I am back again. The week in a fisherman's cabin at Gotland was awesome with the best of weather and serene sunsets far away from city brats. In Visby the yearly Medieval Week provided everything from visitors in timely outfits (including my wife), market stalls, and jesters, to performances and tournaments. The closest to computers I got was passing an Internet cafe, yup, I was in control and kept outside
Ahem, not exactly true, I had a thick book on computer science with me. Everywhere. You will definitely benefit from it sooner or later, some patterns fit SWGAide perfectly.
On to business,
I also spent the time away from code smithing to mentally review some design decisions made as far back as 2005, way before galaxy-transferred resources, but some are quite naïve even so. Or rather, they worked up to a point, but SWGAide surpassed some limitations a year ago and some items should have been better thought through when adding the inventory, galaxy-transfer just added another dimension to the limited design. None to blame but myself
Whatever, I am home again with a notebook full of sketches and notes. It is great with vacations, the brightest ideas come at you when your brain is idling. And mine has obviously idled a lo the recent week
However, the transition to the next version of SWGAide will be quite a jump. Due to the quite deep-reaching changes I would appreciate some die-hards volunteering as gamma pilots before the next public release. Not just yet as I just came home, and I have no time estimate, but feel free to volunteer in this thread.
The jump will make the DAT file become incompatible between the current version and all future versions. Thus, once upgraded there is no way back. To ease the transfer a small utility will be provided that "fixes" the DAT file, but most probably inventories must be imported once again, from a file exported by the utility. Hopefully all other resource related features will continue to work uninterrupted.
I will also enhance and relax the format for the inventory export/import file. Two new columns will be added, one for "galaxy" and one for the unique ID resources have at SWGCraft. The latter will reduce the Internet communication with SWGCraft during import. Furthermore, as long as the column headers read the same as in an exported file any arbitrary order of the columns will be OK, and some of them can also be left out. Full backward compatibility is promised.
As mentioned, this is still future. Expect at least some weeks before the first gamma version of SWGAide is available. Even though I love coding, and particularly on SWGAide, my week has 7 days , each day 24 hours
But, SWGAide is open source and co-developers are welcomed, as are any hands with tasks not directly related to Java code
Greetings
Zimoon
spent 1.5 years programming in java, so I know java-code, I'm not great, and it wasn't something I want to do professionaly the rest of my life, but doing hobby-applications like this is really quite fun.