GreenDragon

It can't be .net no its infailable :>. If you need some help finding it just send me a message and I could give you a hand.

Fyrecaster

Definitely willing to be a tester. Wanted to say looks like you have made some big jumps and I think you're heading in the right direction. Keep up the great work, I am confident that if you keep at it long enough and when the right help comes along your vision will come to fruition.

Finally worked out the smallest bug to my Player Window UI thanks to Myxiplx. So as I said when the right help comes along I mean it. When youe ready for testers just give me a tell.

Fyrecaster

shillingworth

Wasn't .Net after all, I completely overlooked it too. I'm not actually sorting that data, that'd be reading more data than necessary, but instead sorting their keys in a secondary key list (a key being the string needed to retrieve the data from the hashtable). So I copied the keys to a master listing, then in the sort algorithm when it found a match to the order in the text file, it'd remove the key from the master listing and add it to a sorted listing (this way each pass through the master listing would increase the next pass speed). But when I removed the key from the master listing the array size changed, you probably guessed it by reading that line if you know anything about arrays. I forgot to decrease the index location to match the new array size.

But I did find a new bug when I fixed that. The default inventory window's top element gets pushed to the bottom of the stack no matter what method I use to copy the sorted list to the actual saved sorted list. Only the inventory window does this, and only the default inventory at that (tried 4 cutom ui inventories, none do it). It happends even when I don't sort the elements and just plain ol copy the arrray of elements in the table to any array or collection, even the debugger is reading them in the right order. I've encountered something like this before though with sorting matrix data in direct x, so I'm going to dig up that code later and see what I did to fix it.

__________________

shillingworth

Got most of the stuff working with the editor and set up some file saving functions. Also attached a comment field to the base xml class which is used in every element listed in SIDL.xml and each file. The comment filed adds the comment to the top of whatever it was added to. The editor is starting to work how I wanted it to. Down to working on the editor side of things now that the EQIALibrary dll is working properly, even gave the dll the ability to store the original order of the elements and flag sorting on and off. Most of the editor is completed from last time I was working on it, just a matter of integrating the new method of doing things into it (which I half finished today).

I'm getting excited now, not long til I get to play with the graphic routines again, which are my favorite part of any programming project.

shillingworth

Finished up with some editor stuff today, still need to add the saving functions to the editor, but for now I'll toss out what I have so far as a demo. Currently the only way to test/play with it is to use File->Open->EQUI.xml in the default folder (it has file exist checks in place so I guess a folder without all the file listed in equi.xml should work too, but only supports ui's with equi.xml so far). It takes a minute to parse the UI, actually closer to 24 seconds on my computer. There's no real visual way to tell when it's done loading except that the combobox in the Screen Pieces panel will have entries.

EQIAStudio Demo

GreenDragon

Looking good. It takes quite awhile to load in the file not sure why. I can load in and parse a good size file like SIDL.xml in fractions of a second. If you need some help with this or would like my code I can help you out.

Drakah

wow bud, nice job so far

It feels pretty solid to work with, strange desktop refreshing though when using it. /shrug

Wish you guys all the luck!

__________________
Regards,

Drakah
shakahr.com
Remember...it is only a GAME

shillingworth

It's taking so long because it's parsing the every last file in the UI (123 of them). In final form I'll have it just parse the currently opened window and any it depends on. The actual parse time on 1 file, I use EQUI_Animations as my benchmark since it's the largest, is within 2 seconds.

The desktop refreshing bug I'll have to look into, I didn't notice it on my laptop or main computer, but I have 3 other computers I can test it on around here, I'm sure one of them will show it.

fenrian1

Sorry for the delay in downloading and playing with the EQIA.

What I see so far I really like, many improvements over sidlwidl that I could see. I loved the way when I would start to edit an element, it would resort everything into proper order. Also, unlike sidlwidl, it uses lower case to define styles, so I dont have to re-edit by hand every thing that sidlwidl should be getting right the first time. I loved the little tool tips in the bottom corner and I especialy loved the comment line spaces for adding commented lines.

I put the EQUI file into a copy of my custom ui file and it read my custom files just fine, loaded a tad slow, but still faster than alot of other aplications I use, loaded faster than EQ so I'm happy with that. I found myself wanting the save feature to work since some of my windows are a complete mess from sidlwidl.

One thing I did notice was that it would not read labels properly;

<Label item="BW_BufNumber1">
<AutoStretch>true</AutoStretch>
<BottomAnchorOffset>40</BottomAnchorOffset>
<RightAnchorOffset>91</RightAnchorOffset>
<RightAnchorToLeft>true</RightAnchorToLeft>
<EQType>0</EQType>
<AlignRight>true</AlignRight>
<TopAnchorOffset>28</TopAnchorOffset>
<NoWrap>true</NoWrap>
<BottomAnchorToTop>true</BottomAnchorToTop>
<LeftAnchorToLeft>true</LeftAnchorToLeft>
<TopAnchorToTop>true</TopAnchorToTop>
</Label>

It see's all the offsets set to false and 0 except the autostretch which it sees as true in the properties screen. also when you change false to true it reorders everthing nicely, but all the offsets are converted to 0

<Label item="BW_BufNumber1">
<ScreenID>A_Label</ScreenID>
<Text>2</Text>
<Font>3</Font>
<TopAncorOffset>0</TopAncorOffset>
<BottomAncorOffset>0</BottomAncorOffset>
<LeftAncorOffset>0</LeftAncorOffset>
<RightAncorOffset>0</RightAncorOffset>
<RelativePosition>false</RelativePosition>
<AutoStretch>true</AutoStretch>
<TopAncorToTop>false</TopAncorToTop>
<LeftAncorToLeft>false</LeftAncorToLeft>
<BottomAncorToTop>true</BottomAncorToTop>
<RightAncorToLeft>false</RightAncorToLeft>

A few thoughts;
Put the elements list next to the properties window so you don't have to mouse accross 19" of monitor to switch elements.
Have the element name remain high lighted when working in the properties window.
Is there a way to not have the properties trees colapse when changing elements. I was playing with a mod for the group window, I started with the default added a BufName and a BufNumber label, then cut and pasted the pair 24 more times into the screen. When I use EQIA to edit them, it only leaves the last parameter I changed expanded, so I have to expand by hand the color, position,size with mouse clicks, rather than just arrowing down the list making changes with the numpad. No biggie on a couple of elements, but a bit of a pain to do with 48 elements + the 25 BufButtons that need to be altered.

Truly awsome piece of work, especialy considering this is not even a beta yet.

shillingworth

Haha, I found the culprit of the properties that's getting set to 0. Notice the spelling "TopAncorToTop".

shillingworth

Yeah that's some of the behavior of .Net that I don't like. I'm slowly coding in my own behavior, but there is just so much crap in those objects that it's taking me awhile to locate all of the behaviors I don't like.

shillingworth

Well I trashed the current editing environment. WinForms are just to damn limiting to my liking, so I'm jumping right into the graphical side and creating the editing environment from xna code instead of winforms. With the way it's going so far the editor will be able to be skinned using an EQUI_Template.xml file and it's company of files that hold the texture information. This way the CPU of the computer is left to handle just the data while the graphics card takes care of all the drawing of the interface and the editing studio itself. The editor does have a hard coded skin to fall back on if one is provided that doesn't work properly.

I've got most of the text rendering done and just found out that the xna team at microsoft just released a new copy of xna with a built in tool for this. So I'll probably spend a few days learning that tool.

Also been busy with updating my guild's website, with all the crap javascript tries to pull that takes a big chunk outa my EQIA time.

shillingworth

Got a bit of functionality to the forms engine I've built up in XNA. Text rendering still having issues though, it it's rendering all text and then clipping off what isn't shown instead of just rendering what is shown. So now I'm working on a way to measure the EM unit of a font (width of the letter M) to work out an algorithm for trimming the text before even rendering it. Would have been nice if the XNA dev's put that into the framework, but I guess they couldn't make it to easy.

shillingworth

After a ton of work, I am nearly done with the visual part of the editor. Still haven't got any EQ files to display, but have a good working Gui engine established modeled like EQUI's structure. Just finished added a bunch of code to serialize the Scene Graph instead of handling EQUI data seperately, looks like a few minor tweaks and it'll be operational. It is all finally falling into place

Still haven't got keyboard input operational in the new forms engine, but after peaking at Xna5D's code it doesn't look like it'll be very hard at all to implement. Might just rewrite the mouse system when I do keyboard to have them both in one place.

So far was able to create EQ windows, the xml streams the scene graph generates looks like it's right. But I haven't really studied it for typos, just glanced over it.

No Screenies unfortunately, my server's still got me locked out of images and comcast has yet to get back with me, they said it can take up to a week to fix the bug I encountered