After a burst of inspiration, I managed to finish implementing Morning Star’s most basic functionality: recoloring images!
Thanks to Qt4’s awesome high-level interface to images (using QImage objects), the recoloring logic turned out to be much shorter and easier to understand than Wesnoth-TC’s, which had to deal with libpng and all the storage format details with PNG files. Instead, Morning Star just needs to care about reading, comparing and writing 32-bit ARGB values.
The interface design is pretty much set in stone now for version 1.0, but there’s still a lot of functionality missing. Nonetheless, this is starting to look good and I should have a working version for releasing to the public very soon. Hopefully this time artists will like this tool.
My collaborators know well that I often refer to Mozilla’s current flagship browser as “Failfox”. Many have read what I’ve got to say about severalversions of Mozilla Firefox before. A few also know my stance on the foundation’s trademark policies and their sole existence.
Yet I can’t bring myself to hate this awesome browser that’s still superior to Google Chrome in user interface design as far as I am concerned.
After switching to Iceweasel/Firefox 3.6 from Debian experimental a couple of months ago — after learning of its status at the website of one of the maintainers — I have had a pleasing and stable experience with Firefox that I’d not had since 3.0 was released. Now I’m also beta-testing Firefox 4 for Windows on my XP SP3 virtual machine, and awaiting the future stable release.
I thought I’d clarify this for those who might have thought I was yet another Firefox-hater, based on my previous rants. Of course, it’s a bit jarring that it took Mozilla and/or Debian so long to stabilize Firefox on amd64 systems, but I guess you can’t ask for more — it mostly is, after all, a volunteer-driven effort, and amd64 builds had not appeared before in the official FTP server until the Firefox 4 betas, for some reason.
Thanks to the power of Qt4, my long-delayed sister project to Wesnoth-TC, codenamed “Morning Star”, is finally commencing to materialize.
While I’m progressing slowly on this as always, partly due to my parallel work on Rei 2 IRC bot, this project is very likely to get completed soon thanks to Qt Creator, an awesome IDE designed for the development of Qt4-based software applications — with a familiar feel akin to Microsoft Visual Studio, which was incidentally involved in my early learning process with C#.
Morning Star is not a front-end to Wesnoth-TC as I initially planned. Instead, it is a whole new application built upon the same logic which will be oriented to the general audience so that artists can take advantage of its preview features, and even export recolored images, all without the need to use a command prompt, which is the main limitation of Wesnoth-TC right now. 😉
I have not decided upon a name for Morning Star, so if anyone can propose an adequate formal name for this project, I’d appreciate suggestions.
The Battle for Wesnoth forums have been working since quite a while as an authentication source for Multiplayer server users, who can register forum accounts to claim ownership of a username, making it unavailable in MP except to people who can provide the correct login credentials. phpBB 3.0.x, however, doesn’t help a lot in regards to user registration rules since it supports more stuff in usernames than what wesnothd (the Wesnoth MP server software) does.
To fill this gap, I wrote a quick hack long time ago, and enabled it in the forums, forbidding further registrations of incompatible usernames. Nowadays, all new accounts must comply with some simple rules which my mod implements.
Only this night I bothered to actually MODX-ify the hack, which had been previously circulating in the form of a Git commit in my source tree. Now I present to you the Wesnothd Usernames mod for phpBB 3.0.7-pl1.
Version 1.0.0 (Zip, 33.4 KiB)
SHA1 checksum: 1229f401eeac171887cfee8c0ccecd9aaa19dd4a
This might be useful only to very few people since the whole phpBB authentication support code is barely documented — but if you find a use for this mod in your phpBB+wesnothd installation, please feel free to drop me a comment so I can know your experience and fix any bugs that you may find. Of course, it’s unlikely that there are any bugs here since this modifications has been part of the official Wesnoth.org forums for more than a year. 😉
It’s a tradition for the Battle for Wesnoth community to explain what our software version numbers mean to newcomers, since these often ask what’s the difference between the stable series, and the development series, and what happens when a new stable version is defined.
A simple answer addressing the difference between odd/even minor version numbers (i.e. Y in X.Y.Z) has usually sufficed, but now that we are producing releases for the 1.9 development series, misconceptions about the next major series (2.x) spread like the plague. I wrote clarification post a couple of months ago, on the numbering scheme — since it’s getting lost in the depths of the Users’ Forum archive, I'll replicate it here for the few anonymous people who read this.
I’m also going to explain what’s the deal with this magic “2.0” version number, although that part is going to be a lot more subjective — in other words, I’ll address that subject from my own point of view instead of the development team’s.
The Wesnoth users community has always been rather special compared to other gaming groups. The forumers are usually civilized, they respect the Posting Guidelines, rarely start heated discussions on their own, and follow our moderators and developers’ orders and recommendations.
The development team, our current moderators and I are usually around to help with any thread requiring moderation. Such a pacific community doesn’t require maintenance work like that very often, not counting the insatiable spam generators that never stop coming to attempt to plague the forums with cheap search engine-feeding signatures and gratuitously large ad-posts.
However, a rather recent phenomenon is that of Rent-a-Modding. There are some members who seem to think, consciously or not, that forum moderation works by following a tight set of rules resulting in mechanical procedures fitting every possible situation, derived of course from our Posting Guidelines. Other users attempt to answer to forum posts authored by newbies, by guessing what a developer or moderator would say in such situation, or by copying past moderator reactions.
The behavior I’m describing here is commonly known as backseat-modding, and as Urban Dictionary puts it, they are, effectively, a pain in the ass for actual mods and admins, but it’s not because they look like wannabe-mods, but because most of the time they are doing it wrong!
As I was saying, moderators don’t really follow strict rules to decide how to react to a particular situation, since every situation involves completely different contexts which depend a lot on the poster’s background and past behavior — there is, after all, a reason for handpicking Forum Regulars who might fit the job. This is what makes Rent-a-Mods annoying in the first place, since they can easily give out a really bad impression of our community and standards, scaring away newcomers and spreading bad words about us in other corners of the ’net.
Taking a wild guess of what a Developer will say to a poster regarding a specific development issue, such as Wesnoth’s future plans, or why problem X has not been fixed yet, or why feature Y is apparently never going to be implemented, is also a really Bad Thing™ since it wastes our time correcting the spreading misinformation before it gets stuck in people’s heads. There has been a lot of random guesswork regarding recent problems such as the supposed GNU General Public License violations by the iPhone/iPad port creator and distributor, or why a complaining poster has been banned from the multiplayer server(s) — hence we had to ban both to keep things orderly and avoid the development of useless time-consuming arguments.
In case I’m not getting my point across:
DON’T DO IT. IT’S NOT USEFUL FOR ANY OF THE INVOLVED PARTIES. LET THE MODS DO THEIR JOB.
Thanks for reading. I’m fairly certain that this post might not provide a clear enough answer for cases such as this, but I don’t feel like writing a longer and thorough rant at this moment.
People’s curiosity has no limits, particularly when it comes to Wesnoth add-ons.
In order to reproduce a bug, I had uploaded and removed a test add-on from the add-on servers for 1.8 and trunk several times, yet it seems I forgot to remove it the last time. This hasn’t stopped people from downloading it out of morbid curiosity, although nobody has dared to ask me about it on IRC or the forums. Certainly not news to me, since this is exactly what happened with it the last time prior to its removal.
As of this writing, the 1.8 version has had 949 downloads, as it can be seen in the screenshot above. You’d think an add-on with a description of “FOO” and a misspelled title would not attract anyone to try it, but this principle doesn’t work in practice. Had the add-on contained code to break all other add-ons, people would still not get the idea, I guess. Then again, I’m talking about users who often mistakenly download the source code tarballs and then ask how to install Wesnoth on Windows or Mac OS X.
This is what I get for forgetting to remove this kind of stuff. Thanks Gambit for pointing it out to me this night.
After some hesitation, I have deployed Prosilver Special Edition on the Wesnoth.org forums, with multiple changes meant to make it more similar to mainline Prosilver in terms of layout. Wesnoth’s custom Prosilver changes have also been applied on our copy of Prosilver SE.
In fact, Prosilver SE as used in Wesnoth.org depends completely on the main Prosilver template rather than its own partial template set, and it also replaces the default Prosilver theme/stylesheets and imagesets, since otherwise very few people would choose to use it. Besides, OAB.
Of course, further changes are not unlikely to occur, depending both on the users’ feedback and my own testing experiences.
Most people who frequented phpBB 2 forums have met the Subsilver theme at some point. Wesnoth’s community is not the exception, and the phpBB 3 switch completed by cycholka/Mist in March 2008 during the third-to-last host migration involved switching everyone to Subsilver2, which is the last incarnation of the good old Subsilver. Most of us Wesnoth forumers have become accustomed to the cleanness, quirks and old-school feel of Subsilver2.
However, that will eventually change.
Maintaining patches for mods affecting the forum user and moderator front-ends involves editing three template sets, which are Prosilver (phpBB 3’s new built-in and default style), Subsilver2 and AcidTech, which is Subsilver2-based with some essential layout differences. There are even some mods that don’t provide MODX instructions for Subsilver2, since it’s not essential for approval in the official modifications database to include support for this style that’s most likely going to be dropped in future phpBB release series.
If you take a look at my Projects section you’ll also notice that I’ve needed to write a couple of Subsilver2 hacks in the past to add minor functionality that’s present in the official phpBB 3 “Olympus” forum theme by default. There’s a third custom change in my tree, corresponding to the Quick Reply editor toggle button.
I have just rebooted from a 2.6.35 kernel to 2.6.34.2 in order to have the ability to hibernate bluecore with Tux-on-Ice again. However, the laptop acted up after the warm reboot as a consequence of running Linux in KMS operation mode, apparently. The greatest sign of doom: the Giant Blinking Cursor of Doom.
It’s normal for these HP laptops to display the text-mode blinking cursor for a bit after the BIOS splash screen, right before transferring execution to the first available boot medium. The cursor’s size is similar to Linux’s or MS-DOS under a default configuration with any generic VGA-compatible video adapter. In this transition state, the bold-white cursor blinks a few times at the top-left corner of the empty black screen, before changing its color to the normal text terminal white when GNU GRUB takes over.
However, whenever the AMD ATI Catalyst drivers lock up the laptop and I perform a warm reboot using one of the Magic SysRq sequences, the laptop doesn’t get past the system initialization code and after the BIOS splash screen disappears, instead of the usual bright blinking cursor, an abnormally large and wide white blinking cursor appears as the computer gets stuck forever.
I had not seen this occur after running with the open-source KMS drivers before, but I guess it might indicate I own a faulty GPU or motherboard.
