Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 10:16 pm

This is the official thread to talk about status, eta, and other plans for the next 3.06 version of CMUD.

While I've been mostly focused on bug fixing for this version, I've also wanted to continue adding some new features. In addition to the free-floating "buttons anywhere" and mouse-click properties for buttons that I've mentioned in other posts, I have also finished the implementation of user-defined styles via the #STYLE command. You can use your style name in the #CW, #COLOR, and #PCOL commands to control both the color as well as the font name, size, and style attributes (italic, bold, etc).

I've also decided to continue working on some new features next week. The other main features that I want to add to this next version are:

1) xterm mouse support
2) multiple status bars with multiline support
3) stripping MUD prompt and displaying sticky prompt in a status bar
4) auto-unwrapping text lines from the MUD

I think several of these new features will improve the conversion of users from zMUD to CMUD. They are things that we have talked about for a long time, and I think CMUD is finally in the proper shape to add these kind of features that will benefit all users.

Hopefully I'll be able to get this ready next week. But it depends upon what else the universe throws at us. The last few weeks have been pretty busy and stressful.

Stay tuned for more details. Comments are welcome as always.

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 11:18 pm

Is it feasible to add a little timer next to the sticky prompt to count how many seconds have passed since the last prompt update? If it isn't too hard to add I think people might like that option.

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 11:26 pm

Those items you listed appeared interesting, although honestly I didn't see any that popped out at me as something I'd use. Perhaps the multiple status bars with multiline support, I'm not quite sure what that entails but it sounds cool.

I've personally just really appreciated the bug fixes. Especially the recent work you've been doing. Getting bugs fixed so Cmud runs to spec for me is better than new features. I get more disheartened when I run into bugs than any new feature could compensate for. For example, every time I look at my movement objects and see:

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 1:43 am

Styles!? Sweet!

One thing that I'd love is if the sticky prompt could be in the MUD window, as the last line, rather than in the status bar. I want it to still look pretty and styled like it should be, but for there just to be fewer of them to spam me up.

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 2:04 am

One thing I'm still waiting for that you mentioned before was the ability to toggle the (annoying) popups and helps when using the Editor.

It still drives me crazy when I'm typing something like %db( and the little "help" pops up and covers everything I need to look at until I click away. It also still drives me crazy that I'll type something out in full (like %null) and I have to hit enter TWICE to get to the next line.

In case others don't know what I'm talking about:

While I appreciate that others like it and probably will continue to use it, this is my main pet peeve about the editor. If I recall, you said this was a simple task, though I could be wrong. :P

Charneus

Adept Joined: 18 Dec 2005 Posts: 246

I've been having a bunch of problems with the mapper. Bunches of them are pobably my own doing, but I can't help but think there are still some decent size gremlins associated with it that could be ironed out... hopefully I will learn what I'm doing wrong on the ones I am screwing up, and maybe some of them will be fixed.
A couple that come to mind which I've posted elsewhere are the primary key crash issue, settings not being saved, or exportable, exit keyword config changing possibly when the reload room data is selected from the mapper...
Thanks zugg for the great product, and please don't take my comments negatively. Mr. Green

Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 5:00 am

Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 5:28 pm

I'll add something to the to-do list for an option to control the auto-completion and code-hints in the script editor. There isn't any way to make them semi-transparent. The popups are generated by the open-source Scintilla editor component, which is something I don't have control over. But I can certainly add an option to turn them off for people who don't want them.

And don't worry. I'm not neglecting bug fixes. Most of the bugs posted in the "What is needed to make 3.0x a public version" thread are already fixed. It's always a balance between fixing bugs and adding new features. And I wanted to make sure that the 3.0x public version had more than just the new mapper stuff for people who don't care about the mapper.

Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:26 pm

OK, items #2 and #3 are going to be delayed until the 3.07 version. As usual, bug fixes are taking too long. It's always the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time to add 20% of the features. In this case, I'm talking about the user-defined styles. I added them quickly last week, but today I realized that there were several remaining problems. For example, what happens when the Style Preferences is open and you use #UNSTYLE on the command line to delete a style. Or, even dealing with how the screen "expires" a style when it is deleted so that it's not referring to a deleted object record in memory.

Then I needed to add a right-click menu to the Style Preferences screen to allow you to delete a user-defined style from that screen. Then I needed to handle Style records properly in the main Package Editor so that style records are not shown by default (like directions and location objects). In other words, I spent most of today tweaking the stuff needed to really make styles work properly.

I *did* get the xterm mouse support added today and fixed a couple of xterm emulation bugs. Those were high-priority for me since I'm trying to get TeSSH into a public release status too.

But now that I look at the stripping MUD prompt stuff, I can see that it's going to take several days longer than I want to wait for this next beta release (end of this week). The unwrapping lines from the MUDs isn't too hard in theory, so I'm still going to try to add that. And I'm still fixing more bugs. But hopefully you'll see a release this Friday.

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:08 pm

I went ahead and released 3.06 BETA today. I still didn't get around to #4. So only #1 on the list above was added to this version. Hopefully the rest of these features will make it into next-months version. Still more bug fixes in this version than I'd like for a public version. Hopefully this one will be better and I can get closer to a public release. But there were still a lot of basic low-level changes in 3.06 (some parser fixes and the color/capture fixes) that might cause new bugs.

At least I got the new free-floating buttons and some other features into this version.

This version also updated the Armadillo copy protection system. Should be transparent to all users. The new version is supposed to work better on Vista with various DEP settings. But definitely let me know if you run into any license problems.

Wanderer Joined: 29 Jan 2008 Posts: 63

Any plans for 3.07? Twisted Evil

I'm particularly intrested in using HTML logging, so I vote for fixing remaining issues with colors (ansi/custom/#CW/#PCOL/etc) and how they are written to a log file.

Beginner Joined: 03 Jan 2004 Posts: 24 Location: USA

If the database was ready to go. I am still a little leary as to the amount of data to put into it with a new version coming it sure would be nice to be able to know if my data will transfer with the new version. I really am excited to see a database that is useful since the old days of zmud database crashing and losing data really left a bad taste *wink*

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

Zugg has said the database rewrite will be the next big project, after the mapper is finished. He still has 2 more phases to go on the mapper.

Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2009 5:04 pm

Yeah, you probably won't see a new database module until 2010 at the rate things are going right now with the mapper :(. Some SQL commands/functions will be added during the Phase 2 of the mapper, so that might help. But the whole user-interface of the new database module is a pretty big project. After all, it's like putting an entire program like SQLite Administrator within CMUD...and then making it compatible with the previous database module (well, as much as is possible).

As far as 3.07, it's mainly going to be bug fixes. The remaining color issues are high on my list, as is the #NNN broken command that happened in the latest release. Still hoping to add the feature for unwrapping lines from the MUD because I think I've got a pretty simple algorithm to handle it. And still thinking about some MUD prompt features. But mainly bug fixes. I really do need to get this into a new Public version, especially so I can start marketing TeSSH.

Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 5:01 am

Beginner Joined: 03 Jan 2004 Posts: 24 Location: USA

Hey thanks for the info Zugg, and, please do not misunderstand I absolutely think zuggsoft is the best! I have been a looooonnnnnnnngggggg time customer of zmud all the way back to ver 1.14 I think it was. I was just salavating over a stable datebase. We all know it has been sort of an issue to the point that many "casual" users stopped even using the feature cause of crashes, missing, and corrupted data issues over the years. So that is why I am really excited about it and just thought I would do what Beta is supposed to do. Wasn't complaining just reporting thanks for the awsome support!