Entity 2.1.24

[troymac1ure]

Surface properties working fine for standard maps, something not right for bsp conversion (my problem, it should work, wall walker did)
(I think collision bsp.ent needs looking at I noticed negative shorts for faces/planes, not you problem)

I have noticed this too, not sure why, but you are probably right with the plugin thing.

Loading strings; thank fuck for that, the amount of times I've hit a strings box by mistake and cursed, I'll Gladdy accept sightly longer map load time
quick plugs, thanks will speed things up, in future if its easy add a refresh tag button, if not easy don't bother
Portal viewer, I don't know what I'm looking at, but I like looking at it,

Loading maps will take no longer. The strings are loaded in a seperate thread, so you can use access the map while it's loading them.
The plugins are applied automatically, but the way that the meta editors work is that once a tag is loaded, it only changes the values and doesn't reload the whole tag. If you click on a different tag type, then back on the first, it will change. In this method you can actually have two tabs open with the same tag, but under two different plugins.
I really don't know what the portal viewer is either. I just put it there b/c someone else might know

Reporting problem as the error box instructed
browsing bitmaps in delta towers bsp3 scenarios\bitmaps\water\water_deltatemple error "23 format not supported"
System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index and count must refer to a location within the string.
Parameter name: count
at System.String.Remove(Int32 startIndex, Int32 count)
at entity.MapForm.loadmeta(Int32 tag)
at entity.MapForm.treeView1_AfterSelect(Object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e)

I'll try to duplicate this and find the issue. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh yeah... and I forgot on the list the Collision Editor. lol. Too many changes...

[kornman00]

Sorry that's it for this version.
Also, source is available on the FTP server.

If you guys want to continue to maintain this program, why not use code hosting, eg code.google, bitbucket, etc?

[troymac1ure]

Sorry that's it for this version.
Also, source is available on the FTP server.

If you guys want to continue to maintain this program, why not use code hosting, eg code.google, bitbucket, etc?

I'll look into it. Never used code hosting before. Also, I'm the only one who updates this thing. I just post the code cause meh. Maybe someone will feel like adding/fixing something and I feel that the source should continue to be open.

[bumlove]

Portals

For those who want to address the framerate issue, you can subdivide the level with clusters/portals in 3ds Max. Test the portals in Sapien/Halo with the command 'raterizer_wireframe 1'. I've created clusters that cut off rendered geometry above ground, but the cavern needs clusters for it's openings, and above the mountain, so that unneeded geometry isn't rendered. This is what causes the frame-rate to slow down when the player is above the ground. It can be fixed, but I didn't have the time.

I get the principle, the reason for the slowdown on your base moving post

Maybe someone will feel like adding/fixing something.

I would if I could, I'm wanting to learn but know nothing so I'm suffering from information overload with no way of prioritizing, I'm starting on "thinking in C" to go on to "thinking in C++" I have a distinction in electrical engineering but coding, I go cross eyed and think dark thoughts about prostitutes and hammers, for the safety of the working girls round here Is there a "spoon-feeding C":XD:?

[troymac1ure]

It took me forever to switch to a windows environment. I was programming in DOS for ages (Turbo Pascal & Assembly mostly, some BASIC & C/C++). So When I first started trying to learn windows programming, I thought visual basic was a good place to start. Easy to make forms and the code was just BASIC with windows functions (very confusing at the start). Then I moved to Delphi (Pascal for Windows) and then I found Entity and it's bugs, so I picked up C# and learned that. I definitely prefer C# over the others.

M$ offers a free IDE/Compiler (Visual Studio Express), so d/l it and give it a go. Learn the basics before trying to dive into the deep end. Make a form with different controls (Button, TextBox, Label, etc) and then try to write code to connect them (say change the Label Text to whatever is written in the TextBox when the button is pressed). Just start small and remember you can never hit F1 <help> enough. Windows programming is a lot of learning & remembering commands.

If you need help, I'm here. Also, there's lots of tutorials on the web. Just make sure that you pickup good programming habits from the start, such as:
1) comment your code (I'm weak at this)
2) always use Descriptive variable names (ex. don't use "f" when you can use "fileName")
3) Keep your indents aligned (this is almost always automatically done within IDEs now)
4) Use many function/procedures, don't put all your code into one massive function

Start with these rules and it will go a long way.

[Prey]

So just thought I'd come and say.. crappy codebase dude

But no worries I started cleaning up the code today.. still like to help out from time to time on the coding front Here's a little log of what I did today:..

Code: Select all

[06.Apr.11] - Replaced all 'Maps.map[mapnumber]..' code with a single 'Map' reference in each mapForm (don't know why it wasn't done this way before, the abstraction made no logical sense and was harder to code with..)
	    - Moved map load code into a static 'Map.LoadFromFile(..', and made the Map .ctor internal.
	    - changed MainMenuEdit.cs to use Map objects not MapForms, and moved required code from MapForm into static methods.
	    - Removed 'Maps' class, placed Refresh method in 'Map'.
	    - Windows form generated code, in mapform and mainform, grouped together and placed at bottom of each code file out of the way.
	    - Lot of map load code commented
	    - Main form methods grouped together by relevance and placed in regions. Updated some menu names to reflect their usage.
	    - MetaEditor control now checks Meta Editor .xml exists before loading it to stop the mapForm designer crashing saying the file doesn't exist.
	    - Almost complete with grouping methods in MapForm into regions.

It's a relatively large codebase, so I think I'll probably spend some more time on it over the next two weeks before posting the result. My general aim is to make the code more obvious as to what it's doing (ie. order code, comment, re-structure some parts, and fix others). Some of the things that are being done make stuff look so much more complicated than it is..

[XZodia]

Good job prey, once you've finished doing that, I'll be more inclined to work on it (if I have time)


Also, long time no see.

[troymac1ure]

All I can say is

Nice. Can't wait to see it.

BTW what is .ctor?

Code: Select all

[06.Apr.11] - Moved map load code into a static 'Map.LoadFromFile(..', and made the Map .ctor internal.

It's a relatively large codebase, so I think I'll probably spend some more time on it over the next two weeks before posting the result. My general aim is to make the code more obvious as to what it's doing (ie. order code, comment, re-structure some parts, and fix others). Some of the things that are being done make stuff look so much more complicated than it is..

I agree. I just have been too busy adding/modifying that I didn't even take time to try and clean the code in any massive way. I've come to understand most of it by now, so I just tend to leave it at that. But parts of it are quite confusing and I'm sure I messed those up a bit trying to understand them & fix them (chunk cloner). At least I commented those areas a bit. I've been coding alone for so many years that my documentation has been more along the lines of self memory triggers than anything else (Funny, I used to be quite good at commenting in school...)
If others are willing to step in on parts I have a list of ideas that I've been thinking of on my Laptop. I could post them up here, but I'm looking at doing code hosting, as suggested by Kornman.

I haven't touched the code since release, so I'll wait for you to finish the cleanup before attempting anything new.
(Sorry bumlove & others for the no saving of Enums ATM)

I dont use recursive unless im duplicating a tag.
I havnt tried this version, but the last one eeFF'd up tag names if i saved them recursive then built them in.

would it br possible to rename a tag recursivly?

Like say i take mach tag, swap/add/remove/etc, all the other attached goodies, then i want to save it for another map, so i tick Recursive, then right click
the mach tag and rename it at the time of saving, (this is where the magic happens) durring saving the App should change the prefix/name of all linked tags being saved.

So if the mach was named "Ogrish_lift" the hlmt, coll, mode, phmo, shaders' oops that would be a problem all shaders with one name.
Upon more thought, Just forget you read this part, i must need my meds!

Just re-thinking this, when renaming, it could check for any duplicates of the original name and rename those at least. So HLMT, MODE, COLL at least would be named accordingly and shaders, etc would remain untouched.

[Prey]

Hello XZodia

Troy: ctor is just shorthand for constructor, in that comment I meant I made it internal so now you can't do 'Map map = new Map()' but instead have to use Map.LoadFromFile().

I agree. I just have been too busy adding/modifying that I didn't even take time to try and clean the code in any massive way. I've come to understand most of it by now, so I just tend to leave it at that. But parts of it are quite confusing and I'm sure I messed those up a bit trying to understand them & fix them (chunk cloner).

I ran the solution through a code formatter and it's a lot more readable now ha.

[troymac1ure]

Hello XZodia

Troy: ctor is just shorthand for constructor, in that comment I meant I made it internal so now you can't do 'Map map = new Map()' but instead have to use Map.LoadFromFile().

I agree. I just have been too busy adding/modifying that I didn't even take time to try and clean the code in any massive way. I've come to understand most of it by now, so I just tend to leave it at that. But parts of it are quite confusing and I'm sure I messed those up a bit trying to understand them & fix them (chunk cloner).

I ran the solution through a code formatter and it's a lot more readable now ha.

Right, I was trying to figure out if you just hit a wrong key or something. I was like WTF letters are beside .ctor on the keyboard? My excitement is mixed with fear of different code now that I learned to read all that gibberish

[sabu]

troymac1ure I just wanted to say you released an excellent version of this app. I still run into common errors like when I'm attempting to do more than one or two things and then it will get an Unhandled Exception, which in my case is perfectly fine because I've gotten a lot done with your release rather than others. As a matter of fact here's something even more cool, every Entity I've ever used trying to use Bsp viewer and put my objects/machs in the coordinates I wanted them, they would always show up in the game like someone threw them out of proportion and dropped a bomb on it, yours however does not do that I really don't know why but I'm thankful.

[troymac1ure]

I think about version 2.1.5 I finally figured out the proper rotation code. It took me a few tries, but that annoyed me too. You would lean a gun up against the wall, then in game it would be half in the floor and upside down or whatever. Every little fix helps

[Grimdoomer]

Troy I never realized what your avatar picture was until I read what it said lol.

[bumlove]

I'm discovering something new about entity all the time, ME² unused now show the hex code is a bloody good idea, if it where aligned properly, at present It shows the hex from the beginning of the tag for the size of the unused, theoretical example:

Code: Select all

Pluggin
Short/>
Short/>
Unused_size8/>

Code: Select all

Hex
64 62 79 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

so all we should see is "00' 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" for the unused but what we see is "64 62 79 10 00 00 00 00"
When moving the ME² window it goes mad on the system memory I've learnt just to minimize (once more a practices thing)
I'm not sure on the control swapper I understand the principle of what it is & how it should work, I just can't get it to work (turn a unused_size8 into 2 floats and then.......?)
other than that I'm still loving it,
I assume you've had plenty of on line reading trying to figure stuff out have you run into this H2V map making tutorial
Oh I found some visual C# tutorials spoon feedable no lumpy bits no chewing required, they have a great way of saying "This piece of code is something called a Method but that isn't important for now because you're going to use something like this 20 times and when I do get round to explaining you won't be afraid anymore"
I have good feelings about 2.1.12 I don't know why
oh quick question how do display a signed byte or is it unsigned I can't remember, 255 doesn't look as good as -1

[troymac1ure]

I'm discovering something new about entity all the time, ME² unused now show the hex code is a bloody good idea, if it where aligned properly, at present It shows the hex from the beginning of the tag for the size of the unused, theoretical example:

Code: Select all

Pluggin
Short/>
Short/>
Unused_size8/>

Code: Select all

Hex
64 62 79 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

so all we should see is "00' 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" for the unused but what we see is "64 62 79 10 00 00 00 00"

Hmmm, didn't realize that it was showing from tag beginning. I'll fix that. I put it in just in case there IS useful information in the Unused you can be like... "Hmmm... that's not just zeroes..."

When moving the ME² window it goes mad on the system memory I've learnt just to minimize (once more a practices thing)

It's alright as long as the entire window is displayed (does the same if you move a portion off of the screen). Unfortunately, this is cause by a custom Tab Control (Tabs now in ME²) and it's a known issue to them. I haven't tried fixing it. It was a quick switch as I was creating my own Tab class, but realized it was taking all my time when I could just use a pre-made one.

I'm not sure on the control swapper I understand the principle of what it is & how it should work, I just can't get it to work (turn a unused_size8 into 2 floats and then.......?)
other than that I'm still loving it,

Never finished it. For one, I didn't like ME1, it was a pain to work with. Also, for the control swapper to work, it would need to intelligently figure out how many controls after to use, etc, etc and I decided that my time was better spent elsewhere as people could just edit the .ent files.

I assume you've had plenty of on line reading trying to figure stuff out have you run into this H2V map making tutorial
Oh I found some visual C# tutorials spoon feedable no lumpy bits no chewing required, they have a great way of saying "This piece of code is something called a Method but that isn't important for now because you're going to use something like this 20 times and when I do get round to explaining you won't be afraid anymore"
I have good feelings about 2.1.12 I don't know why
oh quick question how do display a signed byte or is it unsigned I can't remember, 255 doesn't look as good as -1

Nope, Haven't actually looked at any H2V stuff at all. I'll check it out though.
-1 actually does look better (and you can use if (x < 0) checks instead of if (x = 255)), but what you prefer is unsigned (signed means it has a +/- sign, so negative numbers allowed. Whereas unsigned doesn't allow a +/- sign, so all numbers will be > 0).
ubyte is the typecast.

[bumlove]

bugger had quite a long post but got kicked off, quickly entity doesn't like ubyte in fact I think entity shows ubytes when byte is written so, FF hex = 255 in entity with typecast "byte" I want signed byte I've tried sbyte (stop looking around before I get booted off again)
Control swapper defunct, no problem I don't mind notepad

*starts pouring of Prey's spring cleaning*

[Prey]

Well the codebase is looking a lot better now, I've attached what I've done to this post.

Note: there will be no difference for end users, but a lot of difference for programmers

Here's a change log of everything I did:

Code: Select all

[06.Apr.11] - Replaced all 'Maps.map[mapnumber]..' code with a single 'Map' reference in each mapForm (don't know why it wasn't done this way before, the abstraction made no logical sense and was harder to code with..)
	    - Moved map load code into a static 'Map.LoadFromFile(..', and made the Map .ctor internal.
	    - changed MainMenuEdit.cs to use Map objects not MapForms, and moved required code from MapForm into static methods.
	    - Removed 'Maps' class, placed Refresh method in 'Map'.
	    - Windows form generated code, in mapform and mainform, grouped together and placed at bottom of each code file out of the way.
	    - Lot of map load code commented
	    - Main form methods grouped together by relevance and placed in regions. Updated some menu names to reflect their usage.
	    - MetaEditor control now checks Meta Editor .xml exists before loading it to stop the mapForm designer crashing saying the file doesn't exist.
	    - Almost complete with grouping methods in MapForm into regions.

[07.Apr.11] - Finished placing all mapForm methods in regions.
	    - Moved classes in Map.cs to their own files.
            - Restructured file hierarchy in solution explorer.
            - Removed unused files.
	    - Ran solution through NArrange tool, which has arranged every code file so they all follow the same code standard
	    - Ran solution through DeCodEx tool which moves generated windows form UI code from the main file to a partial class in a designer file.
	    - Moved HaloMap and MetaEditor Projects into same folder as Main Project.
	    - Moved solution file outside entity project folder.
	    - Replaced all Application.StartupPath uses with Global.StartupPath; A custom variable that always points to the release folder, meaning dont have to have a copy of plugins etc in the debug folder.
	    - created a Global.ShowErrorMsg function for use when a messagebox is shown in a catch statement. This function also shows the internal error for better debugging.

[08.Apr.11] - Ran Resharper Code Cleanup, with StyleCop plugin, on Solution.
	    - Removed ref to map object in all meta class functions, and replaced with a single ref in the ctor, with refactoring
	    - Placed one meta scanner object in meta object, and refactored methods to use that.
	    - Replaced 'tagnumber' with 'TagIndex'
	    - Moved Metafunctions into Miscfunctions file, and removed map params from all these methods too.
	    - Made chunkAdder non-static and an object of Map, and moved into HaloMap lib.
	    - Removed most of places where map is passed as a parameter needlessly.
	
[09.Apr.11] - Moved a lots of files into HaloMap.
	    - Started creating xml prefs file for storing all settings, instead of the registry..

[10.Apr.11] - Finished xml prefs stuff.

[11.Apr.10] - Removed passing around of intptr for bitmaps.
	    - Refactored namespaces.
	    - Fixed most warnings.
	    - Ran Ghostdoc on solution.

The three worst areas still in the code in my opinion are:
Meta Editor: Code isn't very modular, or efficient.
Bitmap Class: Lots of meaningless variables, and the functions see to take 100+ parameters..
All Render Forms: Lots of copied code, rubbish dealing with graphics device.

I didn't do anything with them though, because your working on a new meta editor troy, and I've got better code for the last two in my Orbit app, so no point in going near them.

Also I removed your registry stuff and replaced it all with an xml file. Reason being I don't think unofficial hacking/modding programs should store stuff on a persons computer that they might not know about.. Much easier to keep it all in one directory

edit: Re-uploaded without my user settings.xml, as that may have caused errors..

[XZodia]

That. Sounds. Awesome.

Finally, an Entity source I could potentially work with...I just wish I had the time...

Really need to SVN it.

[troymac1ure]

Also I removed your registry stuff and replaced it all with an xml file. Reason being I don't think unofficial hacking/modding programs should store stuff on a persons computer that they might not know about.. Much easier to keep it all in one directory

edit: Re-uploaded without my user settings.xml, as that may have caused errors..

It's not a big deal, but I disagree. The main reason I moved to a registry entry in the first place, was so that multiple programs could be written and have instant access to shared resources without always having to keep pointing to map directories or plugins, etc. This way you enter it into one program and any included program needs no setup. That is why I added the file option as well, in case people wanted to be able to load multiple copies with different plugins, but now that is taken care of with the quick plugin changer. I posted the code to be used in other programs, but other than 1 other program I made, I don't think it's been used at all, so like I said no big deal. Would have been much more useful at the start of the H2 modding times.
Now if installing multiple versions, you will need to resetup your directories. As long as it's done in a clean manner and not just filling your registry with gibberish placed in no particular order, meh.

anyways, just d/l the source. Will check it out soon. Thanks for all the cleanup

[OwnZ joO]

What did you do to clean it up prey? Did you say you ran it through a code formatter? I remember trying to clean it up years ago, and I just ended up giving up and writing my own stuff based off of code from entity and other apps.

[Prey]

Well I did use the resharper plugin for VS to code format, and the stylecop plugin for resharper to format more. Also the ghostdoc plugin to generate sort-of-useful comments everywhere

After that I did a bunch of manual refactoring stuff, which can be seen in the log, and added some of my own comments. Lots more can be done, but I think I made a good start.

[troymac1ure]

Just looked at the code. It looks alot cleaner but ...
It looks like you grabbed 2.1.10, so now I need to figure out the changes I made in 2.1.11 and reimplement

[Prey]

That's the only source you've posted so..

[troymac1ure]

Sorry, I didn't realize you grabbed the source from page 1. I u/l the new source to the FTP server, but didn't post the link here. I forgot I had u/l the source to page 1 before; I don't usually do this b/c the source is too large, but I remembered there was direct access to the FTP server from here.

this was it:
Download

[sabu]

Critical error trying to run RTH. Haven't attempted it in the past with this updated version of entity because I wasn't able to debug my Xbox at all to begin with.
In other words, I'm not able to connect to the Xbox with this version, the only version of Entity that I can connect with is UE 1.6.
I'm running Windows 7.