In last night's episode of Eureka (Duck, Duck, Goose), the winner of the fair was Megan, daughter of Julie He(a?)rrington.  It's always fun to come across little things like this in life.

For some time now I've been working on a project, QuickBuff/NB2-Lite, the former being its name, the later being its purpose.  The premise is to have a plugin that can take the old nb2 profiles we probably all have still laying around and run them.  Recently I've been making a lot of progress on this and have been able to ssuccessfully run buff profiles.  Unfortunately vital recovery is still incomplete, and I haven't yet started on equipment manipulations.

I very much wanted to bring back the old nb2, but between the network parser changes and the control infrastructure changing, that became less and less of a reality.  The network parser alone was enough to make me want to drop it since nb2 is just a huge network driven state engine.  Not to mention the sheer amount of code duplication within that engine.  I don't know how nerf ever managed to maintain this code as long as he did.

Expect to hear more on this in the future as I near the testing phase.  I'll probably also start requesting copies of your profiles so that I can make sure everything works as expected.

I know I said something about tomorrow, but once I started working out the examples I wanted, I found many defiencies in my original setup.  I've since been working out a complete overhaul of the message system.  Once I complete the refining of the new system, I'll go over everything including the differences between the two.

It's been a while since I've said anything about Decal so today I've decided to share some things about the next public release of Decal.  We've come a long way with Adapter and our new rendering code so this upcoming release will likely be the last time you guys see the old view system.  You can also expect a few other components to be completely redone and at least one to be gone forever.

There are two new features in Adapter that will be the focus of today's article.  One will make life easier for devs, the other will make things much more interesting for them.  Firstly, to make development and maintenance easier, I've added another code hook-up attribute to the system, BaseEvent.  The purpose of BaseEvent is very much like that of ControlEvent.  It works on the protected 'system' events that exist as part of PluginBase (which mostly come from ACHooks in the Decal core).  When applied to an event handler, these attributes will automatically hook up and tear down the connection to that event.

[WireUpBaseEvents]
public class Test : PluginBase
{
protected override void Startup()
{
// Network events
// this is the old way of doing it
//this.ServerDispatch += new EventHandler<NetworkMessageEventArgs>(Test_ServerDispatch);
}

[BaseEvent("ServerDispatch")]
void Test_ServerDispatch(object sender, NetworkMessageEventArgs e)
{
throw new Exception("The method or operation is not implemented.");
}

protected override void Shutdown()
{
// old tear down
//this.ServerDispatch -= this.Test_ServerDispatch;
}
}

This may not look like much since once you add the attribute, you only save one line of code.  What it does for you, is guarantee proper shutdown of all of your events.  I've found many times in my code where my tear-down code missed several events.

Now for the more interesting stuff.  Plugin devs often want to share the functionality of their plugin with others.  They also sometimes want to get information from other plugins.  This can't always be implemented to suit all (depending on language/knowledge/etc) so we've added a message notification system to Adapter to help things along.  With the next release of Decal, all Adapter plugins will be able to consume a single event "AdapterMessage", and they will be notified of all messages sent between plugins.  Sending a message is very simple as well, you just derive an object from AdapterMessageEventArgs, add in the information you want to share, and call SendAdapterMessage.

I'll talk a bit more about messages tomorrow, along with some examples on how to use it.

Brain drain's kept me from generating as much code as I'd need to start the series describing the rewrite of ACAim.  I'm slowly chugging along at it and will start posting once I'm a bit more comfortable with my progress.

My head's a little clearer now, so tomorrow I'm going to start a series on writing a plugin for the new Adapter in Decal.  Be warned now:  this series will be covering the redevelopment of ACAim from the ground up.  This will include all of the network code and message parsing.  The actual decal code will be very minor compared to the rest.  It should very much prove to be a learning experience for everyone.

I've almost always been behind the times with my computer hardware.  It wasn't until this past tax season that I was able to have a modern desktop (Athlon64 2800+).  As the holiday season approaches, I find myself wanting to upgrade my workspace again, even though there's no chance in hell of it happening, to include something to make me more productive or something fun.

For productivity, I'd like to see a pair of these sitting on my desk.  I was lucky enough to have a pair of them with a previous customer, and absolutely fell in love with them.  The amount of space the save compared to CRTs and the extra productivity from having that much screen area are wonderful.  I honestly find it hard to work with my CRT combo at home, and almost impossible on the single head setup I have at the office now.

For fun, it would absolutely have to be an iBook.  Either the 12" or 14" model.  With the power of BSD and the simplicity Apple is famous for, not to mention the design put into the new models (durability, battery life, etc), make it hard to not want one.

Ah well, I suppose new toys will have to wait til next taxmas, unless some nice, generous users happen across the paypal button on my projects pages and show their appreciation.  In the mean time, I shall return to my attempts to ressurrect NB2.

This is one of the reasons why we hate dealing with the rendering system:  It's hacked.  We take over the call to create that AC makes and "do things" to the object so that Decal knows when to draw.  Well it turns out that our repeating textures were directly related to this.

In the previous version of Decal, the rendering hack consisted of a proxy object, a complete reimplementation of the DX object, that told us what was happening.  Under this model, AC had a reference to our proxy, and we had the real object.  In the new system, we decided to go with another method, vtable patching, which only alters the particular functions we want.

Well, as things would have it, Checksum created the initial hooking setup for Decal3, not Haz or myself, so this little detail wasn't exactly fresh in our minds.  So here we are, testing various ways of drawing to the screen, expecting the DX object to behave normally, but we keep getting this weird repeating effect.  We found a few methods to, ah... minimize the visible effect, but this backfired when multiple huds were generated.

Well it just so happened that Check popped up again while we were exploring the issue, took a glance at our code, and "reminded" us about the hook.  We nearly died when we realized what was actually happening.

To keep Decal drawing on the screen on top of AC's 3D, we hook a DX function called EndScene.  When AC calls this function, we send a signal to Decal to do all of it's rendering work.  Well, in our new HUD implementation, we use a technique that renders on an off-screen texture instead of the main window.  As part of that operation however, we have to call EndScene.  It turns out that our repeating texture was actually a recursion issue that somehow fixed itself before causing a crash.  So we reworked the code a bit to call the real EndScene and no more issue.

Just goes to show you how being too close to a particular project can bite you when the bugs creep up.