MT 1.3b15 update

Progress reports and musings from the developers on the current gaming tools.

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trevor
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MT 1.3b15 update

Post by trevor »

No build this week, I've been spending my development cycles on research. I'm finally to a point to put it to good use, so expect the next build early next week.

Some of the research I've been working on:

* Drastically improving the vision speed so that we can have tokens have infinite visibility by default. Made a couple significant improvements to the algorithm and it works great. Now I need to migrate the updates into MT, then I'll be ready to tackle the vision-light thing

* Panel binding, this one is more behind the scenes, and technical, but it basically allows me to build and updates dialogs and panels faster and with less code. Both good things.

* Web repositories of images. You will be able to add a list of known repositories to MT and it will look for images there instead of the MT server, and drop back to the MT server if it can't find it anywhere else. You will also be able to specify a repository in your campaign so that you can upload your campaign images to your webserver, and your players will automatically get the updated remote repo while they are connected to that campaign. Faster image downloads. Smoother interaction with the server. Fewer drops and image transfer failures
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torstan
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Post by torstan »

That sounds brilliant. With the risk of sounding like a complete nerd, what did you do to get the vision system to speed up so much?

Equally, if we are having infinite vision by default, is there any way we could set a campaign default (or possibly even a map default) for us poor D&D users that have to remember the default encounter distances for different terrains? Just a thought.

Looking forward to the next build. I'll soon have to start using 1.3 for campaign building :)

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Preconfigured vision: Yes, I'll be adding a new tab on the Campaign Properties dialog that let you name and design visions you can attach to tokens.

Speed increase: This is a bit technical, which I'm happy to go into, but to avoid making you all go to sleep, I found a clever way to reduce the number of points I have to calculate. To give you an idea of the improvement, I created a "board" of 10,000 x 10,000 and put 500 randomly sized rectangles on it, creating some 2600 points. The current vision calculation took 40 seconds to figure out the vision. That's totally unusable. With the update, the exact same layout took .9 seconds. It all boils down to breakeing up the topology into smaller chunks, and culling out the ones that can't possibly be seen. Oh yeah, and a little bit more speed by restructuring the approach to change a geometric Subtract to a geometric Add (which is faster, go figure).
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Phergus
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Post by Phergus »

Looks like exciting times ahead!

I'm sure a lot of folks will be thrilled to see the web repositories.

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Full Bleed
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Post by Full Bleed »

Impressive stuff!

It's great to see that you're not only looking to add awesome features to MT but that you're always looking to make what we do have better.

The better vision calc and web repositories sound like phenomenal upgrades.

Thanks for keeping us all in the loop. Following MT's development is, in and of itself, something of a hobby. ;)

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Oh yeah, another one I've been working on: make the RPTools tab on the Connect to Server dialog work more like the LAN tab, where it will show a list of currently running (public) servers so you can just double click on the server you want to join.
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Big_Mac
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Post by Big_Mac »

trevor wrote:Preconfigured vision: Yes, I'll be adding a new tab on the Campaign Properties dialog that let you name and design visions you can attach to tokens.

Speed increase: This is a bit technical, which I'm happy to go into, but to avoid making you all go to sleep, I found a clever way to reduce the number of points I have to calculate. To give you an idea of the improvement, I created a "board" of 10,000 x 10,000 and put 500 randomly sized rectangles on it, creating some 2600 points. The current vision calculation took 40 seconds to figure out the vision. That's totally unusable. With the update, the exact same layout took .9 seconds. It all boils down to breakeing up the topology into smaller chunks, and culling out the ones that can't possibly be seen. Oh yeah, and a little bit more speed by restructuring the approach to change a geometric Subtract to a geometric Add (which is faster, go figure).
The scary part is that makes really good sense to me. I remember this stuff from my graphics classes in college.

Wohoo College is worth something :) :D
--
Big Mac

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Big_Mac wrote: Wohoo College is worth something :) :D
WOOOOOO !
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AlterForm
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Re: MT 1.3b15 update

Post by AlterForm »

trevor wrote: * Web repositories of images. You will be able to add a list of known repositories to MT and it will look for images there instead of the MT server, and drop back to the MT server if it can't find it anywhere else. You will also be able to specify a repository in your campaign so that you can upload your campaign images to your webserver, and your players will automatically get the updated remote repo while they are connected to that campaign. Faster image downloads. Smoother interaction with the server. Fewer drops and image transfer failures
Two words:

Hot. Sex. 8)

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Post by snikle »

Big_Mac wrote:Wohoo College is worth something :) :D
Yeah, whatever. I drank that time away...only thing I got out of it was...a wife! :shock:
• snikle •
snikle.wordpress.com

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Sir Flak
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Post by Sir Flak »

Alcohol will do that everytime.

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Azhrei
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Re: MT 1.3b15 update

Post by Azhrei »

AlterForm wrote:Two words:

Hot. Sex. 8)
California - n., from the spanish cali, meaning hot, and the latin fornia meaning copulation or intercourse. Hence the saying, "Terra de California -- the Land of Hot Sex."

;)

(Note that I live in Florida. The Land of Old Sex. What can I say?)

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Post by RPTroll »

Will the web repository just be a URL pointing to a directory? Will is scan subdirectories? Does it need a table of contents? Will the URL be visible to the players? (I'd prefer it not be).
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trevor
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Post by trevor »

The general repository URL will be visible to the players, but the campaign injected repository will not.

The way it works is you generate an index file (we provide a shell or perl script, or Export from MT), put the images and index file on your web host, then put the URL of the index file into MT.
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RPTroll
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Post by RPTroll »

So the index file contains an image reference of some sort linking MT-ese (MTease?) to a filename? Can you give us an example? Does the index file reside in the same directory as the images or does it contain URLs to the images that can be anywhere?

Ever thought of making the images JARable with the index file embedded?
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