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It works for me.

6 (31.6%)

It does not work for me.

1 (5.3%)

I'd be willing to help test it.

6 (31.6%)

I'm not interested in testing it.

1 (5.3%)

I might be willing to help test it.

5 (26.3%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[Angle]

Sweet!

If not problems have been reported within a week we can go ahead and remove the JAgoraGraph repository.

I tested it and found no problems. We just need a few other people to see of it works for them. On that note, I'm considering how to go about expanding our pool of testers. I was considering sponsoring a debate of some sort on the forum, just to test things out. I think we should probably neaten a few things up first, in particular Post needs to not have text run off the edge. This means either turning it into JComponent of some sort, which should be able to take care of that problem automatically, but may be hard to get to assume the right size and position, or writing the code for this myself. Which do you think would be easier to maintain in the long run?

[Anvilfolk]

Again, I really don't know a lot about Swing I always felt like it was made for developing forms and fairly static things, whereas I imagine an Agora client to be more graphically flexible, in a way. That's why my go-to solutions were always game libraries and stuff.

If a JComponent is just "any" object that can draw itself, then that sounds like it wouldn't be too different than what people do in games, where you need to break text into lines depending on the width of each desired line, then draw each line, etc. Graphics are hard and annoying!

[Angle]

JComponent is indeed for more static things, which will probably be a problem eventually. I think I will go with writing my own code for text scrolling.

[Anvilfolk]

I meant Swing in general - you build forms with it, and they're not really meant to have things moving around, lots of easy scrolling, etc. What is the alternative to JComponent?

[Angle]

Yeah, you are right about that. We probably will want to see about changing graphics libraries. I have a friend who swears by OpenGL, maybe I'll take a look at that. But first I want a minimally functional client.

JComponent is the parent class of most everything in AWT and Swing. So the alternative is to use a different graphics library, or to have it as I do now, where posts are drawn on top of a JPanel with PaintComponent.

[Anvilfolk]

One thing we ought to try to do is keep this implementation as multi-platform as possible. That means using libraries that are also multi-platform. Some game-dev libraries will not be, and I'm not sure what the whole OpenGL situation is.

I actually tried using OpenGL for a while, but couldn't get transparency to work properly. It's also very low-level, probably more low-level than what we want to work with. Ultimately, I think a vector graphics library would be ideal, but I couldn't find anything that seemed promising for Java.

[Angle]

Well, by OpenGL, I mean a wrapper for openGL, like LWJGL, or LibGDX for that matter.

[ShadowHammer]

I like this idea, but have nothing to contribute except moral support, so this is pretty much just a PTW.

[Angle]

You can download the project and then post any issues you find on the github pages. And I'm thinking of starting some serious testing soon.

Edit: in other news, I fixed the issue with text running of the Post. Still need some work though, I'll go over it with FontMetrics tommorrow.

[Anvilfolk]

Do you think we will be able to position things off-screen? Imagine you have a large debate, can we make it so it will be free navigable?

[Antsan]

One thing we ought to try to do is keep this implementation as multi-platform as possible. That means using libraries that are also multi-platform. Some game-dev libraries will not be, and I'm not sure what the whole OpenGL situation is.

I don't know the situation for Java in this regard either, but as OpenGL is the low-level graphics library/interface/standard (I have no idea what the correct term is) it should be an obvious choice if you want multi-platform support.

[Anvilfolk]

Thanks for the info. LibGDX can basically be used as an interface for OpenGL, but somehow I couldn't even get a nice anti-aliased circle with some transparency going, and the process to fix the weird transparency issues seemed to be way too low-level and convoluted. Ultimately the point is that programming things from scratch in OpenGL is probably a bad idea, especially since we don't want to have to deal with different hardware handling low-level graphics code differently.

I'd love it if we could work with something higher level, yet still multi-platform. It's unclear whether there is such a solution for Java at this point.

P.S. fixed the Eclipse files in all of the repositories, and fixed all the warnings. The new login screen is a lot better. At some point we should also add error handling. Perhaps I can try to tackle that.

[Angle]

Go for it. I'm gonna work on the registration and host changing screens next.

[Angle]

Alright, I finished switching over from prompts to panels. can anyone else think of anything we need to do? Do you think it's time we looked into bringing in more people for alpha testing?

I think we should probably consider moderation next. We'll also want to add in voting functionality, probably around the time we add more advanced display options.

[Angle]

Or perhaps I should add functionality for editing already made posts?