Maptool Dev Status

[wolph42]

I've got a couple of questions concerning this

First off, what has happened to Azh? It looks like he following the other elders into the same pit of oblivion... anyone any clue?

The the matter of the development itself, it seems that our current most active Devs are now Lee and Tiorthan, my gratitude to you both for keeping MT alive in the wake of our Elders return...

Two dev questions:

1. Can either of you post here a status of what you're currently working on and have checked off?

2. Might it not be prudent to create a unofficial .jar file with the current changes/fixes/patches etc so a couple of us can test these? I know you two, Azh and some others (like Jamz) have already put in a LOT of work and I'm guessing one of the main reasons to hold of an official release is because of the current incompatibility with j7 (the other being a looooong checklist still unchecked). Still it would be a mutual benefit to both (devs and user) to get a look at the current changes, so we can test and give feedback before you release officially.

[jfrazierjr]

I've got a couple of questions concerning this

First off, what has happened to Azh? It looks like he following the other elders into the same pit of oblivion... anyone any clue?

Azhrei is a trainer by trade. That means that if he is working(which he is a lot this past year or so), he is in Plane on mid day Sunday, at a client city Monday-Friday and back on a plane until late Friday night. Since most Hotel internet is slower than a slug, this effectively gives him partial Friday, Sat, and partial Sunday's to do any MapTool related work..well... he also has a wife and home, so... that takes up most of the rest of his time. However, on the occasional week he does not have a contract, he can actually spend a good bit of time on MapTool and I believe he noted that he has a week off coming up fairly soon. I met him when he was in town a few weeks ago and we spent a bit of time talking about MT and some future stuff. The point is, that he is around and we talk as often as we can.

1. Can either of you post here a status of what you're currently working on and have checked off?

Azhrei has looked at some of the patches Tiorthan submitted but has not had time to commit to the source as of yet. That was as of he and I getting together a few(3-4??) weeks ago.

2. Might it not be prudent to create a unofficial .jar file with the current changes/fixes/patches etc so a couple of us can test these? I know you two, Azh and some others (like Jamz) have already put in a LOT of work and I'm guessing one of the main reasons to hold of an official release is because of the current incompatibility with j7 (the other being a looooong checklist still unchecked). Still it would be a mutual benefit to both (devs and user) to get a look at the current changes, so we can test and give feedback before you release officially.

Well... anyone can create an unofficial Jar if they have the dev environment set up...thats the entire purpose of the Testers forum is to run those patches and test prior to a build. You just have to set up the dev env AND apply whatever patches...

[Azhrei]

"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Although any rumors regarding being snowed under with work are quite accurate.

I've been getting a lot of business requests for custom training courses and that means I have to research the topics, build lectures, create useful/good hands-on exercises for the students, then arrange repro and such to actually get them into the students hands. Add on 7-8 hours a week (minimum) on aircraft and time gets very thin. Not to mention that I'm generally pretty exhausted at the end of a day of training (try standing on your feet for 8-9 hours each day giving a high-energy presentation!).

Anyway, enough about all that. JFJ was right about some down time coming up, but it's shifted a little bit. It was supposed to be week after next but that week has now booked up with business so it'll be the last week of Nov.

I do have some patches applied (they applied cleanly) and I like the looks of all but one for which I've got some minor changes. Once I've tested them I'll go ahead and commit to SVN. I would like to get that done this weekend, but my flight leaves NYC in a couple hours and then I'm flying to Ottawa on Sunday (any Canucks that want to meet for dinner?! ) so my weekend is pretty short. The good news is that it's a 3-day week so I might be able to get something done towards the end of the week (but one of my priorities is getting a broken tooth fixed -- ouch!).

In summary, I'm still alive and kicking but I just haven't had the time to spend trolling the forums four or five times a day like I used to.

[wolph42]

Thanks for the update Azh!
Might I inquire whether Jamz' patches will be implemented? They are quite a violation of the feat stop BUT they are so GD cewl and from my perspective a necessity. I've tested them quite thoroughly so I wouldn't expect any issues from them them, save potential misuse which must be addressed in the wiki.

[tiorthan]

Unless Jamz has changed any of the existing VBL classes I vote for including the change. I haven't seen a patch for review though, just a jar, or did I miss it somewhere?

1. Can either of you post here a status of what you're currently working on and have checked off?

This is probably not directed at me but I will answer anyway:

My first round of patches was a result of some time off work and a list of open bugs that Azh had sent me. I won't do anything like that for a while now since catching up on old bugs is more difficult for me than just jumping atop fresh issues that pop up on the forum (the main difference being that it is easier to get a working example and I don't have to set up everything by myself, which is not always quite that clear to me as it would be to long-time MT users). Also since I only use a very limited set of MT's capabilities, I have a much more difficult time deciding which issue is really more important than another.

Anyway, if you have anything you feel needs fixing for the next release, just throw it at me. My basic principle as a developer is: If you can provide me with proper requirements I can fix anything.

[Lee]

Hmm. The reason I didn't push through with my status update was because I touched a lot of stuff, putting comments as much as I can, with the plan that when I'm done, I would go over all of these and do a change log. I just noticed when I initially started doing a status update that it, and my lengthy responses here in the forum (my fault entirely. Ah, bad habits...), takes time away from doing coding. Here's a short list:

1. General improvements to the GUI, both aesthetic and functional in type, answering the question "I'm at this part of the MT window, what would be convenient here?" Before anyone else answers that question, no suggestions for the moment, please. I'd like to clear my list, which is close at hand, field it for testing, and then receive comments then

2. New script functions, (e.g. impersonate, getGMNames). There are several others but I don't have the dev environment up so I can't properly recall the rest.

3. Fixed bugs:

a. A bug where removed macros with hotkeys still having their hotkeys active after deletion, causing exceptions; unless the hotkey is re-assigned right away.
b. an impersonation bug where the command panel impersonates back to the player rather than the token impersonated
c. several bugs reported in the forum (e.g. movedOverToken)
d. I can't recall the others right now.

4. modified functions, adding functionality (e.g. input, goto, etc.)

@Azhrei Welcome back Reading your itinerary is enough to make a reader weary. If there was anything about my submissions that was in need of changing that you did yourself, please let me know what it was so I can see if it is something I've learned already or need to learn still. Those were my earlier attempts and my current ones are more mindful of the prevalent style found in what I've seen of the code so far.

As for VBL, I couldn't agree more with tiorthan. Wolph and Jamz have put in a good amount of work on it, so it'd be nice for it to bear fruit. Perhaps when Azhrei's free time for MT comes along, there can be a discussion to go beyond from Jamz and wolph has done so far.

[tiorthan]

@Azhrei ... If there was anything about my submissions that was in need of changing that you did yourself, please let me know what it was

The same goes for me. I appreciate every bit of feedback I can get, cause not only did I start working on MT code because I had to get up to date on Java development, also, my main line of work in the last four or so years has been plain old C for embedded systems, and C# and Python for application development which are all very different from Java one way or another.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to discuss this but I have recently started work on a customer project on top of the Netbeans RCP (I think I've mentioned that in an other thread). The application is similar to MapTool in certain aspects. In its current state it has a visualization panel (which could become a map window) that displays the contents of a renderer, it has a toolbox from which you can drag simulator node objects (could be renamed to token) which can be dragged around the visu pane (even be rotated and scaled) and which can be extended by attributes and commands (basically python scripts), and it has a command window (python console which could be made a chat frame).
I don't know if I'm beating a dead horse heare but if you are intersted to see how this would look I could knock up a simple prototype of a basic MapTool like application within a month or two. Basically, I'd just have to write a new renderer and add a project type for campaign files, get rid of all the customer specific stuff and rename a lot of things (hurray for search and replace and refactoring tools).

[Lee]

Same here, picked up JAVA again just for MT. It was probably Azhrei you were referring to, but it sounds interesting; particularly if there are things it can do better than MT, or is able to handle out of the bat some of the things they were tossing around as ideas in the development of 1.4, such as user added layers, audio/video streaming (not sure if that was an intent or just a popular feature request) etc. I gather that Python would be the language for "scripts", such as the intent of 1.4 to go Javascript for this?

[tiorthan]

The reason why I asked is because I don't know if that platform option has already been discussed nor if any of the devs have any experience with that platform. IMO it would have a number of advantages for the development of the next generation MT and my intention for now is just to provide an example of how a Netbeans based application would look like from a developer's point of view. Also, I think it provides a much better ground to argue advantages and disadvantages if you can work with an example.

I gather that Python would be the language for "scripts", such as the intent of 1.4 to go Javascript for this?

Yes. In the current application there's no equivalent to global or campaign macros but node commands work like token macros. The main difference is that token macros are run in the simulation engine context and I can hardly publish that as open source so I could also just try and implement some JavaScript example or something.

[JamzTheMan]

Unless Jamz has changed any of the existing VBL classes I vote for including the change. I haven't seen a patch for review though, just a jar, or did I miss it somewhere?

No, I haven't submitted a "patch" yet. I wanted it to be solid first so I didn't have to submit "ok, THIS one is the final 1.23 patch file" lol

I just have the one outstanding feature I'm working with Wolf to resolve and want to make sure it's working as designed, otherwise I'll submit a patch maybe today now that I see Az has a window of opportunity!

And nope, I I only touched 1 existing class (to add my class to the list of functions) and otherwise was able to use standard/existing MT calls to get everything done. Although I will need an "Elder" to look over my thrown exception clauses and confirm I'm using those correctly.


Oh and glad to see everyone is alive! I know how work can get, especially for traveling consultants. I'm not one but I hire them a lot and crack the whip a lot haha

[Azhrei]

Yes, Jamz... Go ahead and post the completed patch to the Testers forum; I'll get it from there. Thanks.

@Lee: I don't recall exactly, but as I said it was nothing major. When I get it reviewed and integrated I'll let you know which svn revision it is so you can see what I did vs. what the patch included. To be honest, I'm not even sure it was yours -- this stuff all runs together after awhile.

[JamzTheMan]

2. Might it not be prudent to create a unofficial .jar file with the current changes/fixes/patches etc so a couple of us can test these? I know you two, Azh and some others (like Jamz) have already put in a LOT of work and I'm guessing one of the main reasons to hold of an official release is because of the current incompatibility with j7 (the other being a looooong checklist still unchecked). Still it would be a mutual benefit to both (devs and user) to get a look at the current changes, so we can test and give feedback before you release officially.

Well... anyone can create an unofficial Jar if they have the dev environment set up...thats the entire purpose of the Testers forum is to run those patches and test prior to a build. You just have to set up the dev env AND apply whatever patches...

Granted, this is true, and you don't even have to create the JAR as you can run it right from Eclipse. But I think there are a lot of good testers out there that are not tech savvy or are tech savvy but don't have the same time/skill sets/ambition to set up eclipse and everything related to do that. But installing a custom JAR is acceptable.

It's also common practice for software to release "Beta" versions to users such as that and for users to bang away at new code with the understanding that it may not be stable. I would vote for such a practice, although late in the game for 1.3.

You could have it as a closed beta with restriction to a beta forum area for advanced users if you think releasing beta code like this would confuse the general masses. But I do see benifit, as personally I could attest that I would probably not have gotten the valuable feed back from Wolf if I had just released a "patch" file.