uses in the Makeover Department. (Also note that you'll be able to filter all drop-downs by gender; or the costume drop-down by era / genre.)
• Storing and managing unicode strings. The Texture Manager had no need for unicode. All the LHTS strings are in unicode. Note that in the below screenshot, I've added "Male" or "Female" to the costume names -- when I saw the list without it, I immediately realized it would be needed!
• A costume file reader! This is used to read in a proper abstraction of the costume files.

The next hurdle will be to parse the costume file, and generate the appropriate user interface controls based on the available costume parts. Below the "Choose Costume" area you see in that screenshot, another area will appear once you've made a costume choice. It will list the available clothing choices -- shoes, pants, shirts, etc. For costumes that require a human body, it will also have a skin tone choice.

The Riley Texture Manager has hit Version 0.91b. This version consists of the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Images appear more crisp in the main viewer panel.
• When converting to DDS, the application now tests if any output files already exist. The user may choose to replace them, or cancel the conversion.
• Added an option in the View menu to enable or disable the alpha channel in the main viewer panel.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when clicking Convert to DDS with no image files chosen.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when switching back to Viewer mode, with no image files chosen, and the frame rate set at "No Animation".

Head on over to the applications page to download the updated version!

The first public beta of the Riley Texture Manager is now in release! As this is a public beta, it's expected to have some minor kinks. Please leave any questions or bug reports in the comments either here or on the applications page.

Head on over to the applications page to download!

Fourth entry for the Riley Texture Manager.

I've got much of the batch conversion to DDS coded, and have run plenty of successful conversion tests. Oddly enough, the more difficult part of this process has been resolving the most appropriate filenames to use. The filenames must be prefixed and suffixed properly, and limited to 31 (total) characters. The location and filename for thumbnails also added that extra little bit of complexity. One extra little thing I did for thumbnails was ensure the aspect ratio is maintained (16:9 for overlays, 4:1 for backdrops).

I finished with converting static overlays, and now have to test and complete animated overlays. Besides the filename and frame rate conversion, the other difference is that each batch of animated overlays only has one thumbnail. Backdrops and regular textures should be much easier to tackle...

Almost there...

Third entry for the Riley Texture Manager.

I'm very close to completing the Convert To DDS dialog box that opens up when you initiate a conversion. There's some data validation and such that needed to be done, and I still have to make some sort of appropriate icon for that button next to the Filename box. (Which will be used to set a custom filename, rather than basing it off the original filename.) These are some of the neat things I've done:

• When the dialog box first opens, it analyzes the filenames you chose. It chooses the most likely output type: animated overlays if they're numbered, backdrops if they all start with "bd_", or static overlays otherwise.
• When you start a conversion, the window collapses off to the side. I still have to write the processing thread for the actual conversion. But the idea is that you'll be able to continue using the application while it works on the conversion. There will be a "Stop" button available while conversion takes place.
• I wrote a "conversion window manager" class that allows you to simultaneously run as many conversions as you want.
• I moved all the Direct3D access code to a place that will let me more easily create future applications. Access to Direct3D is protected by a critical section. What this means is that no single processing thread can disturb any of the others, except to degrade performance. (So, for example, if you were to initiate 30 separate conversions of 100 image files each, the animation in the image viewer might slow down to half the speed. But all the threads will still ultimately work as planned.)

Some of these extra features have obviously extended the development time. But I'm on track to send out a new build to my beta-testers this weekend.