13-07-2000 03:29									#1
	Object Builder: Bug Reports Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

http://home.austin.rr.com/lostmerch...lashEditor.html

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When clicking on the 'Save' button, a text box should appear with some text in it. Does it?

One machine at work didn't act right (IE4, Windows NT with no service packs).

All other machines seem fine.

Please, anyone with time, check this out for me???

	13-07-2000 04:05									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

Hi F. Smith:

Seems to work just fine with Internet Explorer 5.0. I haven't tried anything else in the applet since I'm just back from my conference... but I thought I could be useful and give you some immediate feedback. I can tell already that this will get pretty interesting fairly fast!

I'll try to help out in some of the discussions on government coding later this evening. But for now I need to get my act together and mow the lawn before it gets dark on me.

	15-07-2000 03:46									#3
	Got spare money?

F_Smith:

I have now run this through its paces. I propose that rather than having everyone look at it each time, potentially with little changed between the last time, we just have people take turns. Perhaps Rodrigo or Axi should check every, or every other, iteration. Especially when some of the real guts of the model start getting in there.

I assume you are not supposed to be able to assign religions cultures or tendencies yet for the ethnic groups... The only bug I ran into was in dispelling some of the little input windows I needed to click on the x button twice to get rid of it. Focus problem?

One thing that IMO would be useful for the save files is an XML viewer that would create something easier for a normal person to read... so rather than the two flanking tags you could instead have it read:

"Pop: 1000" instead of two tags flanking a 1000.

	15-07-2000 04:12									#4
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Mark:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this input.

The idea hopefully is going to be for the model designers to use this regularly for testing out their ideas, once the save/load function is finished. And it should only take about 10 to 15 minutes to go thru each release and run a quick test or two, so I kinda hope that everyone on the team would take the 15 mins to crank on it. Maybe not every release, but many of the releases.

But then again, I'll take what I can get.

1) Assigning Religion, Culture, Tendencies and Attributes (one more to add on there) to the EGs will be in there next -- probably tonight.

2) That XML file is to get around the applet restrictions for saving to your local drive. That file is not meant to be read by a person -- it's just a representation of the state of the scenario you have set up using the tool. The idea behind that 'save' text box is that you copy that text and paste it into a text file, and that becomes your 'scenario' file. When you run that code from your local machine, it can read the file on your machine. So tests and scenarios can be made.

3) Thanks, I'll check out the prob with the dialog boxes. It's just a simple windowlistener, listening for 'windowClosing' events. Shouldn't be any room for error, tho. I haven't really experienced that -- maybe it's the browser? What version?

	15-07-2000 22:25									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

I was messing around w/ the scenario builder and It saved my scenario fine, but when I tried to load it it didn't have it on the list. I don't know if it was my computer or your site but something went wrong. And also it wouldn't let me "X" the box to close it when I was done.

	16-07-2000 01:16									#6
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Frank:

Hi. Thanks for the feedback, you're saving me a bunch of time.

You're correct, I'm sorry, the save feature is only about 2/3rds done -- I stayed up late watching a movie with my daughter, and did start coding until about 1 a.m. I went ahead and posted what I had. It'll be finished tonight. There is no windowlistener yet to close the box -- the only way to close it is with the 'OK' button, at the moment. Will be fixed tonight.

1) Was this run thru the applet, or did you download and run it locally?

And please check again in the morning, I'll post the changes around 3 a.m. central.

Thanks again!

	16-07-2000 08:38									#7
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

Hey F_Smith, Glad to help anyway I can. Besides it keeps me from going crazy from the anticipation of the Clash release date. By the way I used the applet to use the site. I'll make sure to check it again later when the updates are complete.

	16-07-2000 13:38									#8
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

Hi, Frank:

It's a bit further along now. Still moving along.

Needs another night of polishing, but I put it up there anyway, for anyone interested in following the progress. Without running servlets, I can't write to the server drives, so I had to find a work-around. I think you'll not mind my solution too much, you get all the functionality. Just remember that it's only a temporary fix. I'll also create an application version that can be downloaded, when time permits and that will not have any problem saving and loading files.

See ya.

	17-07-2000 13:04									#9
	Increase Your PM Length

Okay, it slices, it dices -- now can it make julianne fries?

You can save and load. You can begin to get a visiual look at how you want this laid out.

Civs can control squares, but I haven't built in 'provinces' yet. You can put groups of people in squares. You can define and save civs, religions, cultures, and the map.

Now I take a few days off. Next week, we make this work the way ya'll really want it to . . .

	17-07-2000 14:42									#10
	Tired of ads?

I have IE5, but I can't save. I don't see any text.

Another bug: If you click on the menus to select a religion/culture when there is no EG, the menu gets stuck.

You have some more development to do before you can ask me to work on this.

	17-07-2000 20:26									#11
	Remove this text

OK, now the text in the save window shows up. But what do I do? Do I copy-paste it somewhere? Strange, I can't do that.

OK, the menus don't stick now...

After all, what is all this supposed to do?

	17-07-2000 20:53									#12
	Got spare money?

Hi, Axi:

Actually, you're helping greatly. This is the heart of the development cycle, I'm afraid. Ya'll will be doing a lot of this, banging around on uncomplete 'alpha' software'.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) Debugging. At this rate, we can have a finished, fully debugged scenario builder in a few more weeks. And I can't do this myself -- these things aren't happening on my machine. If ya'll don't help me catch me these things now, then we'll have a bunch of them all at once, later.

2) Concptual design. As you bang around on this, as it develops, you can tell me how you really want it to be, and correct any mistakes I make in concept immediately. That way you get exactly the tool you need, and you get it sooner.

* * *

Won't copy/paste? Odd, I'll look into that next. But yes, the idea is that you set up a 'scenario' by creating groups of people in mapsquares, creating civs, religions, cultures, governments, etc, and then we'll add 'turn' logic in to test these models, and tweak the variables as we see how they evolve and work over a bunch of 'game turns'.

That way, we end up with working, coded, debugged models in a very short period of time -- perhaps 3 months -- and those models can be quickly integrated into the Clash code, in a matter of days or weeks.

Again, thanks for your time. This should only take each of ya'll about ten minutes, once or twice a week. But look at the speed of dev -- it's been 2 weekends, and we're already well along the way to having a working scenario designer!

	18-07-2000 02:18									#13
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

Axi:

Try it now, perhaps. I made another tweak that *might* have had something to do with it, I'm not sure.

You should be able to copy the text from the 'save' box, and then paste the text back into the 'load' box.

	18-07-2000 04:49									#14
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

I played around with it a bit, and encountered some odd things.

1) Population doesn't "stick". Every time I plug in a number it reverts to zero. NOTE: Turns out I wasn't hitting the "Enter" key after plugging in the number....that solves the problem, although it's not intuitive.

2) Initially I was somewhat confused and went straight to the Ethnic groups (before defining any of the other items like Civ, Religion, Culture, etc. I'm not clear on the exact sequence, but I think I tried to add a new Culture next, the box appeared to "freeze", upon which I hit the "Show Desktop" icon. Instantly, everything disappeared including the Task Bar! Even the Start button was gone. I brought up the "Close Program" Box but nothing was "Not Responding". So I clicked on the "Clash Scenario Editor" but hit Cancel instead of End Task or Shut Down. This displayed the offending Culture Window, which now was able to close. I repeated the process several times, and eventually the Task Bar reappeared and all the programs worked again. Weird!

3) After loading data into every window that would accept it (Civ, Religion, Culture, Social Class, Ethnic Group) I then clicked on a different map square. Immediately, none of the data is available in drop-down boxes. The data still exists when I click back to the original Map Square. NOTE: I did find that typing in the name of an ethnic group makes all the other data available in the drop-down boxes, but that still means you'd have to manually recreate the ethnic group list for every new sqaure.

4) Assuming you have entered data into the Culture window and have created a civ, there's aother problem: If I select the "No Culture Selected" dropdown box, it doesn't matter which culture I choose, the box always reverts to "No Culture Selected"

5) While playing around with the Load and Save buttons, I seem to have lost all the "Civ Detail" data, although all the Map Square data remains.

6) The only observed effect of the Form Province button is to add a Population number below the button.

7) Seize Map Square seems to work, but there's no apparent way to "unseize".

All for now!

P.S. Running IE 5.0 on the Win 98 SE O/S.

	18-07-2000 10:21									#15
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Hi, Kull:

Now we're cookin.

1) Changed it to a pop-up dialog.

2A) A new 'General Help Dialog' at the beginning will now try and explain some of the basic 'how to' stuff. I threw some text in there for now, it could be better.

2B) The Focus problem with modal dialog boxes should work right now.

3) The Religion, Culture, etc. drop-down boxes are suppose to be for the 'selected group' of people. When a square is empty, they will be too. I added a label to that panel, which might make it clearer. Is that what you meant?

4) Assigning Culture is fixed.

5) Loading 'controlled squares' should work now.

6) Provinces are not yet implemented. Next weekend. The button should now reflect that.

7) It's a little wierd in IE, but you can now un-sieze mapsquares. Will polish it up tomorrow night.

Great, and thanks for the browser/OS info. That helps a lot!

	18-07-2000 10:25									#16
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

What a great toy!

I had no problems browsing it.

The only thing I found strange was that you can define an ethnic group, FE romans and create a culture, FE persianculture and assign persianculture to romans. In the original model ethnic group and culture are one single thing. I'd like to have the CREATE_ETHNIC_GROUP button introducing the EG attributes, one of them would be its name/nationality.

I know you're gonna say my request is just a particular case of your more general coding, but you'll have to live with my feedback, man!

	18-07-2000 11:10									#17
	Got spare money?

Rodrigo:

Actually, you're right, I think.

The 'EthnicGroup' in that builder is more meant to be just a generic group of people, with no definition. Perhaps it would make more sense to just make the 'culture' the Group name -- I think that makes a lot of sense.

I hope this is of use to ya'll. I'm enjoying coding it.

	18-07-2000 11:21									#18
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Oops:

We need the seperate culture object. For 'romanized' greeks, for example.

Populations are going to have to have the ability to change cultures in respose to certain stimuli (a new Civ conquers them, for example).

	19-07-2000 06:51									#19
	Put an end to popups!

F_Smith:

My original idea was that a civ like the roman empire had several ethnic groups. Each EG has a nationality. So, in the case of "romanized greeks", it'd be an EG living in the roman empire having greek nationality. This EG is different from an EG with greek nationality living in the greek civ simply because the rest of the EG attributes are different.

What I'm really saying is that I see no point in having "culture" as a separated thing from nationality (by culture I here mean a set of cultural attributes like Individualism). What culture would you assign to the greeks living under roman rule? the same culture romans have? I think they'd have a culture which is partly roman and partly greek (at first at least). If so, they have a unique culture: greco-roman (or something like that). Given this uniqueness, i.e. this culture cannot be found anywhere else in the world (there's only one roman empire and only greeks in the roman empire have it), then it's unnecessary to break thing in two: EG and culture. They're really one thing. The right modeling IMO is having an EG with its own cultural values, one of which is nationality. The name of the EG is IMO irrelevant. They can be called "greeks under roman rule" or simply "greeks". As long as all civs with greek population have their own EG with own values each, there's no problem and you can see several forms of greek culture depending on where they live.

What do you think?

	19-07-2000 07:42									#20
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Much better, but there's some new stuff:

1)In the third group of buttons, no matter which characteristic you choose to edit (Social, Religious, Culture, etc.) the "New ****" button brings up a window titled "New Social Class" with a subheading of "SC Name:". The data feeds to the correct location, so it's just an aesthetic problem, not a functional one. NOTE: Same thing happens with the "Edit Civ" and "Edit Base EG" buttons, except they share a window titled "New Civ Name".

2) The Add/Remove Map Squre button doesn't remove. I kept clicking on Squre 2,2, and now there are three of them in the box.

3) Squares retain all the selected info except "Civilization". The "Civ Detail" box always displays the last civ selected, regardless of which square you click on.

4) Clicking into the "Pop:" field does pop-up a new window, but it does NOT activate. Instead, the window is grey and the cursor hops into the Ethnic Group field (right beneath "Selected Group Detail"). If you start typing before looking up, you'll edit that field instead of the population! NOTE: It's easy enough to click and activate the window, but that should be the default.

Onward and upward!

	19-07-2000 10:45									#21
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

rodriqo:

The problem I came across was what happens when an ethnic group in a square undergoes changes to it's environment -- i.e. greeks suddenly coming under Roman rule, then living under Roman culture for a long time.

I have to be able to change their culture individually.

The Scenario Thingy might reflect more what you wanted now. I added in a concept of 'base Ethnic Groups' that is what your 'ethnic groups' concept was -- one unchanging EG with given settings. But then each group in each square is independent from that point, and can change religion, culture, whatever.

Or, it doesn't have to change. Up to you.

Will that work?

	19-07-2000 10:53									#22
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Kull:

1) Fixed, and fixed.

2) Done. Interestingly, I wasn't thinking about clicking on the map to remove -- I had it set up to be removed when you clicked on the list item. Your way is better, makes more sense. Thanks.

3) I'll get to this one next.

4) Fixed.

The new 'base' Ethnic Group stuff seems pretty clean, so far. But I'm sure I missed a few obvious things!

	19-07-2000 12:59									#23
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I am still unable to copy from your save window. Why me?

Otherwise, it looks very good now. Good job FSmith.

	20-07-2000 09:50									#24
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

Axi:

Wierd. A few possibilities --

Could the old version be 'cached' on your browser? Let me ask:

Do you see any 'base Ethnic Group' info in the beginning help info?

Do you see a 'Build/Edit Base EG' button on the left?

If not, then perhaps try clearing out the 'cached' files in your browser (depending on your browser version, look for 'internet options' among either 'view' or 'tools' in the menu bar on the browser, and on that page click the button 'Delete Files' in the 'Temporary Internet Files' section). Then reload the page.

I'm going to add a button to copy that to the clipboard tonight. That should solve this problem, for the time being. But I'm curious about the origin . . .

If clearing the cache doesn't help, then we'll need you to enable the 'Java Console' in your browser, and look at the error that pops up there.

We'll nail that one down, don't worry.

P.S. Just wanted to verify -- you have IE5, not IE4? Not sure if that would even cause this, just trying to get it all settled in my mind.

	20-07-2000 01:22									#25
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Axi:

Managed to find a machine at work that duplicates the problem. The 'save' dialog doesn't even come up . . .

The error says 'class Civilization not found', which is wierd, since the class is there -- I'll look into it some more.

That is on IE4, by the way. Could you possibly be running IE4? Again, I don't know why that would be causing a problem, but one easy fix for now might be to get IE5, if you don't already have it.

	20-07-2000 08:11									#26
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F_Smith:

"The problem I came across was what happens when an ethnic group in a square undergoes changes to it's environment -- i.e. greeks suddenly coming under Roman rule, then living under Roman culture for a long time.
I have to be able to change their culture individually."

Yes, I know what you meant. I maybe wasn't clear with my explanation. An EG who suffers a change in its environment will evolve differently than one that stays in the original one. We agree on this. My original idea was not, as you said, "one unchanging EG with given settings". The changes you talk about were included in the model. My "protest", if it can be called that, is that you're separating things in a way I see is artificial and unnessesary. The greeks under roman rule in a given msq has a unique culture, so you have an EG called "greeks under roman rule" with greek nationality and "greek-under-roman-rule" culture. It's one thing. If you define "g-u-r-r" culture as a stand alone object, you'll find you can only assign it to this particular EG and to no other. If so, why should you have it separated from the EG itself? They'll go together all along. In my head you need an OO-class called EG with attributes:
Nationality
Cultural attr1
Cultural attr2
...
Cultural attr3
+(some extra info)

The greeks u-r-r would be an object of this OO-class which in time is a piece of the roman civ object. The greeks in Greece are another object being a piece of the greek civ object. When turns advance, you change cultural attributes values for each of these two objects. Since the greeks u-r-r are a part of the roman civ object, changes in values would be different to the changes greeks in greece expirience.

So, in short, is not a matter of changes occuring or not or being different here and there, but a matter of having different objects for things that inherently go together.

	20-07-2000 09:09									#27
	Inflate your Upload Space

Hi, Rodrigo:

First, remember, this is just my version of the data model, and it likely will change. And it may not even resemble the one Clash ends up using. But the data will remain the same, so this is a fruitful discussion.

I feel your questioning is great. I enjoy discussing this kind of design detail, and I'm one of those guys that feels that if I've got the right answer it'll stand up under scrutiny.

My concept of OO design is typified by an atom.

There is no such thing as an 'atom'. An atom is actually a 'wrapper' name for a collection of particles and forces. So we have an 'Atom' Class that contains collections of 'Electron', 'Proton', 'Nuetron', etc. objects. Then, I can create any number of 'atoms' (instances of 'atom'), and each will have it's own, independent values.

In Game terms, every square has a population. That Population is broken up into 'group' objects -- instances of the 'EthnicGroup' class. There is no such thing as an 'EthnicGroup', in game terms, each instance is just a collection of values (EGDetailChoices) -- Culture, Religion, Tendencies and Attributes.

In other words, I'm using a 'wrapper' class. That's why it seems 'un-necessary', perhaps -- it's purpose is largely to organize the object-hierarchy. Just like the 'particle'-'Atom'-'Molecule' hierarchy.

'EGDetailChoices'-'EthnicGroup'-'ProvincePopulation'.

Does that seem right?

	21-07-2000 03:12									#28
	Remove this text

The server at my home page seems to have given up the ghost. They assure me it'll be back up tomorrow, by mid-morning.

So I haven't bailed, don't worry.

Of course, some of ya'll might wish I would . . .

Due up in next release -- basic MapSquare editing (adjusting the number of 'prodution' zones per square, mostly), and a simple 'turn' method that harvests food and stores the surplus in generic 'warehouses'.

	22-07-2000 00:17									#29
	Get a bigger avatar today!

*NOTE*:

The server for my home page space is still in the midst of upgrading. They've restored an old version of the files, but I can't update the applet to the newest version yet.

Sometime today, they said.

Of course, yesterday, they said it would be by 11 a.m. . . .

	23-07-2000 06:53									#30
	Remove this text

Okay!

It's back up. I'm adding in a few new things this weekend, so any requested changes will be easy to work in.

Anyone with a few minutes to spare, please run the Object Builder thru a few paces and list anything I didn't notice. It would help me tremendously.

Thanks.