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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

[Anvilfolk]

I honestly think we should have a system that is almost fully functional and looks good. Otherwise people would be making us a favour for testing it. I'd prefer it if it was a good enough system that they'd already use it of their own account.

Editing, navigating, some tutorials/help, stuff like that should all be in. That's just my opinion of course! It's also fine if you want to go ahead and bring a few people in for feedback

[Angle]

Yeah, you're probably right. I'll work on adding editing today.

[Angle]

I talked to my friend about transparency and OpenGL, and he says that first you need to call glEnable (GL_BLEND), then make sure you're using the right blend function, usually glBlendFunc (GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA), then draw stuff in the right order. Does that help you any? He was probably using LWJGL, which as far as I remember is basically a wrapper for OpenGL and a few other things.

[Anvilfolk]

Yeah, those are the things that I ended up trying out. There still ought to be some of the code in one of the initial commits for the client, if you want to try finding it and seeing the bug that came out of that. I did find some webpages talking about the problem I was having with OpenGL and the solution wasn't straightforward or easy or anything.

Again, I'm just convinced that OpenGL is too low-level...

I've been looking at LibGDX again, but just getting the basic resources/skins system working is such a huge pain.... other than that it appears to have some rather nice UI features that could be interesting.

[Angle]

Yeah, I'll look into that stuff after I get editing working. It's down to the syntax now. I was using "UPDATE Arguments SET content=(CONTENT) WHERE arg_id=(ARG_ID), user_id=(USER_ID) VALUES(?, ?, ?);" but it doesn't like that. DO you have any idea how to make that work?

[Anvilfolk]

UPDATEs don't use VALUES(...). Only INSERTs do! Try:

UPDATE Arguments SET content=? WHERE arg_id=?, user_id=?;



We also ought to start sanitizing input at some point!

[Angle]

It doesn't like that either. I'll read up on some documentation and see if I can figure it out.

Edit: alright, theres editing working. Do you think we should add a system to keep track of revisions?

[Anvilfolk]

How did you fix it?

Argument revisions? No, not really. I think it'd be too much stuff. To be honest, even editing should be a feature that can be turned off at some point! We could actually do it like SMF here: we can store the information of when and who performed the last edit to a post. Shouldn't be horribly hard!

[Angle]

I changed the "," to "AND".

[Anvilfolk]

Hahahahahah If I had a nickel for everytime it was something like that....

[Angle]

Yeah...

For now, what do you think we should work on next? I was considering taking a poke at switching to LWJGL, should I do that next or let it wait?

[Anvilfolk]

It'll depend on how far you think we can go with Swing. There's no problem in having two implementations. I mean, as far as I understand you can draw components and shapes however you want them, so there might actually not be any technological limitations. I'm not sure whether these are hardware accelerated though, and every Swing/AWT application that I've run has been pretty slow and unresponsive, so we might have to switch at some point.


One of the things that's super important is that it looks, feels and works good. In particular, people should be able to "merge" different related discussion graphs, order posts in different ways, etc. This should be programmed in a very general way so that it is easy to add new visualizations. Good principles for game design probably apply here - things like detaching views from actual content, for instance.

The more I dive into LibGDX, the more great features it appears to have that we can use, but on the other hand it seems soooo annoying to actually get to work at first. It does offer really large portability, but at the cost of a relatively confusing and somewhat undocumented API and associated tools. Worst-case it devolves into OpenGL, which is what LWJGL is anyway. I feel very strongly that we should steer clear from very low-level libraries. It's a recipe for disaster and low productivity.


I say we could go for LibGDX instead of LWJGL (check the older revisions with the LWJGL implementation to see the kind of problems and low-level graphics programming we'd be running into). There's also Batik, which looks interesting and might be closer to what we want.

If we decide on LibGDX, we should probably talk at some point, or I can write some of what I've learnt about it on here!

[Angle]

Yeah, let's wait on that. In the meantime, are there any other features you can think of that we should add? Perhaps some moderation capabilities, like the ability to ban users, instead of just deleting them?

[Anvilfolk]

We'll probably need to change the database for that, but sure, go ahead!

[Angle]

We'll probably also want to work on security. Right now, anyone can just write their own server application and edit the database. I have no idea how to address this though.