Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sonerohi]

7zip. It's pretty good except for this.

[RedWarrior0]

I used 7zip and got 2.6 fine. No problem there.

[sonerohi]

Hmmm. I'll re-download and see if'n anything changes.
Edit: Everything is running perfectly now. 2.6 is genning me worlds and I'm getting perfect matches every time. I wonder what went wrong the first time  .

[smjjames]

Any updates on this? Just wondering here.

[GFXiNXS]

Yeah, I know it has been ages. I just bought an apartment and it has been nothing but a perpetual black hole draining my time. That, and work isn't really letting up at the moment. I have a few concepts itching to be put down, though, at this point I can't say how long or even whether or not I'll get around to making a new release any time soon. We'll see how I go.

I kind of assumed people weren't paying attention to this project anymore

EDIT: I just ran a quick test. I might actually be able to get UltraFinder to read your specific tile data as opposed to just scanning the colours on the screen. Now that I have this hurdle out of the way, I might just have the motivation behind me to make a full fledged, full featured overhaul

EDIT2: Damn my nipples are rigid. I now have it breaking down the tileset and altering the colours as necessary.

[Elvang]

Awesome. Are you using all autohotkey for the tileset manipulations or an external dll?

EDIT: I tried a keystroke delay detector, worked rather well. Detects the delay 5 times, averages it, then sets the delay to Average + (Average/2) just to be safe, in case there is a slight lag. Use a timer routine to figure out how much time has passed, 10 or 15 milliseconds is the fastest it can be called, based on the OS. So each time it gets called, just add 10 or 15 to a variable, stopping the timer once the test is done. Strangely enough, it was returning delays under 100 for me, and they worked too. Previously I had always needed at least 150, though that might've been with an older version of AHK...

[GFXiNXS]

I'm using an external *.dll called "GflAx", it comes with a free SDK from XnView. Has some fantastic drawing functions along with support for a wide variety of formats (it's also bloody fast). As of current, I have it break your tileset down, set the background colour, and then multiply the init.txt colour values giving the correct shades. I'm only in the preliminary stages of testing, but I have it pumping out all 256 tiles, setting the background colour to black, and multiplying in red with the foreground in about 2 seconds flat

Interesting about the key delay. Some OS's are rather horrible with delay though (not modern, I know, but an example):
Windows 95, 98, ME: 55 ms
Windows NT, Uniprocessor HAL: 10 ms
Windows NT, Multiprocessor HAL: 15 ms
Windows NT 4.0 Alpha: 7.5 ms

I'm assuming without OS detection, that could cause issues?

[Elvang]

Yea. The whole different minimums for timeslices is extra work :\. I guess you could set a timer to 1 millisecond intervals, with each call checking the current system time. That should give an accurate idea of what the minimum is without a lot of extra work.

[smjjames]

Yea, I can understand with the move and all.

Anyways, pretty cool on that new idea and stuff. I've also been waiting to see whether the feature about detecting whether there is sand (as opposed to loamy sand or sandy loam or sandy clay) at the embark site is working out.

[GFXiNXS]

Yeah, well basically, the old (current) version of UltraFinder would read the colour data from the init.txt file and then compare the colours to what is within the DF window in order to gauge what is happening. The problem with that method is that, if there isn't a difference in the colours, I can't really have the program know whether that brown colour is sand or loam.

With the latest developments, I have the program breaking down your tileset (and matching the colours to your init.txt) and reading from that data. With this information I can do all sorts of crazy things like have the program take a snapshot of your screen in the form of ascii to your clipboard, or output it to a text file. Why you'd want that, I don't know, but it'd be kinda cool. But in the same sense, I'll be able to get it to scan your screen and then search for matching strings to know what features are available as well as scanning for things like ocean biomes etc.

I also won't have to rely on the default finder any more, and will be capable of inventing my own scanning system that can turn up multiple sites within a region file etc. All very exciting stuff. Now that I have the base framework in place, I'm hoping that it won't take me long to get the bulk of the code in place.

All in all, this whole concept is no longer a "what if" and more of a "when".

Cheers guys

[Lamp]

Well, congrats on getting the tileset scan working! I can't wait until you implement your own scanner.

[Logical2u]

Can't wait to see what you come up with next, so far I've been loving this utility (2.6c) since it's so annoying to try and find the "perfect" location.

Just a note though it doesn't seem to like the .14 version very much - it doesn't perform enough key-presses to get to the world creator option and instead gets stuck on "about". I even tried turning the delay up a lot... didn't seem to do the trick. Maybe it's missing a keypress or something?

[smjjames]

cool, bieng able to scan multiple sites on the same map is probably on most peoples wishlist. I've always wanted to see all the possible sites that match on one map and I'm sure others do as well.

[Eduren]

Wow dude, it starting to sound really cool. Ill venture a guess that you are the first person to seriously attempt a replacement for the built-in finder.

[GFXiNXS]

-snip-

Just a note though it doesn't seem to like the .14 version very much -snip-

Cheers for pointing that out. Basically, 40d used Dwarfort.exe and 40d+ used Dwarf Fortress.exe. 40d did not have an about option, 40d+ did, and as such I just ran a name check to figure out the version, and it sent the appropriate number of key presses from that point. Obviously d14 reverted the name, thus breaking it. All you'd have to do is retitle it.

I suppose in the new version of UltraFinder I could actually have it scan for which words are highlighted and have it navigate that way so it just keeps hitting the down key until the appropriate label is flagged white. Should avoid any problems. Hopefully it won't hinder the speed of the program too much. I'm already slightly concerned about how long this is going to take to reference tiles and colours.

My current idea is to have different sets to reference, like a letter set, a number set and a features set and have it reference the appropriate library for specific regions scanned, thus reducing the number of tiles it has to compare it to. I'm also going to order the checks via most commonly used so that when it finds the appropriate tile it breaks the loop early on and avoids unnecessary cycles. If I were to bundle everything, looking at 256 characters over 16 colours, totalling 4096 tiles to reference, it'd just plain take too long. By ordering things by most common colour along most common tiles, it should make the programs life a lot easier. It helps, too, that I know what tiles to expect in most cases, so I should be able to give it enough hints to cut time down.

Blegh. Thats a nice wall. If anyone here has a better idea, let me know, otherwise I'll blunder on as I am and hope for the best.


Cheers,

GFXiNXS