Darkstars

Recently I’ve had a little more time than usual with aflobby. Of note are a slew of bug fixes and glest support.

I’ve corrected numerous aesthetic issues, including icons that stretch tabs, and windows that are still undecorated such as the warning window. The bundled Substance has been updated to 4.1 stable, and I’ve made other GUI tweaks to make minor improvements.

I will make clear that 3.9.9 will not support the svn protocol changes unless spring is released before 3.9.9.

Glest Support?

Indeed, with the recent Glest 3 multi player alphas there’s been some talk over glest lobbies. Sadly martinho tried out the wrong lobby program and was repulsed by tasclient, resulting in official support being dropped. Nonetheless, unofficial support started. Hailstone has been working on patching glest to give external lobby support, and I can announce that the aflobby side support is now completed, and sitting in the spring svn.

So what does this involve?

Glest games in the lobby will use the ‘Glest’ mod to identify them from spring based games. Battles will then move into a battle room before the host launches the glest battle set-up screen. Details such as team numbers, spectator modes, maps or battle status are all to be ignored. Chat, player joins, exits, kicks, locks and launches are all that are needed.

More updates

I’ve also removed the html control with the clunky html tables on the player list tab. Instead it now uses a table control, so the whole thing is much faster and prettier.

All the mods in the installer should have these tags, and as of 0.76b1 the lobbies will have access to them. I personally want to change the list/drop down box mod selector into a much prettier and more useful tool using this, and any old mod not implementing the tags correctly will look plain weird, that or itll look like little efforts been put into it.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the recent release of 3.9.8.1, I’d like to address the immediate future and what i want to do in the next month or two.

A unitsync workaround

Some people, mainly satiric and smoth, seem incapable of running aflobby properly due to a mysterious unitsync issue. For some unexplained reason unitsync refuses to load. Tests with satirik showed no error messages or causes, just a generic unitsync unsatisfied link error. Further tests showed he was able to load native OS libraries with JNA but not unitsync. What’s more this all happens under windows, and never happens under Linux when setup correctly. They all have the latest and greatest versions of everything too.

So, to get around this, Ill write a small program in C++/C that will load unitsync and output all the necessary information to a cache file. The archivecachev6.txt file already outputted by unitsync is incomplete and doesn’t contain the necessary info to run the lobby.

This way the lobby doesn’t need to bother with java unitsync troubles if it’s not supported.

Glest Support

The new Glest 3.0 alphas have multiplayer support. Thus I went over to the glest forums to offer my help with a lobby effort by opening up the spring lobby code base to them via aflobby. Spring lobby support was also offered by brain damage. Suffice to say, martinho did the worst thing he possibly could, he downloaded spring and tested out tasclient, then judged the 2 other lobbies based on the fuglyness that is tasclient. Obviously tasclient didn’t impress him and he decided not to bother with us, despite never running or seeing aflobby or spring lobby at all.

But work continued! At the moment glest users are forced to hand around IP addresses by hand via email or forums to pre-arrange games. Since official support was officially gone, unofficial support is now the answer. The glest community at large seems to support the notion of a glest lobby client, and some have contacted me and have been looking into an unnofficial patch to add lobby support.

In anticipation, the svn version of aflobby currently has very basic multiple engine support. Some minor re factoring to the BattleModel class is needed to separate it into two classes (IBattleModel and IGUIBattleModel), but support is around 70% complete. Thise code also means that the eventual TA3D support can be started with 60% of the work instantly done, as is the same for any other engine using the same startup mechanism.

Rather than go the full hog and do beta 4 and release after xmas, I thought I’d better fix what was wrong here and now and push it out.

And here it is, beta 3.9.8, all the mantis bugs listed have been corrected, all those bugs that people kept coming back to in the last few weeks with 3.9.7 are gone.

But this isn’t just a bug fix release! I’ve also added a command line parameter, gotten rid of the coloured table rows people complained about, and now the battle table is now fully sortable, all columns movable. That’s not all, there’s a new right click menu enabled on the battle list that allows you to filter out battles based on their status.

As always, Linux users set your file paths in settings, and windows users extract into your spring folder.

EDIT:: a bug was found with script.txt and spring not liking AiDLL versus AIDLL. That and one where not all mods where loaded.

AFLobby beta 3.9.8.1 (zip)

Having the ugly distorted spring logo on my desktop for a while next to the pretty AFLobby and Spring Lobby icons, I knew I needed to do something about it. So I redid the spring icon, and Satirik adopted the icon, and made a new splash screen to suite.

This is all fine and dandy untill you realise that not all is good and fine:

1. There’s already a project called ‘Spring Lobby’ which you can visit here.
2. The icon is identical to that of spring.exe.
3. It encourages the confusion of new users who can’t distinguish between tasclient and spring itself.
4. It doesn’t give satirik and betalord due credit (a side effect of the above item) as new users immediately assume the spring developers made the program, and not that the program is a project in it’s own right.
5. It isn’t exactly original.

So I set out to remedy this as shown below:

And the accompanying icon as shown here:

These are unofficial at the moment, and I hope satirik likes them enough to use them in his next version ^_^. There’s a second icon available that’s similar, but in my opinion it’s not as good, but I put it in, just in case someone disagrees.

Get TASClient images and icons here

UPDATE!

I made a few modifications to the 16×16 version of the icons to make them prettier after some feedback from betalord :

Get TASClient Images and Icons v2 here