A survey for future versions of MissionComputer

Poll: System requirements survey (43 member(s) have cast votes)
What is your primary system for plug-in development?
Mac OS 9.1 or Mac OS 9.2
(1 votes [1.85%])
Percentage of vote: 1.85%
Mac OS 10.1
(0 votes [0.00%])
Percentage of vote: 0.00%
Mac OS 10.2
(0 votes [0.00%])
Percentage of vote: 0.00%
Mac OS 10.3
(8 votes [14.81%])
Percentage of vote: 14.81%
Mac OS 10.4
(26 votes [48.15%])
Percentage of vote: 48.15%
Windows 98 or Windows Me
(1 votes [1.85%])
Percentage of vote: 1.85%
Windows NT or Windows 2000
(0 votes [0.00%])
Percentage of vote: 0.00%
Windows XP
(4 votes [7.41%])
Percentage of vote: 7.41%
Windows Vista
(2 votes [3.70%])
Percentage of vote: 3.70%
Linux
(0 votes [0.00%])
Percentage of vote: 0.00%
FreeBSD
(12 votes [22.22%])
Percentage of vote: 22.22%

As you may have already heard, I'm currently developing version 4.0 of MissionComputer (screenshots: multiple resources, star map editor). It will, unavoidably, require newer system software than version 3.3.3, but I haven't yet finalised the exact requirements, and it would help me to know which systems are actually being used by plug-in developers.

MissionComputer has never supported Mac OS 10.0, and I won't be able to continue support for Mac OS prior to 9.1, but if I've left out any other system you use or are considering using, please let me know.

I primarily use Windows XP. I have MC running on a Mac OS 9.1 machine, but I don't have anyway to transmit plug-ins between the Windows computer and the Mac. Since all my rendering, photo manipulating and text processing software (the tools I use when making a Plug-in) is on the Windows computer I'm forced to use the Windows computer for stitching everything into plug-in.

Regardless, 10.0 wasn't really usable anyway, and people who have 10.0 for one reason or another boot in 9 instead; I'd be tempted to say the same thing about 10.1, but I don't have any idea for this one. I sure hope not many people still use 10.2, because I'm not feeling like bringing back support for it in Rezilla

This progress looks really interesting, I espcially appreciate the multiple editors feature (for all intents and purposes, right now in MC all editor windows are modal). And yes people, I do use MC from time to time, it's not because I'm working on another plug editing app that it's a reason for me to shun and hate MC, even if there is some kind of not really serious rivalry between David and I as we are the only two people currently working on plug-in editors, in fact I think we're not really competing as our tools have their own strengths and weaknesses (coming from the fact MC is a special-purpose resource editor, specialised in plug-in editing, while Rezilla is a general-purpose resource editor which I've worked on to improve template plug editing, and now adding a few graphical plug-in editors to it).

It looks like things are lining up such that within 2 months my primary system will be a MacBook or MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5. (I'm looking forward to the new toy, but don't be too jealous -- the upgrade is going to be a big timesuck when I really don't need it.)

@zacha-pedro, on Mar 14 2007, 11:52 AM, said in What is your primary development system?:

I'd be tempted to say the same thing about 10.1, but I don't have any idea for this one.

I used 10.1 as my primary system for some time, though I don't think it was until 10.2 that I stopped booting into Mac OS 9 reasonably often.

At the moment MissionComputer 4 doesn't work in 10.2; the results of this poll, as well as how much work turns out to be involved in fixing it, will determine whether that changes or becomes an official system requirement. The Windows version (which is back in the plans, as some of the features I'm designing for the Mac version have the side-effect of making it much more Windows-friendly) is still very much up in the air - it might require Windows XP, but it could just as easily end up working in everything from Windows 98 up.

Editing multiple resources will be great, really looking forward to it.

This post has been edited by Modesty Blaise : 14 March 2007 - 02:01 PM

You forgot:
Linux and FreeBSD

(I added them for you)

I use 10.3, but hopefully I'll upgrade to 10.5 sometime this summer.

@guest_ben-adams_-, on Mar 14 2007, 07:25 PM, said in What is your primary development system?:

You forgot:
Linux and FreeBSD

(I added them for you)

Wait... how could someone develop for Nova on FreeBSD or GNU/Linux? Unless there's a port which nobody told me about...

You can develop for Nova on any platform you like; you just can only play it on Macs or Windows machines, barring WINE, virtualization, etc.

What I'm wondering is where those 12 votes for FreeBSD came from...

@zacha-pedro, on Mar 15 2007, 05:52 AM, said in What is your primary development system?:

Regardless, 10.0 wasn't really usable anyway, and people who have 10.0 for one reason or another boot in 9 instead

Wasn't 10.1 a free upgrade anyway?

@derakon, on Mar 15 2007, 09:40 AM, said in What is your primary development system?:

What I'm wondering is where those 12 votes for FreeBSD came from...

Yeah, considering those 12 votes appear to only count as 1 for the total votes...

This post has been edited by Guy : 14 March 2007 - 04:17 PM

I don't know for the 10.0 to 10.1 upgrade, in fact I've never even used either of them.

Ben is that really serious for an admin to behave (oh, in case you're mistaking this for general development, we're talking here of EVs plug-in development, which only really makes sense on a system an EV can run; even if you're running any EV through any weird mean, like WINE or Basilisk or PearPC or MacOnLinux or vMac or whatever, on a non-Mac, non-Window system, since you can run that system to run an EV you can, and in fact it makes best sense to, use that system to develop plug-ins as well, so I guess that even in the unlikely case someone is doing such stuff and is doing plug-ins, he can post the system he emulates or has running on his virtual machine). Just so you folks know, admins and moderators (though for the latter, only in the forums they moderate) can tamper with polls all they like, including completely stuffing them, though there is indeed that fact that the total number of votes isn't modified to account for that, so I guess Ben voted for FreeBSD (his system of choice), then added 11 votes for FreeBSD.

As for tools which exist outside of the Mac (and Windows), well, Bryce's RLE decoding thing (though he never completely released it) works on Linux and in fact pretty much anything that has SDL (though it requires extracted RLE resources, each resource being in its own file, ala ResPLoder); also, the Maelstrom GPL has some code, collectively referred to as maclib, which allows it to extract resources from a resource file (without the need for the resource manager) and implement other such Mac stuff in order to even get the game to run using only the original game files, which even allows to replace these files with mods found in the Maelstrom add-on files (though of course, no support whatsoever for modifying them). That's about it for any "support" for plug-in development on FreeBSD and Linux, at least that I know of.

@guest_ben-adams_-, on Mar 14 2007, 02:25 PM, said in What is your primary development system?:

You forgot:
Linux and FreeBSD

As a matter of fact, since most of the work involving making MissionComputer work on Windows is simply a matter of reducing its reliance on Macintosh-only functions rather than adding anything Window-specific (beyond basic things like file-type associations), the resulting version should be very close to working on Linux as well (and, presumably, FreeBSD, through its compatibility layer). The question is whether it would be worth the trouble of explaining to people how to use it, given the lack of an EV Nova port for it to edit.

@guy, on Mar 14 2007, 04:16 PM, said in What is your primary development system?:

Wasn't 10.1 a free upgrade anyway?

Yes, for 10.0 users.

But, if I'm not mistaken, any non-Mac version of MC would only be able to edit .rez files, not only for lack of resource fork support, but also for lack of a resource manager to handle the resources, right?

@zacha-pedro, on Mar 15 2007, 04:26 PM, said in What is your primary development system?:

But, if I'm not mistaken, any non-Mac version of MC would only be able to edit .rez files, not only for lack of resource fork support, but also for lack of a resource manager to handle the resources, right?

Correct. The adaptation of MissionComputer to work on non-Macintosh computers mostly involves revising it to eliminate its dependency on the Resource Manager; at the moment, even when you’re editing .rez files, Crusoe stores the buffer file as standard resources.

It’s been suggested that MissionComputer for Windows (or, of course, Linux) could export (but not edit) Macintosh plug-ins in MacBinary form since both MacBinary and the internal structure of the resource fork are publicly documented, but while I will look into this, I can’t commit to it at the moment.

Wow, last time I made anything, I used ResEdit.

Maybe I should actually try the newest Mission Computer!

Where's 10.5?

@eegras-studios, on Mar 16 2007, 09:14 AM, said in What is your primary development system?:

Where's 10.5?

A couple of months from now I think.

Hmm I've had to review some of the Maelstrom GPL source code (for the purposes of updating this), and it reminded me a few things:

First, I don't know of anything that's able to write to resource files or export to resource files outside of the Mac (Heh, in the Maelstrom GPL porting docs Sam Lantinga says "It would be nice to extend my Macintosh Resource class to be able
to write the Macintosh resource forks as well as read them.", though he never got around to doing so; implementing this in MC would be useful to make Maelstrom GPL mods without a Mac), nor do I know of any Mac application that writes to resources by bypassing the resource manager, so you'd be pretty much exploring unknown territory. As you know I studied the resource file format (crap, the original UBB topic is currently 404, hope that will be fixed soon ); I realise now I was perhaps a little hasty in deciding that these reserved spaces prevented creating them by something else than the resource manager, in fact they probably are just placeholders for values that will be used at runtime, as (at least at first) resource files were opened by the resource manager by simply copying the contents of the resource map as-is in memory, for more efficiency, this was back then when memory was scarce so there was no point in compressing for file storage stuff that was already designed to use little space in memory, and there was little concern for platform-independance and proper external representations; since these are just placeholders, I suppose anything can in fact be put in them when writing a resource file. Rereading the specs, I'm not noticing anything that would pose a particular problem to export resource files (inside MacBinary files), though there may be unforeseen difficulties in doing so.

Second, you'd have to pretty much give up on reading and writing 'PICT's and 'snd 's on any platform that doesn't have QuickTime (i.e. anything other than Mac and Windows). Both are documented, but quite complex formats supporting compression (worse yet, PICT is basically a stream of opcodes for QuickDraw, the few PICTs that are in Maelstrom Titles are not used as-is by Maelstrom GPL, the game uses BMPs these PICTs have been converted into), and nothing else than QuickTime (or the original Mac API) can properly handle all the possibilities, so even loading PICT files is probably unavailable in RealBASIC on platforms other than Mac and Windows (unless the folks at Real are really good). Well, of course you could get away with only supporting uncompressed sounds and plain bitmap PICTs, but people have been known to use compressed PICTs and sounds.

Actually I must change my vote from Vista to OS 10.4 as I just bought a Mac and returned a PC.