MissionComputer: The Saga Continues

Curious, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. My only interaction with the audio frameworks is to occasionally hand the system a sound and say ‘play this’. It may be that the newer Mac OS doesn’t get along with the System 7-style sound routines that the EV format and therefore MissionComputer require.

Any progress on a new Windows build?

@starsword, on 05 January 2012 - 10:57 PM, said in MissionComputer: The Saga Continues:

Any progress on a new Windows build?

No, but I have posted version 4.2.1 for Macintosh, incorporating all the minor fixes from the last year. It’ll be up whenever they get to updating the add-ons directory.

Whereas a fortnight now has trebly passed
since e’er the add-ons page endured a change,
be yet there nary word come down from high
to proffer hint when next shall update hap?

Good point — I don’t even know who the right person is to poke these days, but I’ll do some asking around.

Ooh, 10th Anniversary Edition, very nice. Glad to see the three easter eggs I know about are still working, and thanks for poking the server monkeys people in charge of the add-ons page.

Edit: Any chance you can poke them about character encoding on the add-ons page? The description for MC4.2.1 reads

Quote

MissionComputer is a scenario & plug-in editor for the Escape Velocity games. Version 4.2.1 improves the functionality of the government classes window and the oütf and wëap editors, and fixes known bugs. (Requires Mac OS 10.3 or higher.)

Note the terms “oütf” and “wëap”.

Similarly, my own recent addition to the add-ons page, “Active Flares for EVCN”, has description there reading

Quote

This is a plug-in for the "EV Classic for Nova" total conversion of EV: Nova. Active Flares for EVCN restores the behavior of Decoy Flares to more closely match the original Escape Velocity game. With this plug-in, Decoy Flares are fired by the second trigger and drift slowly through space.

The salient parts are the backslashes before every quote character. That behavior is not consistent with older uploads, which have quote marks with no backslashes. But new add-ons have such backslashes added before single quotes, double quotes, and backslashes.

This post has been edited by Qaanol : 24 January 2012 - 03:29 PM

Your concerns have been relayed.

Errrrmmm... I hate to bring this up, because it looks like a bug that you've thought was fixed several times in the past. But there's still a problem with the contribute/require bits.

What I'm seeing is that bits 4H and 8H will not stay set, no matter what. If you set them, close the editor, and reopen it without doing anything else, they'll be unset. Likewise if you save and reopen the file, restart the program, etc. If you set those two bits in something else (ResEdit, in my case), then open in MC, they'll be unset. It happens on both the contribute and require fields.

One thing I've noticed: if you open the contribute or require editor and then hit OK without making any changes, the file is considered unsaved. Could it be actively unsetting those bits somewhere in there? Just speculating, probably unhelpfully, but there you are.

For reference: version 4.2.0 on OS X 10.5.8, G5.

Ick. The marking as unsaved doesn’t mean anything, but it may well be that while fixing Contribute/Require bits on Intel, I broke them for PowerPC in the process. To the best of my knowledge it works properly on Intel, but the whole system probably needs a thorough audit or perhaps even rebuilding.

I was afraid it might be something like that. Phooey.

Not a biggie, but I wonder if we can make it easier for devs to give them a sub field texts for outfits and ships when adding subtitles such as "illegal" or "used" without having to memorize funky characters which allows subtitle to show in dark grey beneath the names of outfits and ships.

The oütf editor already supports the second line, doesn’t it? If the feature is missing anywhere else the game supports it, that’s an oversight.

It does, but for ships you need to type \n to get the second line, and then remember to use hyphens to make the second line dark rather than light.

You know how the "Open Special" menu shows each Nova files and whatever resources it has? Well seeing that the window dialog can be resized, can you make it so that resource names don't get broken up when pushed down to the next line? It kinda makes it hard to read. Also, I thought of an idea to make things less clutter when looking for files containing specific resource(s) and that is to add checkbox filters.

@coraxus, on 23 April 2012 - 12:46 AM, said in MissionComputer: The Saga Continues:

Well seeing that the window dialog can be resized, can you make it so that resource names don't get broken up when pushed down to the next line?

Done — while I had it open, I also made the text larger and less cramped, and added support for the scroll wheel. The checkbox filters will take some thought.

I'm still hoping for a new Windows release. Any progress?

I think I might actually be in a position to do that. I’ll take a look at the code and get back to you.

While you're at it, did you alter the shïp editor to support easy second line editing? You'd be surprised how often I forget whether I need to use forward slash or backslash and also whether it goes before or after the 'n'.

I'm also looking forward to a new Windows version.

@darthkev, on 11 June 2012 - 12:01 AM, said in MissionComputer: The Saga Continues:

While you're at it, did you alter the shïp editor to support easy second line editing?

I haven’t yet found a way to accommodate a two-line field — the shïp editor is one of the most crowded — but for the mean time I’ve modified the field’s help tag to remind you about the C-style use of \n to indicate a linebreak.