MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available

@david-arthur, on Jun 27 2007, 12:46 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

No, just the ID numbers. I’ll take a look at it, but unless I significantly increase the size of the thumbnail, there won’t be room for much text.

Oh you're right, I just took a look at ResEdit myself. Strange. Must have been thinking of something else.

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 12:25 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Oh you're right, I just took a look at ResEdit myself. Strange. Must have been thinking of something else.

I think RLE browsing shows names (with NovaTools installed). Don't quote me on it though.

EDIT: DA, when you delete a spob, the confirmation dialog says "^0".

This post has been edited by orcaloverbri9 : 27 June 2007 - 12:44 PM

@orcaloverbri9, on Jun 27 2007, 11:01 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

I think RLE browsing shows names (with NovaTools installed). Don't quote me on it though.

Yes, it looks like the NovaTools RLE browser does show names. Would everyone like me to try increasing the thumbnail size and displaying a bit of a name?

@orcaloverbri9, on Jun 27 2007, 11:01 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

DA, when you delete a spob, the confirmation dialog says "^0".

I can’t find this — how exactly are you deleting it?

@david-arthur, on Jun 27 2007, 02:55 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Yes, it looks like the NovaTools RLE browser does show names. Would everyone like me to try increasing the thumbnail size and displaying a bit of a name?
I can’t find this — how exactly are you deleting it?

The toolbar item. It happens when I create a spob, "change" something (like replacing an 8 with an 8 or something), then close and click delete.

@david-arthur, on Jun 26 2007, 07:46 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

I wonder if the crashes are associated with Intel — I don’t have access to an Intel Mac, so the universal binary is very much experimental. Is MissionComputer any more stable if you launch it through Rosetta instead?

I doubt that all of the crashes are Intel-related; it still crashes quite a bit (although not as much as alpha 1 did) on my PowerPC under 10.4.9.

@david-arthur, on Jun 27 2007, 01:55 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Yes, it looks like the NovaTools RLE browser does show names. Would everyone like me to try increasing the thumbnail size and displaying a bit of a name?

Yes, it would be nice to see the name without opening the resource. Maybe it could be an option in the preferences if you want to see the ID or the name.

@orcaloverbri9, on Jun 28 2007, 03:01 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

I think RLE browsing shows names (with NovaTools installed). Don't quote me on it though.

Ah, so I wasn't just insane 🙂

@david-arthur, on Jun 28 2007, 06:55 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Yes, it looks like the NovaTools RLE browser does show names. Would everyone like me to try increasing the thumbnail size and displaying a bit of a name?

I dunno, would they really need to be bigger? It looks like there's enough room to show a useful number of characters. How big are ResEdit/NovaTools thumbnails?

Sprites need to show frame dimensions!
Multiple selection for graphical browsers?
Some bad chars in Target Generator.
Bad scroll bar in Help:

RLE Maker defaults to 6x6 grid but won't display any warning if this results in fractional frame dimensions until you change it.
(note I've been running in Rosetta)

"Make RLE now (...) generates sprites that are approximately 15% smaller when compressed" - I just tried this out, comparing with orca's utility (with the UE Cruiser again) and despite being identical in size (the 4-byte discrepancy is no longer there, meaning MC4's result is 4-bytes larger than MC3's) and compressing slightly smaller than MC3, orca's still compresses slightly smaller again ;). I had a look at the hex data and there are definitely some differences so it isn't just a matter of what goes in the filler bytes. I can post the results if you or anyone else are interested.

Hey I just had a really random idea: A resource fork file-system with MacFUSE. Feasible? Probably not. Useful? Not really.

This post has been edited by Guy : 28 March 2008 - 08:24 PM

@orcaloverbri9, on Jun 27 2007, 03:56 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

The toolbar item. It happens when I create a spob, "change" something (like replacing an 8 with an 8 or something), then close and click delete.

I still can’t reproduce this — does it happen all the time, or only with certain spöbs? Does it ever effect other resource types?

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Sprites need to show frame dimensions!

What sort of resource do you mean here?

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Multiple selection for graphical browsers?

Maybe sometime, but that would take a great deal more work that doing it for text-based pickers did, since the graphical one is entirely custom code.

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Some bad chars in Target Generator.

Fixed, thanks.

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Bad scroll bar in Help:

Does this always happen, or only sometimes?

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

RLE Maker defaults to 6x6 grid but won't display any warning if this results in fractional frame dimensions until you change it.

Fixed, thanks.

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

A resource fork file-system with MacFUSE.

🙂

@guy, on Jun 27 2007, 08:11 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

I had a look at the hex data and there are definitely some differences so it isn't just a matter of what goes in the filler bytes.

Correct. For some reason, my app and Make RLE end up with slightly disparate colors. I have no idea why.

In the special ships section of the mďsn editor, the selectors for the player's goal, ship behavior, and where to place the ships are not aligned.
Attached File Picture_1.png (10.65K)
Number of downloads: 11

@orcaloverbri9, on Jun 28 2007, 11:56 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

For some reason, my app and Make RLE end up with slightly disparate colors. I have no idea why.

It’s possible that we use slightly different methods of converting the 24-bit images that I suspect most users are supplying into the 16- and 8-bit images that rlëD and rlë8 respectively demand.

@nil-kimas, on Jun 28 2007, 01:33 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

In the special ships section of the mďsn editor, the selectors for the player's goal, ship behavior, and where to place the ships are not aligned.

Fixed, thanks.

@david-arthur, on Jun 29 2007, 12:58 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

What sort of resource do you mean here?

RLEs, of course 🙂

@david-arthur, on Jun 29 2007, 12:58 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Does this always happen, or only sometimes?

Hm, only sometimes I guess. It doesn't seem to be happening right now but it did still happen after a quit and relaunch when I first noticed.
Opening without Rosetta, the Help is invisible. I choose help, the frontmost window becomes deactivated but I don't see any help anywhere. This invisible window appears in the window menu and can be closed with cmd+w.

@david-arthur, on Jun 29 2007, 06:27 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

It’s possible that we use slightly different methods of converting the 24-bit images that I suspect most users are supplying into the 16- and 8-bit images that rlëD and rlë8 respectively demand.

Well considering the UE Cruiser is already 8-bit...
Of course you ran a test yourself back when we were discussing it and found yours to compress smaller so I guess neither is 'better' in that regard. The question is which is more 'correct' 😉

@david-arthur, on Jun 28 2007, 02:27 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

It’s possible that we use slightly different methods of converting the 24-bit images that I suspect most users are supplying into the 16- and 8-bit images that rlëD and rlë8 respectively demand.

I don't know...I just made a new 16-bit Picture and drew the contents into that. As for 8-bit support, I found that this method did not work there, so I wrote a rudimentary dithering method. What did you do?

Actually, I wonder if it's that my app reads a PICT resource, while yours gets images from the clipboard or a file, that's causing the discrepancies. Perhaps copying and pasting in OS X results in a 24-bit image?

@orcaloverbri9, on Jun 29 2007, 11:19 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Perhaps copying and pasting in OS X results in a 24-bit image?

Nope. Well it may depend on the source/target I guess. But if I copy from Rezilla (or ResEdit, when I had that) into GraphicConverter or vice versa the bit-depth would always be preserved.

This post has been edited by Guy : 28 June 2007 - 06:48 PM

The dësc editor for EVO has a bad character in the button to select a dëqt movie resource.

@nil-kimas, on Jun 30 2007, 06:37 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

The dësc editor for EVO has a bad character in the button to select a dëqt movie resource.

Fixed, thanks.

I went poking in the info.plist and found bad characters in place of umlauts for various type codes. I fixed those and now have MC show up in the "Open With" menu for plug-ins :).
But I also saw some other things which seemed a bit odd. The MissionComputer RDL script showed just one extension associated with it, "rdl,.rdl2", which certainly looks like something went wrong. The 'All' document type has an icon associated with it?? The actual icon file contains no data (unless you count 8 bytes). Lastly, are '.mcx' or '.mcbundle' files used at all in MC4 (I think that BNDL one is causing some other bundle types to be associated with MC)?

Looks like something funky is happening with the recent item menu list. It shows me this blank in the bottom of the list, and when I select it, it gives me an error message with no text what-so-ever.

Attached File(s)

@guy, on Jul 7 2007, 10:04 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

I went poking in the info.plist and found bad characters in place of umlauts for various type codes. I fixed those and now have MC show up in the "Open With" menu for plug-ins :).

These ones are not so much bad characters as MacRoman ones where Mac OS X expects Unicode; I hope to be able to convert them at some point, but at the moment there are some important things that only work if

@guy, on Jul 7 2007, 10:04 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

But I also saw some other things which seemed a bit odd. The MissionComputer RDL script showed just one extension associated with it, "rdl,.rdl2", which certainly looks like something went wrong.

Thanks — fixed now. The syntax for this keeps changing on me.

@guy, on Jul 7 2007, 10:04 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

The 'All' document type has an icon associated with it?? The actual icon file contains no data (unless you count 8 bytes). Lastly, are '.mcx' or '.mcbundle' files used at all in MC4 (I think that BNDL one is causing some other bundle types to be associated with MC)?

.mcbundle is no longer used, and will be disabled in the next seed; .mcx is still potentially useful, so I’m keeping it around for the moment. For complicated reasons, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to get rid of All.icns.

@coraxus, on Jul 8 2007, 02:31 PM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

Looks like something funky is happening with the recent item menu list. It shows me this blank in the bottom of the list, and when I select it, it gives me an error message with no text what-so-ever.

Can you post the contents of the ‘MissionComputer Preferences.xml’ file in your Preferences folder? After doing that, check whether the problem goes away if you say Clear menu, or if it reoccurs.

For hypergates, setting the exit angle to Down doesn't do anything. Subsequent directions are short by 45°.

@guy, on Jul 9 2007, 04:55 AM, said in MissionComputer 4.0 second alpha now available:

For hypergates, setting the exit angle to Down doesn't do anything. Subsequent directions are short by 45°.

Fixed, thanks.