Map Forge Preview

[djo]

I've never played with wine or crossover much. I have no idea whether VB apps run or not. (Anyone else know?)

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

It is being developed in VB6. I strongly considered Python, but Boa (for GUI development) felt very awkward after about 12 years of experience with VB.

Python does not, as far as I can tell from a survey a couple years ago, have a really decent visual editor for GUIs for any of the GUIs Python supports. I just do my GUIs by hand.

[lch]

Hi. This really looks awesome, Ballbarian.

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

It is being developed in VB6. I strongly considered Python, but Boa (for GUI development) felt very awkward after about 12 years of experience with VB. Since VB has been around so long, I would assume that most of it's features would be supported by crossover software like Wine.

I can only speak for myself, but Wine is awkward. I'm a supporter of Python-based GUIs myself, and I'm somebody who still constructs all those dialogues with a text editor instead of ever learning to use an IDE for that, but I can of course understand that a project as ambitious as this is a bit much for a new start in Python. Here's an idea how you might make it halfway towards the new technologies and learn something new in the process: Try to develop the program in C# or VB.Net with Visual Studio. Those are the new revamped versions of those programming languages and they're really a blast to develop because they have a lot of really cool features - I never ever did Basic but I've been programming a couple of tools in C# and it's really nice. And the Mono Project has been working to get Microsoft's DotNet family cross-platform compatible, too. So in case you have a .NET program, you should be able to get a Mono-compatible version out of it, which other people can use with Mono.

The difference between Wine and Mono, as far as I am understanding it, is this: Wine has to reproduce the Win32 API so that programs can run, and a lot of the internals from Microsoft are undocumented. The .NET platform consists of new programming languages (C#/VB.NET), a .NET runtime and a set of classes, and those are standarized. Programs written in those programming languages contain bytecode which is being interpreted, like Java bytecode is being interpreted through a Java virtual machine. (But since this really is only superficial knowledge, somebody who has more of an insight in the matter may correct me on all that I'm saying here)

In any case, big props to all the work you've done. I hope that you'll find some pointers so that even old dogs can learn new tricks, too.

[NTJedi]

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

There is much more that I did not show, but hopefully this will give a sense of the progress so far.
(Thanks to everyone for the encouraging words!)

Excellent stuff... what timeframe when the first release will be ready? (1 week? ; 3 weeks? )

[Ballbarian]

Originally Posted by NTJedi

Excellent stuff... what timeframe when the first release will be ready? (1 week? ; 3 weeks? )

Not sure at this point. Right now I am in bug squishing mode. Trying to finish up known items on my to-do list and periodically working on the map in the video to flush out as many bugs as possible before the initial release.

[NTJedi]

Originally Posted by Ballbarian

Right now I am in bug squishing mode. Trying to finish up known items on my to-do list and periodically working on the map in the video to flush out as many bugs as possible before the initial release.

I thought of a feature which you might be interested in providing for the map forge. What about a copy and paste province contents? If someone wants to copy the contents from one province to another province it can be done with two easy clicks.

This way if someone wanted to create half a map of only hoburg population types and hoburg independents then it could be accomplished much more quickly. This would also save time for someone who wanted to setup 10 identical provinces in the center of a map.

[Foodstamp]

I've not been able to get VB stuff to run in linux with WINE, but I doubt that it is impossible. Sometimes to get things to work in linux you need a PhD in computer science, and this may be one of the things that will work but is beyond my level of experience.

[lch]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

Sometimes to get things to work in linux you need a PhD in computer science

This is true for any operating system, I'd say. Give a smart kid a system with any OS on it, and it will reach an amount of proficiency in using it in the same time as a similar kid with another OS on it. Once you stop "playing" you'll demand that things work like they always did, of course.

[Lingchih]

You could always run your intel Mac under Windows or Linux, to edit the map, and then run Dom under the Mac OS.

[Foodstamp]

Yeah, I run winders stuff under winders now and then dual boot into linux. But many people probably don't have the money to run winders unless it came with their system. Fortunately, I have access to the MSDN library for a few more months so all Microsoft software is free .

[djo]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

But many people probably don't have the money to run winders unless it came with their system.

(emphasis mine)

Or, more importantly, the desire.

(Windows, )