DPG!!

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xyzyxx
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DPG!!

Postby xyzyxx » Sat May 20, 2006 9:31 pm

Why am I making this thread? Because I don't think a thread was ever made to tell everyone about the Darwinia Preferences Generator, created by trickfred! And therefore, nobody knows about it yet!

DPG was created a long time ago, but I don't think trickfred really told anyone about it, and up until yesterday, it was compatible only with Darwinia version 1.21. It's finally been updated to work with version 1.42.

The utility is extremely useful. It eliminates the need to go and edit preferences.txt manually ever again. It includes options for setting the difficulty, the bootloader, the profile, the mod, and the control mode, as well as all those little things like graphical settings, sound settings, and key mappings.

It also eliminates the need to create a new profile and restart Darwinia when you begin a new mod, since it lets you select the mod and create a new profile before you even run Darwinia!

To use it, simply place it in your Darwinia folder and run it instead of running Darwinia itself. When you've chosen all your settings, click [create new preferences.txt] and then click [exit and launch darwinia]

(It remembers your settings even when Darwinia doesn't, for example the firsttime bootloader. You can easily watch it every time Darwinia starts!)

download the DPGenerator at http://stellarmatter.net ! (sorry, Windows only :()
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Postby xander » Sat May 20, 2006 10:50 pm

Hey, nice work, trickfred. When are you going to port it to Mac and Linux? :P

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Postby NeoThermic » Sat May 20, 2006 11:18 pm

trickfred, tiny little bug. RenderPosterResolution can take more than 10 as input. I would suggest to make it a text input :)

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Postby trickfred » Sat May 20, 2006 11:19 pm

All combo boxes should be manually editable. You can add a larger number yourself. :D
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Postby xyzyxx » Sat May 20, 2006 11:26 pm

Such is how it works for me. All fields are editable. By the way, just what is RenderPosterResolution?
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Postby NeoThermic » Sat May 20, 2006 11:33 pm

xyzyxx wrote:RenderPosterResolution?


Allows you to make posters!

Basically, you'll end up with screenshots that have enough DPI to print to A0 (IIRC, ~300 is decent)

Here's some of the ones I've taken: (Note! These are images that can crash browsers, and are about 7 to 25MB a peice)

Image
(25.5MB)

Image
(5.7MB)

Image
(7.9MB)

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Postby trickfred » Sun May 21, 2006 3:04 am

v1.01 is up. Minor date/time fix.
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Source or pseudocode?

Postby ShepFan » Sun May 21, 2006 5:13 am

trickfred wrote:v1.01 is up. Minor date/time fix.


I'm a (thus far) unemployed Mac programmer... Any chance you have source or notes or pseudocode (or program graphics) I could translate into a Mac version of your program?

-S
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Postby xyzyxx » Sun May 21, 2006 5:41 pm

Yay! Release the source! Mac version!
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Postby Lowell » Sun May 21, 2006 8:25 pm

...Wow...

This thing is Great !!!

Thanks for all your work on this...

I'll use it every time I switch a profile or create a new one.

I like the poster render setting...that's cool...
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Postby trickfred » Mon May 22, 2006 9:02 pm

The program isn't really that complicated that it couldn't just be re-written on another system/in another language. Also, the current code stores the settings in the Windows registry (the 'remember' option'), so that whole part would need to be re-thought out anyways. If anyone has RealBASIC for Macs or linux (somewhat compatible with VB code), I'd be happy to work with them on a conversion, but like I said, it might just be faster to rewrite it in something else if you're capable.

Edit: Can someone point me to a n00b-friendly C or C++ compiler?
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Mac version of DPG...

Postby ShepFan » Mon May 22, 2006 10:11 pm

trickfred wrote:The program isn't really that complicated that it couldn't just be re-written on another system/in another language. Also, the current code stores the settings in the Windows registry (the 'remember' option'), so that whole part would need to be re-thought out anyways. If anyone has RealBASIC for Macs or linux (somewhat compatible with VB code), I'd be happy to work with them on a conversion, but like I said, it might just be faster to rewrite it in something else if you're capable.

Edit: Can someone point me to a n00b-friendly C or C++ compiler?

Sorry, I've only used Visual C++ on Windows, and I'd hardly call that n00b-friendly, especially if you'd be learning C at the same time. I own CodeWarrior C++ for Windows and Mac, but the app framework has a quite steep learning curve on both platforms.

There is a REALBasic on the Mac. I haven't used it in many years and my copy is way out of date. I don't code in BASIC any more, anyway, I need to stay sharp with C and C++, so that really isn't an option for me.

Really, if there were just a way to learn what DPG does, that would be all I'd need. For example, you knew about the RenderPosterResolution parameter. Is there a list of these (to me) undocumented variables, what they all do, and what the legal values are? And especially, which variables to never touch? I haven't seen anything in my wanderings, such as in Darwikia. Maybe it's with the "How to Mod" stuff? With that info, I could knock together something pretty quickly. It wouldn't have the cool graphics yours does, but it would work OK.

BTW, completely off-topic for a sec... I just made my first 5 attempts at the RedundantOpsMuseum level in EW2, and I have to say... You are an evil, eeeevil man! :D

-ShepFan
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Postby daset » Mon May 22, 2006 11:10 pm

trickfred wrote:If anyone has RealBASIC for Macs or linux (somewhat compatible with VB code), I'd be happy to work with them on a conversion, but like I said, it might just be faster to rewrite it in something else if you're capable.


You can contact me and we can try to give it a shot. It is the only coding language I have ever worked a lot in(currently trying Visual C++) and so I have never actually done anything converting code from one language to another. But we can try if you want. It is RealBASIC 5.2 for Mac.
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Postby shinygerbil » Wed May 24, 2006 9:23 pm

NeoThermic wrote:
xyzyxx wrote:RenderPosterResolution?


Allows you to make posters!

Basically, you'll end up with screenshots that have enough DPI to print to A0 (IIRC, ~300 is decent)

Here's some of the ones I've taken: (Note! These are images that can crash browsers, and are about 7 to 25MB a peice)

...

NeoThermic


Showoff. :P

Anyway, http://www.bertmonroy.com/fineart/text/ ... _damen.htm wins.
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Re: Mac version of DPG...

Postby trickfred » Wed May 24, 2006 9:41 pm

ShepFan wrote:Really, if there were just a way to learn what DPG does, that would be all I'd need. For example, you knew about the RenderPosterResolution parameter. Is there a list of these (to me) undocumented variables, what they all do, and what the legal values are? And especially, which variables to never touch? I haven't seen anything in my wanderings, such as in Darwikia. Maybe it's with the "How to Mod" stuff? With that info, I could knock together something pretty quickly. It wouldn't have the cool graphics yours does, but it would work OK.

BTW, completely off-topic for a sec... I just made my first 5 attempts at the RedundantOpsMuseum level in EW2, and I have to say... You are an evil, eeeevil man! :D

-ShepFan


All the undocumented variables I included are/were mentioned somewhere in the forums, IIRC. If not, then they were mentioned by people in the know (such as NeoThermic, who always seems to know more about things than he lets on) on IRC, I'd imagine, around the time I wrote the first release version almost a year ago.

My program just lets people pick their settings from pre-selected choices (allowing for manual editing of those choices), stores them in the registry, then spits out a new prefs file with those settings placed in the proper format. Easy peasy, a monkey could write it. I've done nothing special, really, I only wrote it because it was annoying to have to edit my prefs.txt file by hand all the time while writing mods. Using it as a game launcher's just a bonus.

Oh, and about the ROM - you could just leave all the DGs behind, but I don't suppose that'd make them very happy. ;D

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