Month: August 2009

The GSOC coding period is now officially over, and the tool(s) are pretty much done too so. Only bugfixes left to be done, and still testing is an issue.

I’ve been plagued by disease since friday unfortunetly, and been suffering debilitating  canker sores, which hurt LIKE HELL, tensed up so bad I got headaches and whatnot and got some medication which kills all feeling in my throat. So I’ve spent most of my time sleeping (which was the best cure according to my doctor). This means I’ve not been able to get as much done as I’d hoped.

There have been some minor changes in the GUI the past week, and  several bugfixes. Fingolfin helped out with Mac OSX gui, which was very helpful since it’s hard to design UI for a platform you’ve never used ;).

The first page has changed look to include a few buttons with the activities, rather than the checkboxes (note that this is not final yet however), also note the helpful ‘help’ button:

Also, the About dialog has been improved upon, with a much better look:

In part due to my downtime the last five days, I’ll probably continue to submit patches during the coming week (and after that maybe?).

I’ve spent the last two days fixing small things that’s been bothering me for awhile, and a few nasty bugs (especially one where files opened using a File constructor would not set xormode properly, resulting in all data being read to be corrupt.

Also, I’ve made some improvements to the wiki page on the tools, however it’s far from complete yet. The changes there will then be merged into the README. Still missing are details on the tools, and the formatting could certainly be improved.

Also, the recent changes in trunk has been merged again, so all functionality added during GSOC should now be present in the branch.

By now, the master tools work fine, both in their CLI and GUI versions, and using them sure is better than the previous methods ;).

This is how it looks when you run the CLI (under Ubuntu), compression tools don’t have much fun output (it’s running compress_queen):

And the GUI (under Windows Vista this time), a small detail that has been added (and is visible in this screenshot) is the name of the tool displayed on the line at the bottom:

Almost all things mentioned in the last post have been fixed, but rather than an ‘advanced’ dialog. You now select Target Platform instead, which loads some defaults optimized for the target platform, instead of forcing you to set defaults yourself.

Tools now filter filenames more effectively, and should in most cases be able to guess exactly which tool you want, or atleast offer the choice of two or three tools. The only tool that is not auto-detected is compress_tucker, which must be run in advanced mode (or for the cli, using the –tool option), since it accepts an input directory, which can’t be effectively selected. A suggestion was to redo the tools so they all accept input directories, since the user might not now what file to select. However, making that work without hickups would require significantly more research into every game than making the user pick the correct file.

Documentation is also not complete (is it ever), and tomorrow, I’ll improve the current  tools page to include instruction on how to use the new GUI and CLI instead.

Another thing that does work yet is the optional –mac parameter for compress_agos (and to a lesser extent, -f to compress_gob and  –speech/music-only to compress_sword1), the simplest option would be to simply create two instances of the “compress_agos” tool, one with the –mac parameter set and with slightly different names, which would then appear as two separate  tools to the user.

Also, I rightly deserve admonitions with the screwup three days ago (with the CLI not compiling), I’ll try to make sure it does not happen again.

For tomorrow, I’ll try to improve the wiki documentation, and possibly some small fixes to the GUI / CLI, such as help strings. The README (and help pages) will be updated after the wiki, as the formatting (and publicity) of it makes it easier to track errors.