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amber needs to be updated because it's a classic app. with support for classic falling by the wayside for years now, especially with the new intel macs, a replacement is becoming urgently needed.

I will go and check it out on a Mac within the next week or so (the lab with Mac's is closed off for some programming competition for an ACM conference this weekend - likewise, most of my time is taken up by sitting through talks at that). There are some things that make me wish I could write in C for this because it seems more natural, but that's going to throw out cross platform right away just because of the way data is stored for myth (all in network byte order if I remember). Would a java application be something that people would be interested in using? Or would it seem too annoying (or am I the only person annoyed by Java)?

-Tim

I think a java app would be fine. They're easy enough to run using a .bat file in Windows so people need only double-click the icon, and I'm sure there's some equally easy method on Macs too.

Most Java apps annoy me. Usually slow, and often non-standard UI's. But if they do something I need, I'm not so prideful so as to not use them. Lots I think you can run just from the .jar file on a mac.

iron wrote:heh, I no longer have the Antero sourcecode - lost it long ago. It only took a week or so to write so I'm sure a scripter with some programming knowledge could make a reworked Antero without too much trouble. Even better would be having its functionality built directly into Loathing.

Gray tried to talk me into updating antero once, and I even went so far as getting the code from you before I got all lazy and stuff. If you want it lemme know, or I can host for all if you don't care.

Ah yes I vaguely remember that. I'm not interested in Antero myself (looking at its hastily written spaghetti code would probably make me ill), so feel free to do as you wish with it

TarousZars wrote:Most Java apps annoy me. Usually slow, and often non-standard UI's. But if they do something I need, I'm not so prideful so as to not use them. Lots I think you can run just from the .jar file on a mac.

me hateses nasty little java apps. slow, interface kludgy (inconsistent between platforms) just bad. of course that opinion is from java of a few years ago. i am sure it works great now.

too bad you don't have RealBasic, it's object oriented and creates nice cross platform code. no chance you could write it in php/mySQL I suppose? ;o

iron wrote:Gray tried to talk me into updating antero once, and I even went so far as getting the code from you before I got all lazy and stuff. If you want it lemme know, or I can host for all if you don't care.

If permission is granted to share the code I'd be interested in taking a look at the code - though for truth in advertising purposes I can't say I would ever actually do anything productive with it. I would be most interested in the code that reads/writes the script section to/from a local folder and any other read/write routines or data format info.

TarousZars wrote:Most Java apps annoy me. Usually slow, and often non-standard UI's. But if they do something I need, I'm not so prideful so as to not use them. Lots I think you can run just from the .jar file on a mac.

It takes some effort to make a Java app look and behave good across platforms. Its not impossible, its just most devs slap stuff together w/ out consideration or cross platform testing.

Also, making an app in Java is one way to make sure it runs on both Mac and Windows (there are other ways to do this, such as using stuff like wxWidgets or RealBasic... but each has its disadvantages).

Also, for GUI tools, the slowdown will not be perceived on any computer that can also run Myth II. Startup time may be a little slower since the JVM has to initialize itself first (though, Cocoa apps take a while to start too, so I'm not even sure that would be perceived), but tools sit mostly in GUI code, which doesn't take any significant CPU cycles, Java or not.

Myrd wrote:It takes some effort to make a Java app look and behave good across platforms. Its not impossible, its just most devs slap stuff together w/ out consideration or cross platform testing.

That's what I vaguely recalled from one of several Java programming classes I took years ago. They were raving about the swingset GUI classes (or whatever they were called) and how powerful they were and how 'easy' it was to create good looking User Interfaces and here I was fluent in hypercard programming and the Apple UI principles where the objects / interface were the simplest part of any app and always worked the same way and I wanted to bang my head against the wall when I saw how convoluted/non-intuitive the whole GUI classes/programming was. It was like programmers clip-art for user interface application coding. You COULD make something intuitive that worked the way other GUI apps worked but you didn't have to, you could break every UI rule ever thought up, and unless you were really fluent with all the GUI principles you were bound to break some inadvertently no matter how well intentioned you were.

I still curse Apple for abandoning HyperCard. It had the sweetest combo of decent power and ease of programming I've ever seen - freed the programmer up from endless tweaking to get routine things done so you could actually work on the code/problem itself. A true color OS X version of HC would be the da bee's knees bomb.

vinylrake wrote:

iron wrote:Gray tried to talk me into updating antero once, and I even went so far as getting the code from you before I got all lazy and stuff. If you want it lemme know, or I can host for all if you don't care.

If permission is granted to share the code I'd be interested in taking a look at the code - though for truth in advertising purposes I can't say I would ever actually do anything productive with it. I would be most interested in the code that reads/writes the script section to/from a local folder and any other read/write routines or data format info.

I would also be very interested in the Antero source for the same/similar reasons vinylrake mentions.

I'm in the process of merging several of my own Myth tools into a "Swiss Knife for Myth" of sorts, and not having to re-invent the wheel regarding where to look and how to extract the scripts from maps would save a little wedge of time.

And fear not, Iron - when I look at the source code for my first Myth tool I cringe every single time. Amazing how something that's coded on-the-fly over the course of dozens and dozens of ultra-late-night sessions evolves...

Heh, my first Myth tool (I only wrote two) included a mesh editing tool for TFL that was written in VB6. That was a real mess. I don't think anyone can beat that in messiness.

Hehe, well ... Baak & Vinyl you're both welcome to it. See TZ for a copy of the source

stratman wrote:I would be happy to try to put together something for collection editing. I do currently have access to some Mac machines so in the next couple days I'll go try to see how Amber works (I've never used it). I know Tahoe never really did the job though.

I'm most unfamiliar with Myth III, but I'm guessing for collections, you want something for doing unit sprites, and that would apply to TFL and SB only right?

...Also, does Amber deal with mons tags and stuff too? I mean, isn't there something in the mons structure that reference which collections to use for different animation sequences for the sprites? Trying to remember this sort of stuff (maybe I should just start looking up, hahah).

-Tim

Yeah, editing collections with tahoe usually ruins them for ingame placement and such. Every time I try and move something around the sprites appear out of place, and often at different coordinates when the camera is rotated..

I just want to be able to get some artifacts done

Strat, Vinyl, and Baak, which Myth tools did you do in the past? I'm always interested in seeing if anyone that made oldies like Bartok or MONSEdit, etc would still even be around.

GeomExp is a small tool to view wireframes from GEOM data and export them as autocad DXF files. Pretty useless for map makers. I think the reasoning behind it was I was working on a map where I needed to render a scene using in game models for the pregame pic in an external application

The other tool I made (which is really a mess of tools) is a set of editors called WinTFL Toolset that, by the time I released it, TFL was really dying/dead (I had used it for personal projects for a while before that in really undeveloped form - it was the result of lots of code I wrote ot "hack" maps apart and do rough stuff in hex editors - cut and paste between loathing for m2 and tfl data, all sorts of tricks we used on demo for our "haxored" maps as the full community eventually came to call such things). "It includes tools to extract files from .gor archives, edit mesh files, edit stli files, edit unit files, edit wind files, and edit text files. It also includes twenty-two pages of documentation explaining how the tools can be used to create a map for TFL." Theoretically, with much pain, you can create an entirely new mesh for TFL using these and other existing tools, so this was the bridge for the gap that kept PC people out of mesh editing for TFL. Being not a programmer at the time, I was writing VB stuff to edit tfl mesh more in the way of script to pull out and insert data - open data as raws in photoshop - do a bunch of custom filters - somehow some monkey rigged height map would pop out. I never thought of developing it further thinking some real programmer would come along and do it. Over time, it has become an unfortunatel necessity for me to learn to develop software

Pythos (from vista? originally from Clan Bear or whatever - I don't remember) was working on a mesh editor for a long time with a graphical interface (I remember seeing pretty screenshots) for windows, but that never happened.

I brought up the possibility of writing a collection editor back on the mill forums when I finally packaged and released these horrible tools, and Melektor (spelling?) posted his work that already showed some impressive screenshots - at that point I decided again to wait for that. Years later, its still not here - its understandable though. I know how those kinds of projects go.

That's why my plan is to do a sort of no promise type of 20 day as much as I can get and then its open source, best documented as possible, and at least has a solid design. After that, anyone else is welcome to expand on, finish, or add giant gumbas to it.

I have this strange feeling that what stopped a lot of myth tool developers and caused them to leave the community were things like...graduation. For me, graduation is never an option

-Tim

Sorry I went 4 wheeling this weekend and hadn't checked the forums. The Antero source can be found here.

And if anyone wants to see the source to the few tools i made (Chaos, HeadEditX, ArtiX) you can grab em using svn from svn://www.atvcowboy.com/trunk/

Hope you find em useful.