Object Builder: Bug Reports

[F_Smith]

http://home.austin.rr.com/lostmercha...ashEditor.html

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When clicking on the 'Save' button, a text box should appear with some text in it. Does it?

One machine at work didn't act right (IE4, Windows NT with no service packs).

All other machines seem fine.

Please, anyone with time, check this out for me???

[Mark_Everson]

Hi F. Smith:

Seems to work just fine with Internet Explorer 5.0. I haven't tried anything else in the applet since I'm just back from my conference... but I thought I could be useful and give you some immediate feedback. I can tell already that this will get pretty interesting fairly fast!

I'll try to help out in some of the discussions on government coding later this evening. But for now I need to get my act together and mow the lawn before it gets dark on me.

[Mark_Everson]

F_Smith:

I have now run this through its paces. I propose that rather than having everyone look at it each time, potentially with little changed between the last time, we just have people take turns. Perhaps Rodrigo or Axi should check every, or every other, iteration. Especially when some of the real guts of the model start getting in there.

I assume you are not supposed to be able to assign religions cultures or tendencies yet for the ethnic groups... The only bug I ran into was in dispelling some of the little input windows I needed to click on the x button twice to get rid of it. Focus problem?

One thing that IMO would be useful for the save files is an XML viewer that would create something easier for a normal person to read... so rather than the two flanking tags you could instead have it read:

"Pop: 1000" instead of two tags flanking a 1000.

[F_Smith]

Mark:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this input.

The idea hopefully is going to be for the model designers to use this regularly for testing out their ideas, once the save/load function is finished. And it should only take about 10 to 15 minutes to go thru each release and run a quick test or two, so I kinda hope that everyone on the team would take the 15 mins to crank on it. Maybe not every release, but many of the releases.

But then again, I'll take what I can get.

1) Assigning Religion, Culture, Tendencies and Attributes (one more to add on there) to the EGs will be in there next -- probably tonight.

2) That XML file is to get around the applet restrictions for saving to your local drive. That file is not meant to be read by a person -- it's just a representation of the state of the scenario you have set up using the tool. The idea behind that 'save' text box is that you copy that text and paste it into a text file, and that becomes your 'scenario' file. When you run that code from your local machine, it can read the file on your machine. So tests and scenarios can be made.

3) Thanks, I'll check out the prob with the dialog boxes. It's just a simple windowlistener, listening for 'windowClosing' events. Shouldn't be any room for error, tho. I haven't really experienced that -- maybe it's the browser? What version?

[Frank80878]

I was messing around w/ the scenario builder and It saved my scenario fine, but when I tried to load it it didn't have it on the list. I don't know if it was my computer or your site but something went wrong. And also it wouldn't let me "X" the box to close it when I was done.

[F_Smith]

Frank:

Hi. Thanks for the feedback, you're saving me a bunch of time.

You're correct, I'm sorry, the save feature is only about 2/3rds done -- I stayed up late watching a movie with my daughter, and did start coding until about 1 a.m. I went ahead and posted what I had. It'll be finished tonight. There is no windowlistener yet to close the box -- the only way to close it is with the 'OK' button, at the moment. Will be fixed tonight.

1) Was this run thru the applet, or did you download and run it locally?

And please check again in the morning, I'll post the changes around 3 a.m. central.

Thanks again!

[Frank80878]

Hey F_Smith, Glad to help anyway I can. Besides it keeps me from going crazy from the anticipation of the Clash release date. By the way I used the applet to use the site. I'll make sure to check it again later when the updates are complete.

[F_Smith]

Hi, Frank:

It's a bit further along now. Still moving along.

Needs another night of polishing, but I put it up there anyway, for anyone interested in following the progress. Without running servlets, I can't write to the server drives, so I had to find a work-around. I think you'll not mind my solution too much, you get all the functionality. Just remember that it's only a temporary fix. I'll also create an application version that can be downloaded, when time permits and that will not have any problem saving and loading files.

See ya.

[F_Smith]

Okay, it slices, it dices -- now can it make julianne fries?

You can save and load. You can begin to get a visiual look at how you want this laid out.

Civs can control squares, but I haven't built in 'provinces' yet. You can put groups of people in squares. You can define and save civs, religions, cultures, and the map.

Now I take a few days off. Next week, we make this work the way ya'll really want it to . . .

[axi]

I have IE5, but I can't save. I don't see any text.

Another bug: If you click on the menus to select a religion/culture when there is no EG, the menu gets stuck.

You have some more development to do before you can ask me to work on this.

[axi]

OK, now the text in the save window shows up. But what do I do? Do I copy-paste it somewhere? Strange, I can't do that.

OK, the menus don't stick now...

After all, what is all this supposed to do?

[F_Smith]

Hi, Axi:

Actually, you're helping greatly. This is the heart of the development cycle, I'm afraid. Ya'll will be doing a lot of this, banging around on uncomplete 'alpha' software'.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) Debugging. At this rate, we can have a finished, fully debugged scenario builder in a few more weeks. And I can't do this myself -- these things aren't happening on my machine. If ya'll don't help me catch me these things now, then we'll have a bunch of them all at once, later.

2) Concptual design. As you bang around on this, as it develops, you can tell me how you really want it to be, and correct any mistakes I make in concept immediately. That way you get exactly the tool you need, and you get it sooner.

* * *

Won't copy/paste? Odd, I'll look into that next. But yes, the idea is that you set up a 'scenario' by creating groups of people in mapsquares, creating civs, religions, cultures, governments, etc, and then we'll add 'turn' logic in to test these models, and tweak the variables as we see how they evolve and work over a bunch of 'game turns'.

That way, we end up with working, coded, debugged models in a very short period of time -- perhaps 3 months -- and those models can be quickly integrated into the Clash code, in a matter of days or weeks.

Again, thanks for your time. This should only take each of ya'll about ten minutes, once or twice a week. But look at the speed of dev -- it's been 2 weekends, and we're already well along the way to having a working scenario designer!

[F_Smith]

Axi:

Try it now, perhaps. I made another tweak that *might* have had something to do with it, I'm not sure.

You should be able to copy the text from the 'save' box, and then paste the text back into the 'load' box.

[Kull]

I played around with it a bit, and encountered some odd things.

1) Population doesn't "stick". Every time I plug in a number it reverts to zero. NOTE: Turns out I wasn't hitting the "Enter" key after plugging in the number....that solves the problem, although it's not intuitive.

2) Initially I was somewhat confused and went straight to the Ethnic groups (before defining any of the other items like Civ, Religion, Culture, etc. I'm not clear on the exact sequence, but I think I tried to add a new Culture next, the box appeared to "freeze", upon which I hit the "Show Desktop" icon. Instantly, everything disappeared including the Task Bar! Even the Start button was gone. I brought up the "Close Program" Box but nothing was "Not Responding". So I clicked on the "Clash Scenario Editor" but hit Cancel instead of End Task or Shut Down. This displayed the offending Culture Window, which now was able to close. I repeated the process several times, and eventually the Task Bar reappeared and all the programs worked again. Weird!

3) After loading data into every window that would accept it (Civ, Religion, Culture, Social Class, Ethnic Group) I then clicked on a different map square. Immediately, none of the data is available in drop-down boxes. The data still exists when I click back to the original Map Square. NOTE: I did find that typing in the name of an ethnic group makes all the other data available in the drop-down boxes, but that still means you'd have to manually recreate the ethnic group list for every new sqaure.

4) Assuming you have entered data into the Culture window and have created a civ, there's aother problem: If I select the "No Culture Selected" dropdown box, it doesn't matter which culture I choose, the box always reverts to "No Culture Selected"

5) While playing around with the Load and Save buttons, I seem to have lost all the "Civ Detail" data, although all the Map Square data remains.

6) The only observed effect of the Form Province button is to add a Population number below the button.

7) Seize Map Square seems to work, but there's no apparent way to "unseize".

All for now!

P.S. Running IE 5.0 on the Win 98 SE O/S.

[F_Smith]

Hi, Kull:

Now we're cookin.

1) Changed it to a pop-up dialog.

2A) A new 'General Help Dialog' at the beginning will now try and explain some of the basic 'how to' stuff. I threw some text in there for now, it could be better.

2B) The Focus problem with modal dialog boxes should work right now.

3) The Religion, Culture, etc. drop-down boxes are suppose to be for the 'selected group' of people. When a square is empty, they will be too. I added a label to that panel, which might make it clearer. Is that what you meant?

4) Assigning Culture is fixed.

5) Loading 'controlled squares' should work now.

6) Provinces are not yet implemented. Next weekend. The button should now reflect that.

7) It's a little wierd in IE, but you can now un-sieze mapsquares. Will polish it up tomorrow night.

Great, and thanks for the browser/OS info. That helps a lot!