I'd say a sliver more - these can be for instance OS9 users who like to also play old Mac games that are not able to change the resolution themselves and ask it to be 256 colors at launch of the game, thereby having these people be constantly in 256 colors (a few years back on my Performa I had my brother and sisters complain that I put the computer to thousands of colors since that forced them to put it back to 256 when they wanted to play some games; in fact they even complained when I would put it to 800*600 since they were used to granny resolution). There is no chance of this in OSX though, as though these games can still be played in Classic, Aqua is unbearable in 256 colors so they revert to thousands/millions as soon as possible.

Zacha Pedro, on Oct 31 2005, 06:26 AM, said:

I'd say a sliver more - these can be for instance OS9 users who like to also play old Mac games that are not able to change the resolution themselves...
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When I first started playing EVN it was on an Apple Workgroup Server 8150 (c. 1994) and my screen at 832 by 624 fixed resolution could only display 256 colors. I remember being delighted to hear from the on-forum lips of Matt Burch himself that EVN would indeed support 8-bit dithering. EVN was, needless to say, a capslock-always-on experience but it was still fun as hell. I've since upgraded to a nice shiny PowerBook g4 but I think keeping the 256 color support is important, for those folks with clunky OS 9 machines who just want to play a little EV. The rle8s can definitely be sacked if there is a workaround, but keeping the 256 support would be nice.

(edit) All gone now.

This post has been edited by Guy : 02 August 2007 - 04:49 AM

Hideously mangled indeed. Otherwise fine (except I like HTML and sitx a little more than you do, but that's rather minor, and you need to be concise and choose the easiest path). By the way, I will edit the original now we've settled on RTF being preferred (and now that I've realised about further issues about .txt, such as TextEdit using LF which makes them illegible on OS9).

Yeah, well I don't think I implied you shouldn't use HTML for the normal Read Me.
But for sitx, like I say, newbie windows users don't know what to do. Seriously, have you tried counting the topics about this on the Nova board? There's really no need for sitx as bin zip is just as easy* and I don't think there's any downside other than a fraction less compression. If I was controlling the addons pages I'd reject any sitx plugins.

• If you have DropStuff then you're also going to have DropZip and/or are on OS X so can use Plugin Archiver.

(EDIT): And another jab at .sitx: StuffIt 10 (currently) breaks backwards compatibility, meaning if you use this then you're cutting OS 9 users completely out of the loop.

This post has been edited by Guy : 02 August 2007 - 04:50 AM

Guy, on Nov 10 2005, 06:00 AM, said:

(EDIT): And another jab at .sitx: StuffIt 10 (currently) breaks backwards compatibility, meaning if you use this then you're cutting OS 9 users completely out of the loop.
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Wait - you mean the sitxes Stuffit 10 produces can't be expanded by the previous (or at least 7.0.3, latest OS9 version) versions of expander? I kept sitx around for some reasons, mainly because it is (or at least, .sit was) the basis of plug distribution and still has a wide acceptance in the community (at least the plug developer's community at large - including those who don't come here), and because of the recent efforts from Allume to improve support on Windows. Unfortunately I can't monitor the latest stuff due to my system software beginning to get outdated (Jaguar). If it's actually the case we have to try to get Allume to correct this, and if they don't then I'll act. But before I need to know more precisely of the issue.

Well here's what I know, though I'm not 100% sure this is the case on all machines and all platforms. Heck it may even be just me although I've just of similar reports on EV-Nova.net.
If you try to open a StuffIt 10 file with Expander 9 then it will give you an error, although it seems to expand it okay regardless. If you try with earlier versions then it won't recognise that the archive actually contains anything at all.
If you ask me, Allume is entirely untrustworthy to keep StuffIt working reliably. If they fix this, they'll break something else. Bin and zip is easier for everyone and I see no reason at all to use .sitx.

Issue confirmed. The problem is very grave indeed. I'm immediately modifying the guide to tell people with Stuffit 10 not to use .sitx for now, then I'll ponder the best way to get Allume to act on this. Indeed, plug distribution ever since EV (and, in a way, Maelstrom) has been based around .sit (with .cpt at times, but it's more than dead now), and that would be too bad to suddenly put this to an end due to what could merely be a bug that could be fixed in the next minor release (okay, not just that, but still...), so I say we leave them this chance to fix the things. If they don't I'll be more than happy to nuke sitx entirely.

Well there's a 10.0.1 update just been released. The change list doesn't include this issue though.

But really, sitx is redundant. Just because it was the standard for EV/O doesn't mean we should continue to use it, especially now we have windows to worry about. The mac community as a whole appears to be moving away from it, with compressed dmgs and zipping from the Finder being much more common now, not to mention that Apple no longer bundles Expander.

Zacha's Guide said:

If your plug is really big and doesn't fit in 12 Mb when archived, then you need to separate your distribution folder into smaller parts, archive these separately, and upload them separately.

Are you sure about this Zacha? I count 7 plugs over 12MB on the addons pages, with PolyconGraphics3PC at 15.22MB.

Guy, on Nov 19 2005, 09:57 PM, said:

Are you sure about this Zacha? I count 7 plugs over 12MB on the addons pages, with PolyconGraphics3PC at 15.22MB.
View Post

No, I am not sure at all of the exact limit. This 12MB value comes from the file sizes of the original rEV segments, so I assumed this to be a safe value, and thought the max couldn't be much more since KofQ has said he had had many problems uploading the stuff (the reason why he segmented his archive). Of course, we have the very Nova distribution which is more than 70MB, but I think the limitation does not come from an actual server limit, but rather is related to our uploading mean (which may even depend on the browser), Ambrosia obviously has a private way to transfer files to the ftp server that does not have this limit. Therefore, there is little way to really know the limit, if ever it is the same for all people, so 12 MB is a value as good as any other.

.sitx from Stuffit 10 problem solved (or at least, explained), though I wish it would have been better documented. Would anyone care to confirm the solution? (I can't). I will modify the distribution guide to indicate that. But not right now (midnight. need to sleep).

Aha, that's interesting. Though I'm not any more impressed with Allume and still won't accept sitx as suitable for plugins.

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This post has been edited by Guy : 22 November 2005 - 09:58 PM