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[Ravendarksky]

Hi all,

I've uploaded V0.9 to the downloads page! Please check it out as it is a significant improvement over earlier versions. I do not have time tonight to rework all the text below.. but rest assured I will soon! (There is a PDF help guide included in the download). I have updated the changelog below though.


**WARNING this application is only designed/tested for WINDOWS 8/7/XP, Other operating systems currently won't work (If this becomes popular enough I will put in the hours to make it so**

CHANGELOG:
V0.1 -> V0.5

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bugs fixed:
- masterpiece filter now works
- link to masterpiece text file now works
- fixed bug where mini monitor would not always resize to dwarffortress upon open
- fixed an annoying bug where monitor would sometimes lock onto dfhack window instead of df window (a real pain to fix!)
- Monitor now only stays ontop of dwarf fortress, rather than ALL windows.
- Special characters now display correctly

Changes Made:
- Error handing added. Errors are logged to errors folder in root directory
- A lot more efficient (less memory and cpu cycles consumed)
- Filters are now dynamic, have as many or as little as you like. (Just create new text files or use settings UI)
- QuickButton in mini monitor lets you filter text items more efficiently as they appear and annoy you.
- Removed settings option to have monitor "always on top"
- removed the need for the program to fullscreen dwarf fortress when opening.
- You can now have as many/few monitors as you like and take full control of them.
- You can now pause the game when an alert occurs
- you can now (attempt) to zoom the game when an alert occurs. This is buggy and often fails. (it opens up the alerts and tries to zoom last message, which isn't always right/isn't always zoomable)
- New filter categories let you group filters together and quickly turn them on or off AND view them in seperate screens
- You can now save/load to several settings files (I suggest one per fortress if you are heavily customising things)
- Now supports relative paths for gamelog.txt

V0.5 -> V0.9

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

To Do:
- Add checks that text isn't already matched by another filter.
- Resizing of mini monitor breaks when applying extra visable categories. (Can't figure out how to repeat this)
- Check if spam timer resets when new spam is recieved. COuld do with a visual display such as a count? Does this apply to individual text strings OR text strings per filter OR per filter?
- dfhack support
- fortress specific settings files
- Special Characters in Filters
- Read colours from data/init/colors.txt for defaults.
- Spam counter on main alert menu (increment on parent message every time an identical message is not displayed due to spam counter)
- Look into making NAMES more distinctive and unique to make reading combat reports easier.

Bugs fixed:
- Some code simplfication now reduces amount of text parsing when extreme amounts of messages are being reported quickly.
- Several crashes now don't happen
- Settings files can no longer cause crashes
- Optimised startup time for speed, PLUS Lazy newb pack auto loading support
- Removed some UI bugs
- fixed bugs where messages/filters/exceptions were SOMETIMES case sensitive
- fixed a bug where all messages were being displayed in lower case.
- fixed a bug where restarting the monitor could cause a crash if dwarf fortress had been closed
- Fixed a bug where long lists of filters caused the filter/exception editing pages to overflow off the screen.

Changes Made:

- Settings window is now brought to foreground if you try and open it when it is already open in the background.
- New homescreen for launching the monitor... Lets you edit settings without running the program and also means you can open it when dwarf fortress is closed!
- Added a second donation button and a personal reference.
- Default colours fixed (for all except "discovery" and "artifact" which I have left as gold. Not bothered to tie this to data/init/colors.txt yet. Red - #ff0000 Light Blue - #32befa blue - #3296ff Grey - #b4aa96 yellow/orange - #ffc800 Purple - #e632e6 Green - #8cff32
- You can now choose how long messages are displayed for on the mini monitor (minimum one second, and doesn't work in realtime, so you won't always get your message to disappear in XXXX milliseconds... but it is close enough).
- You can now choose how often to display repeated messages in terms of time. Setting a SPAM TIME of 30000 milliseconds will only show you any one unique message at most once every 30 seconds. Value can be set in milliseconds with a maximum value of 60000 ms(60 seconds) to keep memory overhead down. Default value is 1 second, but I'd increase this!
- Added detection/display of gamelog/df window to homescreen instead of on monitor launch and removed closing if not found. Status display now instead. Detection happens when you try and start the monitor, but also optional buttons to manually do it.
- When mini monitor is moved, it's location is saved to current settings so that resizing/moving dwarf fortress doesn't cause it to jump back to it's original location. (requires a settings save to save for future sessions)
- Default width no longer obscures happiness counter.
- When mini monitor is resized, it's width is saved to current settings so that resizing/moving dwarf fortress doesn't cause it to jump back to it's original width.
- You can bypass the homescreen by using the tickbox on it
- Help documentation now available.
- Added a default filter to pause and zoom when one of your dwarfs is attacked by a ghost

/CHANGELOG


Hi all,

Inspired by 100s of annoying job cancellation requests I've thrown together a program to do away with spam and replace the in game alerting system.... It's pretty nice.

Features:

• Setup a list of categories to display and then what alerts you want to display within them. ALL other game text is hidden, effectively removing spam.
• Mini monitor to replace in game announcement, can display alerts of various categories
• Main monitor to view announcements minus spam. As many tabs as you like
• Ability to turn on or off various types of messages and customise what colours they are
• Choose your own font and sizes
• Choose precisely what alerts to PAUSE and ZOOM on. Zooming is a bit buggy though!
• Customization filters which allow you to filter what is displayed (See settings screenshot)
• Customization Exception Filters which allow you to filter specific messages from within filters (See example below)
• Save/load your settings and filters for full customisation

Current limitations/Future improvements:

• Font colors are NOT yet precisely the same as in dwarf fortress by default, but can be customized to be so.
• Font style and size are the same for all announcements.
• Only Tested on Windows 8/7/XP. Will almost certainly not function on MAC/Linux, will look at improving this if there is enough interest

Screenshots (from version 0.1):
Current limitations/Future improvements:

• Font colors are NOT yet precisely the same as in dwarf fortress by default, but can be customized to be so.
• Font style and size are the same for all announcements.
• Cannot *YET* pause on specific lines
• Cannot *YET* zoom on specific lines (I need to compile a list of all zoomable messages first....)
• Only Tested on Windows 7. May not look as good on Windows XP and will almost certainly not function on MAC/Linux, will look at improving this if there is enough interest
• Currently settings are saved to Current.xml, plans to make this fortress specific and give user finer control

Link: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7946

Screenshots:

Mini monitor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mini monitor + Combat:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Combat monitor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Alert Monitor:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Settings Screen:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Usage:
Simply download, unzip and run the exe. (and read the PDF file it comes with)



***TESTING***

• Please feel free to test your gamelog and let me know if the default filters don't pick up anything
• I'd love to hear if you think the filters should be simpler/more complex or grouped differently

NOTE
If it won't work *AT ALL* then you need to install .NET 4.0 on your computer... I'm hoping that won't be the case though!

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=225702
from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5a4x27ek.aspx

[Meph]

Nice work. Funny to see something like this pop up out of nowhere... I thought TheGazelle was working on something like this?

It appears your lower bar completely hides the entire bar that DF puts there, including the happyness counter that falconne added with dfhack.

Does this somehow support custom announcement done by dfhack? Many scripts give user feedback, for example siren. Will it show in your external window?

[Ravendarksky]

Nice work. Funny to see something like this pop up out of nowhere... I thought TheGazelle was working on something like this?

It appears your lower bar completely hides the entire bar that DF puts there, including the happyness counter that falconne added with dfhack.

Does this somehow support custom announcement done by dfhack? Many scripts give user feedback, for example siren. Will it show in your external window?

- I had started making this before TheGazelle posted their project and since I believe my one has a larger scope I decided to continue with it. However since I'm using C# and WPF I imagine my program will become obsolete eventually as it is replaced by one which will also work for linux and macs. I'm happy for my ideas to be extended/borrowed/improved upon. I'm happy to give The Gazelle any help they want as well with their program

- I will need to look at the happiness counter and see what can be done, currently I just force a window to stay ontop of everything else and use the dwarf fortress position to position it

- To operate correctly the program has to be able to recognize every single line of text from the dwarf fortress log (or else how would it know the difference between a missed line and one we actually want to filter?). Do all these announcements write to gamelog.txt? If so it would be simply be a case of adding them to the filter you want them to appear under. If they do something more clever and inject text straight into dwarf fortress somehow then currently this won't be picked up by my tool.

A useful thing to do is open up the settings and run your game log through the "Search Gamelog for Missed Filters". This will tell you what, if any gamelog text is NOT being picked up correctly by my tool. Currently it ignores some world gen stuff.

[Meph]

If they do something more clever and inject text straight into dwarf fortress somehow then currently this won't be picked up by my tool.

They do exactly that. No gamelog entries. Dfhack can make those, but most scripts just decide not to, because no reason for it exists (existed?).

And Wow, someone who can write C++ and do overlays... can I borrow your skills for stupid dwarf tricks ?

[Warmist]

If they do something more clever and inject text straight into dwarf fortress somehow then currently this won't be picked up by my tool.

They do exactly that. No gamelog entries. Dfhack can make those, but most scripts just decide not to, because no reason for it exists (existed?).

And Wow, someone who can write C++ and do overlays... can I borrow your skills for stupid dwarf tricks ?

Actually just had an idea to move the happiness counters to the left of screen. The right side is used for levels (although there is limited value at least for me) but the left side is not used for anything

[PeridexisErrant]

PTW, this looks great.  Between this and The Gazelle's gamelog parsing stuff, maybe we should launch a campaign to have best practise for scripts that insert announcements to also write to the gamelog. 

the left side is not used for anything

It does flag availability of combat, sparring, and hunting reports, but there's plenty of room below that.

Edit:  after playing around with it for a bit: 
 - Is there some way to define a relative path, for newb-friendly-ness in my LNP?
 - I noticed that the minibar (heh) was often off by a few pixels both vertically and horizontally, playing windowed and non-maximised
 - If there's some way of setting the minibar to stay just above DF rather than everything, that would be good - it seems weird/hackish when it stays above eg Therapist as well
 - The big window adds new stuff to the top, not the bottom; this is the reverse of the convention everywhere else (eg stock announcements)

[Ravendarksky]

You can use the "tweak" options to change the width and position of the minibar.

I'll look into the other changes tonight, THanks for the ideas

I'm happy to update my program to read alerts straight from DF rather than from the game log... but I've no idea how to do that! I will download the dfhack source and hope it gives me some idea =S

[Meph]

The lua scripts do it like this:

Code: [Select]

local function announcement_example() dfhack.gui.showAnnouncement(
    'BlaBla an example has happened.',
    COLOR_CYAN, true)end

[Ravendarksky]

Thanks Meph, I'll look into that.

As for doing some interface stuff for you... I'm happy to give it a go! C# is not c++ though.... but I should really get my finger out and learn some more c++ anyway!

C# is what I use at work so when time is limited (which it always is) I prefer to use it.

[00112]

PTW

So far, it is working as intended and I'm on Windows XP using the Masterwork Mod. I'm going to be using this for combat alerts though.

[Ravendarksky]

PTW

So far, it is working as intended and I'm on Windows XP using the Masterwork Mod. I'm going to be using this for combat alerts though.

Hi 00112,

Thanks for posting! How does it look? Can you post a screenshot of the mini monitor window (in both transparent and windowed mode?)

Is there anything you would like different with the combat alerts? I was considering changing the combat filters to be a few separate things like "Direct combat", "Status Updates", "Environmental Hazards", "Combat Spam"

Any and all feedback is welcome

Next version will have at least:

- Top down OR bottom up alerts
- *Hopefully* only on top of DF window rather than all
- Option to pause on specific filters.
- Settings applying without restarting
- Default setting and width changes
- Proper DF alert message colours.

[00112]

I would prefer that the combat alert to be separated into two things: sparing and everything else.

Image 1 Image 2

Both windows are not transparent even if I set them to be transparent. If I want to run it, I have to delete the current settings and let it run on using the default settings. It will crash if I tried to change  and save a setting. I modify the settings I want onto the default settings file to get around it. The df window will maximize every time I do this, but I don't mind it when I can resize it.

[Meph]

00112: If you run it with Masterwork you will not see the custom announcements I added, which is not too bad if you know the mod in and out. Otherwise you are missing out on some crucial info, mostly about the researcher.

Ravendarksky: I'll send you a PM.

[topherclay]

This is a particularly good addon for people running multiple monitors. You can jack up the font big time and just plop a whole window for announcements on another screen. The hands down biggest perk for me is gonna be the first time some birds dive bomb my citizens or a siege pops up out of no where, I just can't wait to be able to filter out all the "runs away" spam and actually see the combat.

[Ravendarksky]

New version is out! Addresses most of the issues people have mentioned as well as a few significant improvements.

- Error logging
- A lot more customization
- Saving/loading makes more sense
- Easier to change
- Quick filters
- Uses relative paths (for Lazy newb pack)
- Doesn't stay on top of all windows now
- Custom zoom/pause functionality on individual alerts
- Can now filter by multiple seperate keywords ie job AND cancel AND web will only match alerts which contain all of these words.
+ much more