Matrix Games Forums

I’m definitely open to suggestions on appropriate graphics!

For 0.2.5 I want to basically tidy everything up and make it look pretty, so I certainly wouldn’t mind replacing the buttons with some kind of decent image. Quite possibly a DW or at least space themed background image for the forms and splash screen too.

Ultimately I want every form to fit well on a 720p screen, which is obviously going to require some tweaking at the moment. But that means background images needn’t be that large, and with jpeg compression you can get perfectly reasonable large images at less than 1MB.

The application icon could pretty much be done anytime; the file is going to be tiny (it only needs to be 256 x 256 pixels at most after all) and it’s no trouble at all to actually set that up. So I’ll include that as soon as I find or get sent one I like.

So yeah, if you or anyone following this wants to contribute pictures or artwork for the tool feel free to post it in this thread or pm/email it to me.

Naturally anything I end up using in the app will be credited appropriately (note to self, an “About this App” form would be a really good idea), so if anyone sends me stuff be sure to include the name you’d like to be credited as!

Couple of changes for Revision 15.

The application itself now uses an icon, I need to make sure it actually gets implemented properly on publish so for now I’ve just set it to a generic NASA image of a galaxy. It should appear both as the icon before launch and in the top left of the Main Menu title bar.

If anyone has any better suggestions for an icon I’m all ears!

I’ve also made a very basic “About this App” form, its main purpose will be to hold the credits section. At the moment the only entry is the above NASA image.

I also realised that even with the ability to set whatever image you like, people still might need to set the image indexes themselves. I’ve tried a more advanced method with the Component form’s Pictureref field, so we’ll see how that goes.

Edit:

I'm currently updating my NAS from 2TB to 6TB drives, and while it does function during this performance might suffer so you might have trouble updating during this time. I expect the whole process to be done in about 10 hours!

Things still going well?

So I've pretty much taken an enforced break due to being ill, fighting with my NAS and dealing with some personal stuff.

I was off work for more than a week and that was down to what was basically an oversized cold. Most people just coughed a lot and got a bit of a sore throat, for me it was bad enough that I actually had trouble breathing.

As for the NAS apparently you can't just stick in a new drive and extend the volume oh no, you have to make new volumes and copy the data back and forth 3 times. I wouldn't mind except that I've got damn close to 2TB of data and it takes all day to do a single copy.

The nice part is I am now better and my NAS is rocking a pair of 6TB drives.

Bottom line is I'm back and continuing work on the tool. Right now I'm working on extending the changes to the Component Image to every other image, I'll push an update once it's looking good.

Good to hear, glad you're back and healthy again

Ok, I’ve just published revision 16 which has all the image references used showing the image and allowing the user to set it to something else, with the exception of the 3 in the races form. I think I’ll wait until I’ve redesigned it before I bother with that, it’s too big as it is!

It also shows the actual index number so you can set it. If you want to set it to a different index and replace the image, just make sure you set the index number first, then select the file you want to replace it with.

So for 0.1.6 we have all the images in the forms except the races form, and the start of the sound replacement. The sound effect in the components form is now working pretty well.

Ideally I would have liked it if you could press play, then the play button would turn into a stop button until the sound finished or it was clicked, then turned back into a play button. Sadly it wasn't to be, because VB can't seem to actually detect when a sound is playing.

So I've gone with just having separate play/stop buttons, it works fine and the program doesn't seem to mind if you hit stop while there's no sound playing anyway.

Very tasty update in revision 1 for 0.1.6 (that's nothing whatsoever to do with sound) today, I now have the create/delete/insert project working in the research form. I wanted to see if I could make it work and several hours later here we are!

Creating a project is pretty simple as you might expect, it just adds a new blank project on to the end of your project list. Set the values and output, job's a good'un.

Inserting/deleting a project was more difficult. I believe I've solved it but please double check what it's doing and report any bugs to me (and keep backups).

So revision 2 was a minor bugfix for an issue introduced by revision 1 when trying to load files.

As there's only 2 locations involving sound files the latest update puts us on 0.1.7. It has the weapon sound effect in the fighters form done. It works just like the one in the components form, in fact since the files are stored in the same folder it was really just a copy/paste job.

I've also introduced some more error handling into the input process, it'll now detect if your research projects are out of sequence and tell you where it happened so you can go fix it. Ideally I'd like to just read them in and sort it, but sorting a 3 dimensional array with potentially over 400K entries turns out to be rather complex not to mention time consuming on the CPU.

That is everything for the 0.1 release.

My plan for the moment is to work on:

- Redesign the design templates, races and policies forms and place image/sound handling into the races form.
- Setting images up like the sound files so selecting a file in the mod folders image folder doesn't screw it up.
- Make images display their progress in output like the sound files do.

That’s the stuff I’ve put off for a while because of the amount of time it’ll likely take. It needs doing though, so when it is all done I’ll publish 0.2!

0.2 is where the real fun begins. The basic plan is as follows:

0.2.1.0 Allow create/delete/insert for every form that could do with it.
0.2.2.0 Create proper user guidance on forms (tooltips/labels) to make editing more intuitive.
0.2.3.0 Implement data validation to restrict entries by user.

There might be more too that I’ve forgotten. But pretty much by the time I get to 0.3 I want it to be as functional and easy to use as it’s going to get. Then in 0.3 I’ll be looking at graphics, by which point there shouldn’t be any more coding to do so it’ll literally be choose image, place image.

I also realised I forgot to update the OP when I published 0.1.6. Up to date now!

Revision 1 of 0.1.7 has the design templates form redesigned. It now shows all the variables on screen at the same time rather than making you choose which one to edit.

ORIGINAL: Sabranan

So I've pretty much taken an enforced break due to being ill, fighting with my NAS and dealing with some personal stuff.

I was off work for more than a week and that was down to what was basically an oversized cold. Most people just coughed a lot and got a bit of a sore throat, for me it was bad enough that I actually had trouble breathing.

As for the NAS apparently you can't just stick in a new drive and extend the volume oh no, you have to make new volumes and copy the data back and forth 3 times. I wouldn't mind except that I've got damn close to 2TB of data and it takes all day to do a single copy.

The nice part is I am now better and my NAS is rocking a pair of 6TB drives.

Bottom line is I'm back and continuing work on the tool. Right now I'm working on extending the changes to the Component Image to every other image, I'll push an update once it's looking good.

Ack! Sorry to hear that you were ill but I'm glad your doing better now. And yeah, copying 2TB of data 3 times over is a bit extreme and time consuming!

Really, really looking forward to 0.3!

Revision 2 has my first pass at making the races form a little more presentable. I've decided to group similar fields together and give the user the ability to select which ones to make visible, while keeping certain fields that are more common visible all the time. Seems like a reasonable compromise between forcing the user to select from a list every time he wants to edit a single value and having everything on the screen at once.

It's defo smaller than it was, so hopefully it'll be easier to use.

Just published revision 3, much the same idea as revision 2 but for the policies form. This one really lent itself well to this kind of shrinking due to all the checkboxes, which take up very little space individually but due to the way they needed to be separated nicely it ended up making the form much larger than it needed to be. The form is smaller than the races form now even though it had more fields to work with so I’m pretty happy with that.

That means the only thing left before I can publish 0.2 is to sort out the images. At the moment you can choose a file in the mod folder for sound files and it just switches to using that file, but it doesn’t yet work for images. I also need to make it so that it outputs debugging info when it’s handling images.

The nice thing is the code is already done because it’s the same as the sound files, just with different folder paths and file extensions. Might even get it done tonight at this rate!

So that was a lot more complex than I thought.

It is done though, so with revision 4 I have the races form updated to include the race image (and the alternate image too), it shows file copying info in the output log for images and setting images to the output location shouldn’t cause crashes.

I still want to go over it to make sure I haven’t screwed up anywhere, but once I’ve done that I’ll publish as 0.2!

Couple of minor issues later and we’re on 0.2, another major milestone passed!

0.2 will be all about quality improvements. The create/insert/delete project will be expanded to the other forms, and then it’s just about restricting what the user can enter into each textbox and providing tooltips or error messages telling them why they can’t set their reproduction rate to “poopoo”.

Of course most of it is pretty intuitive anyway, but it’s easy to make mistakes or put in values that are too high/low for DW to deal with.

The other thing I want to do is set the tab indexes more intelligently. Right now they’re just at their default values, so pressing the “tab” button might move you to the next logical field to edit, or it might select almost anything else on the form. Another thing to resolve before 0.3.

That said though, aside from the ability to create and delete items it’s all perfectly functional. 0.2.1 will have that completed too.

As it turns out images licenced under GPL mean you have to have your source code available. Since I don’t, I’ve decided to remove the start/stop buttons and replace them with icons licenced with a free licence that only requires attribution.

Dead simple update, but obligatory since it removes a potential GPL violation.

Have you found all the unstated restrictions on mod changes? I know people have found a lot of them, like the upper effective limit on colony growth rate tech, gold having to be in the game regardless, etc...

Might be nice to include on the input restrictions

I've found or been told about a fair few of them I think, but it's hard to locate unstated restrictions!

Limits on things like how many research projects or components you can have are saved as constants in the program, so if I find out later that there's a different limit to the one I've set it's dead easy to change.

I recall Drybreeze mentioning the gold issue, but I haven't looked into it properly myself yet. I haven't heard anything about the colony growth limit, but I'm not sure I could really handle that even if I knew the limit. Even if a user had that ability on more projects than they needed to hit the cap, they might intend it to be that way or the player might still not be able to hit the limit because of racial restrictions on the tech.

I can't be sure, but I think your editor removed a line it shouldn't have from research.txt, namely in a tech that had two "ABILITIES" lines, it removed the first of them (the tech that enables resupply ships).

I should also mention great work so far, it's looking fantastic, super useful!