MissionComputer: The Saga Continues

Actually, I did find a copy of MC 4.1 in my downloads after looking in there. I could've sworn I looked there before and saw nothing, but it was there after all. Oops.

Thanks DavidArthur. It is great to have MC so much more stable now.

What is all this ballyhoo about internet-enabled disk images? On my machine when I download the MC dmg it goes to my downloads folder just like everything else. I then manually mount the image, manually copy the MC application to my desired location, and manually unmount the dmg. I like it this way and want to make sure it never changes. If I happen to get a machine on which this automated extraction and deletion does occur, how would I go about disabling it?

It's all down to how your browser is configured. MissionComputer's disk image simply has the flag enabled that tells browsers — mostly Safari — to extract its contents.

Hey, how's the Windows port coming? (If at all.)

QUOTE (StarSword @ Aug 31 2010, 12:27 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hey, how's the Windows port coming? (If at all.)

It runs. Slightly better than before. I have a to-do list, but nothing resembling a release date.

I’d like to once again commend the excellent work you’ve done on MissionComputer.

And also grumble about how long it takes to delete resources. I sometimes have cause to delete resource en masse , for instance during the course of splitting up one file into several files. Case in point, today I needed to delete 410 dësc resources from a file. I used a stopwatch and timed MissionComputer 4.1.0 as taking 2:02.74, meaning 122.74 seconds to delete them. By contrast it took Rezilla only 1.20 second. No typo in those numbers, MC was over 100 times slower.

I'll take a look at the deletion code — there’s a good chance that all of that abstraction I did to fight data loss back in the bad old days is preventing efficient mass deletions. How does the Delete button in the Resource Copier compare?

QUOTE (David Arthur @ Nov 8 2010, 09:10 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

How does the Delete button in the Resource Copier compare?

1:57.87, so 117.87 seconds, almost the same as MC proper. Plus the resource copier has no way to close without saving afterwards, whereas both MC and Rezilla do.

I have another request. Could you make a “print mode” for the star map (and maybe the sÿst view too) that turns the background white, makes the text labels black, and puts uninhabited systems in light gray rather than pure white please? Sometimes I like to print off hard copies of screenshots from MissionComputer so that I can mark them up in pencil. The current setup makes it rather difficult to do so.

QUOTE (Qaanol @ Nov 8 2010, 01:25 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

. . . today I needed to delete 410 dësc resources from a file. I used a stopwatch and timed MissionComputer 4.1.0 as taking 2:02.74, meaning 122.74 seconds to delete them.

Fixed, thanks.

QUOTE (Qaanol @ Nov 10 2010, 04:06 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Could you make a “print mode” for the star map (and maybe the sÿst view too) that turns the background white, makes the text labels black, and puts uninhabited systems in light gray rather than pure white please?

Should be possible. (Incidentally, File->Export already allows you to save the full map as an image. It generally needs some cropping, but I'd think it's still more convenient than screenshots.)

QUOTE (Qaanol @ Nov 10 2010, 04:06 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Could you make a “print mode” for the star map (and maybe the sÿst view too) that turns the background white, makes the text labels black, and puts uninhabited systems in light gray rather than pure white please?

ev.png (44.47K)
Number of downloads: 20

I've also fixed the Export command so that the images no longer require extensive cropping.

Nice. Does print mode show systems in their gövt colors, or at least have the option to do so (I hope)?

QUOTE (Qaanol @ Nov 23 2010, 10:43 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Does print mode show systems in their gövt colors, or at least have the option to do so (I hope)?

I suppose it could — I was thinking of it more as a greyscale mode, but I suppose this is no longer inherent in people’s definition of ‘print’.

I hesitated to post this, because I think I must be overlooking something... but I don't think I am. There doesn't appear to be a working "undo" option. I, being a fairly careless person, have often accidently erased a decent amount of text from a desc, only to discover immediately afterwards that I didn't want to do that. But there doesn't appear to be anyway to undo my last action, and it automatically saves, so I have to re-write everything I just deleted.

Speaking of that, any plans for adding a spellcheck? Normally I don't really need one, but since I do most of my work late at night, it's easy for me to slip up without noticing it...

These are just minor things I've noticed. I love your program, it's incredibly useful and well-designed, thank you for making it at what must be a considerable loss of productive time to yourself!

QUOTE (Male_Valkyrie @ Nov 24 2010, 11:22 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There doesn't appear to be a working "undo" option.

Correct. Unfortunately that would require substantial architectural changes, as the frameworks on which MissionComputer is based don’t (as Cocoa does) offer automatic undo support, and this is at least beyond the scope of the 4.1.1 update I’m working on at the moment.

If you notice the problem before closing the resource window, you do have the option of choosing 'Revert this Resource', which will at least restore what was there when you opened the resource in question.

QUOTE (Male_Valkyrie @ Nov 24 2010, 11:22 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Speaking of that, any plans for adding a spellcheck?

I could, I suppose, call in the system spell-checker, but again that’s substantially more complicated than it would be in Cocoa, and it’s never really seemed worth the trouble. I tend to assume that anyone who is writing a substantial amount of text will be pasting it in from a real word processor anyway.

QUOTE (David Arthur @ Nov 24 2010, 09:56 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I suppose it could — I was thinking of it more as a greyscale mode, but I suppose this is no longer inherent in people’s definition of ‘print’.

Well, my purpose in printing is being able to do things like draw outlines around the group of systems that will have each particular düde. Having sÿsts color coded by gövt makes that a lot easier.

Perhaps three modes — normal, printer, and colour printer — are needed.

QUOTE (Qaanol @ Nov 25 2010, 12:05 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well, my purpose in printing is being able to do things like draw outlines around the group of systems that will have each particular düde. Having sÿsts color coded by gövt makes that a lot easier.

Is this better suited to your needs?
evcolour.png (36.06K)
Number of downloads: 15

QUOTE (David Arthur @ Nov 29 2010, 06:25 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Is this better suited to your needs?

Perfect!

…the other thing that would be really useful, is probably way too complicated and way too much work to implement, but I’ll mention it anyway. One thing I like to do when printing a galaxy map is to replace the name of each system with some particular attribute I’m interested in. So, for example, I might replace every system’s name with its AvgShips value. That way when I print the map, I just see how many ships are in each system.

Or I might pick some düde or group of düdes and replace each system’s name with that düde ID number (or sequence of düde ID numbers separated by spaces) if that düde appears in that system, possibly showing the percent chance it will appear, or a blank name if none of the düdes I’m looking at appear there. Similarly I might rename each system to the name of its government, or to the number of asteroids there, or its radar interference level.

I have rather convoluted procedures using ConText, ResStore, Excel, TextWrangler, and a custom script I wrote to automate most of the process, but it still takes several minutes to produce each map. And there are some that would take me more work than it’s worth to do, like renaming systems by the prices of commodities sold at spöbs in them.

What would be ideal for this would not be replacing the system names, but leaving them in place and just listing selected attributes below the name. But I suspect this is way outside the core feature set of MissionComputer. So I’ll just mention that it would be nice for some program to be able to do. A sort of “universe viewer” if you will.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 29 November 2010 - 07:57 PM

I certainly like the idea of being able to export more data through the star map, and have back to the days of Pontus's tools. But doing anything like this would require major changes to the star map editor that aren't within the scope of anything I'm currently working on (though I will keep it in mind).