1st real thread (was Re: jugglemaster (fwd))

Mon Jun 7 23:01:56 EDT 2004

I figure that as long as we're having a conversation, we might as well 
make it public...

Because this is a forward to the list, rather than a reply, the quoting is 
thrown off... I'll try to make it somewhat clear.

===============================================================================
Barton Chittenden = I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on /.
===============================================================================

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 19:32:17 -0400
From: Chunky Kibbles <chunky at icculus.org>
To: Barton Chittenden <tiger at iglou.com>
Subject: Re: jugglemaster

On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 12:43:00AM -0400, Barton Chittenden wrote:
> Gary,
>
> I started poking around in the code. I have two features that I'd like to
> add to the feature list; I don't think that either of them should be
> particularly difficult.
>
> 1) Add some sort of control that would allow you to save a random pattern.
> This might get a little involved in the user interface department; you'd
> have to figure out where to put the save pattern button, when that button
> should appear, what file the pattern should get saved to, and so forth and
> so on. Writing out the pattern to the file should be bloody simple by
> comparison {and I should know ;-}.

Yeah. That should pretty cool. I actually mean to re-write the pattern
loading code and move it into jmlib, so it won't have to be done for
every individual app. I actually re-wrote it twice so far, once using
normal C++ and once using lex & yacc. I'm definitely gonna run with
another, more-informed and less-hakky C version of the C++ code I did.

Pattern-saving facilities would be extremely cool, and probably a
really good way of geting your feet wet in the jmdlx code. An
automatic submission thingy that e-mails patterns to me might be
pretty neat, too, so that I can enter them into the pattern files?
Maybe a form submission to the jmdlx webpage?

<Barton>
I like the idea of submitting patterns to the web page. 
</Barton>

Whaddya think? Having just read that, it sounds like I was asking you
to write some code for me, it wasn't meant like that at all. Just some
thoughts :-)

<Barton>
I'm definitely interested in getting my feet wet. Whether or not I end up 
immersed, or simply with damp feet, I don't know yet, but I definitely 
want to give it a shot... and if I mess something up, that's what CVS is 
for :-).

Speaking of messing things up (or not), I like the fact that all of your 
modules have a main() function inside for testing purposes. You might want 
to have that #IFDEF'd out, so that you can compile individual modules for 
testing simply by giving gcc a command line option:

/* Testing code */
#IFDEF STANDALONE_TEST

int
main(void)
{
 	/* testing code goes here */
}

#ENDIF

then compile that module with

gcc -DSTANDALONE_TEST -o foo foo.c

Even better to incorperate this into your make file.

Perl has some wonderful testbed stuff, some of which interacts well with 
C.

</Barton>

> 2) I would like the styles dialog {ie. the dropdown box that's avialable
> when you select "Change Stlye" in the file menu) to be populated by
> traversing the pattern list. As far as I can tell, you've already written
> all
> of the code in PatternLoader::PrintStyles().

Yeah, I'd pondered that. The thing is, that the styles in the pattern
file mostly suck. They have daft names, and are generally only aimed
at single individual pattern.

<Barton>
They could easily be renamed... and even if they're only aimed at a 
certain pattern, I think that it's kind of neat to be able to apply them 
to various site swaps. In fact, I think that this is one of the most 
interesting concepts within jugglemaster: style and site swap are 
orthogonal.

If I ran the zoo, I would create a pattern file that had all of the 
standard stlyes at the top of the file, followed by a comment or divider 
or something, followed by the rest of the styles. That way the one-off 
styles aren't cluttering up the prime interface real-estate, but they're 
thare if you want to play with them.

</Barton>

I think a much better solution would be to have a third pattern file
that contains a multitude of styles, that you can use as you
described. It would conveniently get all the hardcoded styles out of
the jmlib code [which badly sucks at the moment - the latest version
is only barely an improvement on the code as I got it originally].

Definitely a good idea.

<Barton>
I think that this might be the place where I actually get my feet wet ;-).

At this point, none of my Linux boxen are in a good position to do 
development: my laptop doesn't have the free disk space for wx, my desktop 
box is headless and I don't have any networking set up into that box right 
now.

So I'll probably be doing development under windows or cygwin.

Has anyone ported to cygwin yet? How difficult is compiling under windows?

--Barton
</Barton>