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Using the old inventory (or one of the Modded inventories) makes items which are about to be equipped to the “Head slot” vanish.

More specifically: Moving an item to an invalid slot makes it “vanish” for the client.
Looking into the Database, the items gets “location_in_parent=-85”.

In my oppinion this is a BUG. The server should deny moving items to “invalid slots” rather than giving it some “inaccessible parent id”.
There’s no way for “clients” to reaccess those items.

To reproduce: use the old inventory.xml (which has <widget name=”head” factory=”pawsSlot” tooltip=”Head”> instead of <widget name=”helm” factory=”pawsSlot” tooltip=”Helm”>).

The spelling of “color / colour” isn’t consistent among books.

The book “Currency Fundamentals” even uses both ways of spelling:
“There are coins of higher denomination. The Hexa has a value of 10 Tria; it’s made of another crystal mineral, light blue in color, and has the shape of a hexagon. The red Octa is worth 50 Tria, and the gold-coloured Circle is worth 250 Tria.”

Newer books seem to use “colour” rather than “color”.

I looked for other “or”-”uor”-inconsistencies but couldn’t find any so far. (I am sure it’s way easier for someone to check who has the books in text format). I’m quite certain that there are more. Easiest way would be a spell-checker which is explicitly set to the one or the other spelling.

I know, one can’t say “the one way is right and the other way is wrong - since both are valid”, yet the spelling should be uniform. So, which one has to be used for PlaneShift? UK or US?

And I have been working on that feature.

Imagine you make an actual map and you want to add some river (by using lines), there’s no way to distinguish that river from a road. Or maybe a “city wall” from a road.

Or you want to mark a “very important spot”, different kind of roads, etc.
Being able to change the colour of individual lines and text, you can actually make a map which takes such things into consideration.

My changes allow to set colour for lines, bezier curves and text.
You can select an item and open a “colour picker”-dialog. The colour picker has a “preview box” and three sliders, one for red, green and blue.
Since some colours would be quite unrealistic the “colour range” can roughly be limited by giving a min and a max val which is applied to all three sliders. (it’s a new pawsColorPromptWindow class, derived from pawsPromptWindow)
eg: min 0, max 100 will allow you to chose a colour from 0,0,0 (black) till 100,100,100 (grey) and every possible combination.

My implementation currently works, requires no changes on the server side and only saves the colour if you actually defined one (other than black).
It’s even backwards compatible (meaning you can open coloured maps with a current stable client, you just won’t see the colours and modifying the map will make you lose them)

The colour is saved like:

//text
if(color == -1)
{
    xml.AppendFmt("<tx x=\"%d\" y=\"%d\" t=\"%s\"/>", x, y, txt.GetData());
}
else
{
    xml.AppendFmt("<tx x=\"%d\" y=\"%d\" t=\"%s\" col=\"%X\"/>", x, y, txt.GetData(), color);
}

// same way for line and bezier curve

Here’s a preview with a text and some lines (tested it also with bezier curves), as well as the “colour picker” and the “open colour picker”-icon.

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/422/coltest2bk8.png

[ I can provide more screenshots, if needed ]

However, if this gets aproved, there are some (few) things I want to clarify:
- should it be possible to specify the range of each colour component?
- should it be possible to also define the alpha value? (I’d rather say no, because if “filled poly paths” (which is another thing I am working on) is ever supported, there should always be some transparency to see the parchment-texture throught)
- what’s the best way to submit the icon (if it’s fine) and the xml (entry for the icon)?
- suggestions?
- should the classes (and text) be named “color” (US-English) or “colour” (UK-English)? (i found both of them, searching through the code).

[ there’s one tiny bug I still have to fix, but that one should be a trifle. ]

Right now, the sketching is a nice feature, yet you are very limited by not having a way of drawing some kind of curves.
It’s rather unrealistic that one could only draw “perfectly” straight lines.

Bezier Curves, or more precisely Cubic Bezier Curves offer an easy to handle way of “creating” and “modifying” curves.
The curves are defined by 4 points, moving those points around alters the curve.

Wikipedia: Bezier Curves

Well, that’s exactly what I implemented. (Spent a lot of time and put plenty of love into that beauty :D )

Here’s what it looks:
Edit Mode: (focus on the curve in the center only, the spirals are my test objects)

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/6731/beziereditqc3.jpg

View Mode:

http://img364.imageshack.us/img364/1724/bezierviewck8.jpg

I focused on having it as user friendly as possible:
Blue Line = drag the whole curve
Green Line = drag one half of the curve
Dots = drag one of the 4 the control points

I also kept an eye on performance and implemented a precomputed array for the “Weights of the line-segment points”.
The resolution of the curve (each curve is displayed by drawing several line segments) can be chaged by modifying a define.
However, a resolution of 20 proved to be good-looking. Only very-very large (and extremely bent) curves may get visible edges which isn’t really a problem either, because you can simply use two curves instead of one. (the right spiral on the screenshot consits of 200 bezier curves)

And here’s my patch

http://pastebin.ca/1095938

MIND! You will have to apply this patch (which fixes some dragging-issues) first:  FS#2094 

To reproduce: Click on an icon or on text in edit mode, it jumps to the mouse cursor.
The icon also flickers OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp because it replaces the mouse cursor. (using the mouse cursor makes the removing of the “icon jumps” behaviour impossible anyway.)

I fixed that issue and also did some cleanup (eg the SketchLine shouldn’t care whether the mouse is down or not if you drag it).
Position changes are now done relatively.

Another change: If the sketch could not be parsed, the user gets notified about it and the sketch doesn’t display. Before he only got an entry into his Error log but no real feedback. (you could theoretically recieve unsupported sketches from the server.)

http://pastebin.ca/1095915

Sketching: Impossible (or hardly possible) to select horizontal or vertical lines. (the whole line, not just an edge).

Move the edges of a line till it is perfectly horizontal or vertical. Now you want to move that line (without changing the slope), but you can’t select it anymore, since you have to hit exactly on the line.. maybe it’s even impossible at all to click into the bounding rectangle of the two points of the line. (I was never able to select such a line).

Fix provided: Increasing the size of the bounding rectangle if needed.

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

Fix provided: An added Icon will now automatically be selected.

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

Right now you click (MouseDown, MouseUp) to see which object you end up selecting, if you selected the right one, again (click + drag) (which will automatically move text or icons on the first click). It’s not really a “user friendly” way since the clicking can often be kind of “trial and error”.

Fix provided: Now selects on “Mouse over object” (only while the mouse moves, in order to be able to move the object with the keys without deselecting it if it moves away from under the mouse)

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

While moving the line, the boxes cover the ends of it, thus making it very hard to “guess” where the end of the line will actually end up.

Fix provided: While dragging a line, the boxes will not be drawn. If dragging only one corner of the line, only that box will not be drawn.

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

Usually both boxes of the lines blink, independant if the whole line, or only one corner of it is selected.

Fix provided: The selected line will turn dark red and both boxes blink. If only one box is selected, the line will turn dark red and only the selected box will blink

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

If you have many lines close to each another (especially if their end-boxes are close), it is often hard to tell which line you actually selected.

Fix provided: The selected line will turn dark red and both boxes blink. If only one box is selected, the line will turn dark red and only the selected box will blink.

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

You can’t select a line which is inside the bounding rectangle of a previous line. (You’ll always select the line which was added first.)

Fix provided:
Instead of returning true as soon as the coordinades of the mouse are inside the bounding rectangle, I further calculate the normal distance from the mouse coordinates to the line and return only true if the distance is ⇐ 3.

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

if saving a sketch whose name consists of invalid characters, it will be saved as books/book%d.txt instead of sketches/sketch%d.xml

(bug and fix for this pointed out by weltall)

diff for this and the other reports I opened concerning the pawsilluminationwindow: http://pastebin.ca/1090210

Well, chat and system log files don’t have a CR/LF line ending on Windows anymore. Already since 0.4.00.
The log files “.txt” are associated with notepad which needs “CR/LF” to show the line endings correctly.

And without actually seeing _lines_, the log file is very hard to read, yet it may be important to read up in order to remember the last state (be it quests or RP).

You could alternatively use notepad++, an open source text processor (with many nice features), but it is a mere workaround and notepad++ is, seems not really as resource friendly as notepad.

The layout is hardcoded, consequently custom mods (or future GUIs) are restricted to use 16×2 layout which makes it even harder to get the GUI you want (without code changes, otherwise you can’t share it).

However, I made up a way to accomplish an “xml-defined” colums-count.
With my code-change you can simply add (or remove) columns defined in the XML.
It also _hides_ those slots which get over INVENTORY_BULK_COUNT (eg when using 3 rows), thus fixing the issue that someone who changes the XML to add a column, can easily get invalid slots.

Here’s the diff:
http://www.pastebin.ca/1062095

It’s impossible to change the guild window backgrounds (in the xml) without changing the source code and recompiling the client.

It may be possible to solve that issue by assigning the backgrounds in the XML file to the tabs and removing the
pawsGuildWindow::SetTheRightBackground()
part which overwrites the background of the whole window.

What I am trying to accomplish is a “lighter gui”, lighter in memory usage.

Those waggons look strange on my system. (looks like a wrong z-buffer, or maybe something with "transparency")
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/8638/shot35jz1.jpg

Sys info:
ATI Radeon X1800
Windows XP

Maybe it's related to this bug:
http://www.hydlaa.com/flyspray_upgrade/index.php?do=details&task_id=1265

While advisors are forced to be specific through the whole conversation, those who ask for help need not tell more than
“n help” for the first question and the follow-up conversation even works with single characters “n”.

I don’t think that any question with mere 6 characters can contain any useful help-request.

yet the advisor can’t even say “You are welcome :)” as an in-conversation-response

An advisor can’t simply write “You are welcome :)” after some successful advising.

XYZ: Thanks, that helped.

Either ignore that or write some strangely wordy reply expressing that you appreciate the thanks and that the other person, indeed, is welcome (being more welcoming to newcomers).

In contrary to that, those who need help can write as little as “n help” or for follow up questions even a single character is sufficient “w”.
(this will be another report)

Of course, an advisor shouldn’t simply do that while advising someone, yet the one who requested help should get some notice that their advisor isn’t available anymore and that they may want to ask their question again.

I think the first place where people need some advise is usueally the Tutorial map.
If no Advisor is online, or none answered within some specific time, people will get the response:

The world has no advisors at the moment. You are now allowed to shout your question to other players. You can do it in this way “/shout <question here>”.

However, there’s none in the tutorial world who will hear those shouts, consequently those potential new “PlaneShifters” will feel ignored and may drop it.
Either change that “You are now allowed to shout” or add something like “alternatively you can ask in the IRC fan channel or on the forum”. At least let them know in some way that none will hear that if they’re in the tutorial.

It shouldn’t be necessary to kill Kikiri in order to obtain eggs.

Eggs should spawn near Kikiri instead.

(unless I missunderstood the anatomy of Kikiris)

People should be able to decide whether “incoming” text is filtered or not.
However, when both “outgoing” and “incoming” words are filtered by default, it’s almost like enforcing all chat to be filtered.

It’s anyway - in my oppinion - a bad idea to “transform leet-speak” into “look alike roleplaying conform text” sup d00d? → how farest thou Sir?

If the sentence contains a word which contains a bad word, the rest of the sentence isn’t checked against this badword.

To reproduce write:
/tell <yourname> damn pppdamnppp damn

The result will be
<yourname> tells you: $@!$ pppdamnppp damn
You tell <yourname>: $@!$ pppdamnppp damn

Mark, it only happens if a word CONTAINS the badword, not if you use a badword multiple times: eg:
/tell <yourname> damn damn damn
result:
<yourname> tells you: $@!$ $@!$ $@!$