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When clicking on the 'Save' button, a text box should appear with some text in it. Does it?

One machine at work didn't act right (IE4, Windows NT with no service packs).

All other machines seem fine.

I have now run this through its paces. I propose that rather than having everyone look at it each time, potentially with little changed between the last time, we just have people take turns. Perhaps Rodrigo or Axi should check every, or every other, iteration. Especially when some of the real guts of the model start getting in there.

I assume you are not supposed to be able to assign religions cultures or tendencies yet for the ethnic groups... The only bug I ran into was in dispelling some of the little input windows I needed to click on the x button twice to get rid of it. Focus problem?

One thing that IMO would be useful for the save files is an XML viewer that would create something easier for a normal person to read... so rather than the two flanking tags you could instead have it read:

"Pop: 1000" instead of two tags flanking a 1000.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this input.

The idea hopefully is going to be for the model designers to use this regularly for testing out their ideas, once the save/load function is finished. And it should only take about 10 to 15 minutes to go thru each release and run a quick test or two, so I kinda hope that everyone on the team would take the 15 mins to crank on it. Maybe not every release, but many of the releases.

But then again, I'll take what I can get.

1) Assigning Religion, Culture, Tendencies and Attributes (one more to add on there) to the EGs will be in there next -- probably tonight.

2) That XML file is to get around the applet restrictions for saving to your local drive. That file is not meant to be read by a person -- it's just a representation of the state of the scenario you have set up using the tool. The idea behind that 'save' text box is that you copy that text and paste it into a text file, and that becomes your 'scenario' file. When you run that code from your local machine, it can read the file on your machine. So tests and scenarios can be made.

Hi. Thanks for the feedback, you're saving me a bunch of time.

You're correct, I'm sorry, the save feature is only about 2/3rds done -- I stayed up late watching a movie with my daughter, and did start coding until about 1 a.m. I went ahead and posted what I had. It'll be finished tonight. There is no windowlistener yet to close the box -- the only way to close it is with the 'OK' button, at the moment. Will be fixed tonight.

1) Was this run thru the applet, or did you download and run it locally?

And please check again in the morning, I'll post the changes around 3 a.m. central.

It's a bit further along now. Still moving along.

Needs another night of polishing, but I put it up there anyway, for anyone interested in following the progress. Without running servlets, I can't write to the server drives, so I had to find a work-around. I think you'll not mind my solution too much, you get all the functionality. Just remember that it's only a temporary fix. I'll also create an application version that can be downloaded, when time permits and that will not have any problem saving and loading files.

You can save and load. You can begin to get a visiual look at how you want this laid out.

Civs can control squares, but I haven't built in 'provinces' yet. You can put groups of people in squares. You can define and save civs, religions, cultures, and the map.

Another bug: If you click on the menus to select a religion/culture when there is no EG, the menu gets stuck.

OK, the menus don't stick now...

Actually, you're helping greatly. This is the heart of the development cycle, I'm afraid. Ya'll will be doing a lot of this, banging around on uncomplete 'alpha' software'.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) Debugging. At this rate, we can have a finished, fully debugged scenario builder in a few more weeks. And I can't do this myself -- these things aren't happening on my machine. If ya'll don't help me catch me these things now, then we'll have a bunch of them all at once, later.

2) Concptual design. As you bang around on this, as it develops, you can tell me how you really want it to be, and correct any mistakes I make in concept immediately. That way you get exactly the tool you need, and you get it sooner.

* * *

Won't copy/paste? Odd, I'll look into that next. But yes, the idea is that you set up a 'scenario' by creating groups of people in mapsquares, creating civs, religions, cultures, governments, etc, and then we'll add 'turn' logic in to test these models, and tweak the variables as we see how they evolve and work over a bunch of 'game turns'.

That way, we end up with working, coded, debugged models in a very short period of time -- perhaps 3 months -- and those models can be quickly integrated into the Clash code, in a matter of days or weeks.

Try it now, perhaps. I made another tweak that *might* have had something to do with it, I'm not sure.

1) Population doesn't "stick". Every time I plug in a number it reverts to zero. NOTE: Turns out I wasn't hitting the "Enter" key after plugging in the number....that solves the problem, although it's not intuitive.

2) Initially I was somewhat confused and went straight to the Ethnic groups (before defining any of the other items like Civ, Religion, Culture, etc. I'm not clear on the exact sequence, but I think I tried to add a new Culture next, the box appeared to "freeze", upon which I hit the "Show Desktop" icon. Instantly, everything disappeared including the Task Bar! Even the Start button was gone. I brought up the "Close Program" Box but nothing was "Not Responding". So I clicked on the "Clash Scenario Editor" but hit Cancel instead of End Task or Shut Down. This displayed the offending Culture Window, which now was able to close. I repeated the process several times, and eventually the Task Bar reappeared and all the programs worked again. Weird!

3) After loading data into every window that would accept it (Civ, Religion, Culture, Social Class, Ethnic Group) I then clicked on a different map square. Immediately, none of the data is available in drop-down boxes. The data still exists when I click back to the original Map Square. NOTE: I did find that typing in the name of an ethnic group makes all the other data available in the drop-down boxes, but that still means you'd have to manually recreate the ethnic group list for every new sqaure.

4) Assuming you have entered data into the Culture window and have created a civ, there's aother problem: If I select the "No Culture Selected" dropdown box, it doesn't matter which culture I choose, the box always reverts to "No Culture Selected"

5) While playing around with the Load and Save buttons, I seem to have lost all the "Civ Detail" data, although all the Map Square data remains.

6) The only observed effect of the Form Province button is to add a Population number below the button.

7) Seize Map Square seems to work, but there's no apparent way to "unseize".

All for now!

Now we're cookin.

1) Changed it to a pop-up dialog.

2A) A new 'General Help Dialog' at the beginning will now try and explain some of the basic 'how to' stuff. I threw some text in there for now, it could be better.

2B) The Focus problem with modal dialog boxes should work right now.

3) The Religion, Culture, etc. drop-down boxes are suppose to be for the 'selected group' of people. When a square is empty, they will be too. I added a label to that panel, which might make it clearer. Is that what you meant?

4) Assigning Culture is fixed.

5) Loading 'controlled squares' should work now.

6) Provinces are not yet implemented. Next weekend. The button should now reflect that.

7) It's a little wierd in IE, but you can now un-sieze mapsquares. Will polish it up tomorrow night.

I had no problems browsing it.

The only thing I found strange was that you can define an ethnic group, FE romans and create a culture, FE persianculture and assign persianculture to romans. In the original model ethnic group and culture are one single thing. I'd like to have the CREATE_ETHNIC_GROUP button introducing the EG attributes, one of them would be its name/nationality.

Actually, you're right, I think.

The 'EthnicGroup' in that builder is more meant to be just a generic group of people, with no definition. Perhaps it would make more sense to just make the 'culture' the Group name -- I think that makes a lot of sense.

We need the seperate culture object. For 'romanized' greeks, for example.

My original idea was that a civ like the roman empire had several ethnic groups. Each EG has a nationality. So, in the case of "romanized greeks", it'd be an EG living in the roman empire having greek nationality. This EG is different from an EG with greek nationality living in the greek civ simply because the rest of the EG attributes are different.

What I'm really saying is that I see no point in having "culture" as a separated thing from nationality (by culture I here mean a set of cultural attributes like Individualism). What culture would you assign to the greeks living under roman rule? the same culture romans have? I think they'd have a culture which is partly roman and partly greek (at first at least). If so, they have a unique culture: greco-roman (or something like that). Given this uniqueness, i.e. this culture cannot be found anywhere else in the world (there's only one roman empire and only greeks in the roman empire have it), then it's unnecessary to break thing in two: EG and culture. They're really one thing. The right modeling IMO is having an EG with its own cultural values, one of which is nationality. The name of the EG is IMO irrelevant. They can be called "greeks under roman rule" or simply "greeks". As long as all civs with greek population have their own EG with own values each, there's no problem and you can see several forms of greek culture depending on where they live.

1)In the third group of buttons, no matter which characteristic you choose to edit (Social, Religious, Culture, etc.) the "New ****" button brings up a window titled "New Social Class" with a subheading of "SC Name:". The data feeds to the correct location, so it's just an aesthetic problem, not a functional one. NOTE: Same thing happens with the "Edit Civ" and "Edit Base EG" buttons, except they share a window titled "New Civ Name".

2) The Add/Remove Map Squre button doesn't remove. I kept clicking on Squre 2,2, and now there are three of them in the box.

3) Squares retain all the selected info except "Civilization". The "Civ Detail" box always displays the last civ selected, regardless of which square you click on.

4) Clicking into the "Pop:" field does pop-up a new window, but it does NOT activate. Instead, the window is grey and the cursor hops into the Ethnic Group field (right beneath "Selected Group Detail"). If you start typing before looking up, you'll edit that field instead of the population! NOTE: It's easy enough to click and activate the window, but that should be the default.

The problem I came across was what happens when an ethnic group in a square undergoes changes to it's environment -- i.e. greeks suddenly coming under Roman rule, then living under Roman culture for a long time.

I have to be able to change their culture individually.

The Scenario Thingy might reflect more what you wanted now. I added in a concept of 'base Ethnic Groups' that is what your 'ethnic groups' concept was -- one unchanging EG with given settings. But then each group in each square is independent from that point, and can change religion, culture, whatever.

Or, it doesn't have to change. Up to you.

1) Fixed, and fixed.

2) Done. Interestingly, I wasn't thinking about clicking on the map to remove -- I had it set up to be removed when you clicked on the list item. Your way is better, makes more sense. Thanks.

3) I'll get to this one next.

4) Fixed.

Wierd. A few possibilities --

Could the old version be 'cached' on your browser? Let me ask:

Do you see any 'base Ethnic Group' info in the beginning help info?

Do you see a 'Build/Edit Base EG' button on the left?

If not, then perhaps try clearing out the 'cached' files in your browser (depending on your browser version, look for 'internet options' among either 'view' or 'tools' in the menu bar on the browser, and on that page click the button 'Delete Files' in the 'Temporary Internet Files' section). Then reload the page.

I'm going to add a button to copy that to the clipboard tonight. That should solve this problem, for the time being. But I'm curious about the origin . . .

If clearing the cache doesn't help, then we'll need you to enable the 'Java Console' in your browser, and look at the error that pops up there.

We'll nail that one down, don't worry.

Managed to find a machine at work that duplicates the problem. The 'save' dialog doesn't even come up . . .

The error says 'class Civilization not found', which is wierd, since the class is there -- I'll look into it some more.

"The problem I came across was what happens when an ethnic group in a square undergoes changes to it's environment -- i.e. greeks suddenly coming under Roman rule, then living under Roman culture for a long time.
I have to be able to change their culture individually."

Yes, I know what you meant. I maybe wasn't clear with my explanation. An EG who suffers a change in its environment will evolve differently than one that stays in the original one. We agree on this. My original idea was not, as you said, "one unchanging EG with given settings". The changes you talk about were included in the model. My "protest", if it can be called that, is that you're separating things in a way I see is artificial and unnessesary. The greeks under roman rule in a given msq has a unique culture, so you have an EG called "greeks under roman rule" with greek nationality and "greek-under-roman-rule" culture. It's one thing. If you define "g-u-r-r" culture as a stand alone object, you'll find you can only assign it to this particular EG and to no other. If so, why should you have it separated from the EG itself? They'll go together all along. In my head you need an OO-class called EG with attributes:
Nationality
Cultural attr1
Cultural attr2
...
Cultural attr3
+(some extra info)

The greeks u-r-r would be an object of this OO-class which in time is a piece of the roman civ object. The greeks in Greece are another object being a piece of the greek civ object. When turns advance, you change cultural attributes values for each of these two objects. Since the greeks u-r-r are a part of the roman civ object, changes in values would be different to the changes greeks in greece expirience.

First, remember, this is just my version of the data model, and it likely will change. And it may not even resemble the one Clash ends up using. But the data will remain the same, so this is a fruitful discussion.

I feel your questioning is great. I enjoy discussing this kind of design detail, and I'm one of those guys that feels that if I've got the right answer it'll stand up under scrutiny.

My concept of OO design is typified by an atom.

There is no such thing as an 'atom'. An atom is actually a 'wrapper' name for a collection of particles and forces. So we have an 'Atom' Class that contains collections of 'Electron', 'Proton', 'Nuetron', etc. objects. Then, I can create any number of 'atoms' (instances of 'atom'), and each will have it's own, independent values.

In Game terms, every square has a population. That Population is broken up into 'group' objects -- instances of the 'EthnicGroup' class. There is no such thing as an 'EthnicGroup', in game terms, each instance is just a collection of values (EGDetailChoices) -- Culture, Religion, Tendencies and Attributes.

In other words, I'm using a 'wrapper' class. That's why it seems 'un-necessary', perhaps -- it's purpose is largely to organize the object-hierarchy. Just like the 'particle'-'Atom'-'Molecule' hierarchy.

'EGDetailChoices'-'EthnicGroup'-'ProvincePopulation'.

So I haven't bailed, don't worry.

Of course, some of ya'll might wish I would . . .

The server for my home page space is still in the midst of upgrading. They've restored an old version of the files, but I can't update the applet to the newest version yet.

Sometime today, they said.

It's back up. I'm adding in a few new things this weekend, so any requested changes will be easy to work in.

Anyone with a few minutes to spare, please run the Object Builder thru a few paces and list anything I didn't notice. It would help me tremendously.

They were supposedly upgrading the server for better thruput.

Which brings up a good general question -- how long does it take the applet to load on ya'lls machines?

I can change the order things load in, to speed it up, if anyone is experience serious delay.

I am sorry about that. It seems to be an isolated case on your environment. If you don't mind, for now, I'd like to solve your specific problem by creating an application for you to download, instead of running the applet. That'll let you save, guaranteed.

But about the functionality of the tool itself -- is it okay? Terrible? Comments? Suggestions?

What can I add to make it useful?

We need this to replace the spreadsheets, so we can develop real models and get debugged gamecode at the same time.

Btw, where did you get this?

quote: You can't control more provinces than the current tech level. Your Tech level is 1, and you have 1 provinces Raise the Tech level first.

Oh and I love the NotReadyYet messages!

Seriously now:

1) The Build/Edit base EG dialog is a little screwed up. It won't let you select the 2nd base EG you create to assign it it's attributes.

2)The selection mechanism on the map (the one that makes them pink) is either too slow or it is screwed up; can 2 or more squares be selected at the same time?

3)Your program is several times larger or your server is several times slower now. It takes me a couple of minutes to load.

4) How about the right click menu on the mapsquares? Will we be able to set the number of sites for food and resources in the future?

5) Don't you think it's just tedious to fill the map with the same EGs all over the place? What will happen in the beginning of a game, when the "world'" is created? What I mean is, don't we need a random generator for that stuff? (A thing that you could instruct: gimme a world with these religions, these civs, these cultures, classes, etc...)

6) When will we be able to insert, test and modify our formulas for the various attributes we provide for our EGs?

I would make more worhthwhile comments, but I am not very familiar with the game object model; Rodrigo is really your man.

Forgive the silly little line drawings. It's just the best I can do. They're just 'placeholders', for now, I'm simply drawing those pixel by pixel in the game code, creating a memoryImage (very flexible, but very inefficient). Most everything I've done for displaying the map will be different for the final game, in fact. I just cut some corners.

The number I plucked out of thin air, but in one of the threads (tech discussion, perhaps?) mentioned that the number of Provinces would be dependent on a tech level. So, for the moment, just to test the model, I've limited each 'civ' to one province. It can be easily expanded -- I'll set a place for you to customize a civ's tech level for that.

1) I'll look into it -- it works okay on my machine, oddly enough.

2) Same thing. I have an idea of what to do now, I'll post about it later tonight.

3) Dang it. As I said, they 'upgraded' the servers. It shouldn't be any longer to load. I can do something about the load time, tho -- it takes about 15 seconds on my machine (but I have a 2 meg/sec cable modem and 512 meg ram).

4) Absolutely. I will add that in tonight, in fact.

5) This is not how a game will begin. That will be either generated randomly, or you load a 'scenario' file. This is an early version of what will actually be a 'scenario' editor. That's also why I was hoping ya'll could save/load game info in this editor -- so you didn't have to re-create the entire world you want to test every time.

I got to check it out without fate's evil hand interfering! You've made a lot of progress, very cool.

It took about 90 seconds to load with a cable modem and I E. 5.0. I had the same problem as Axi, I couldn't actually copy the stuff in the save file info box. Here's my requested feature list

1) Please start the ObjectBuilder with a default set of information covering at least half the map with a few civs, several cultures, a few provinces, etc. already built. It is an extreme pain to need to go in and create a whole bunch of dummy names for things when you just want to see in general what is going on and what is implemented. Perhaps you could leave the bottom half of the map unfilled so people could do things starting from scratch if that's what they wanted.

2) As Axi said, getting the actual values for the government and social models in there, and being able to watch how they evolve with time, is key. But please start it with a default set of values. Most of the people who check it out will not want to enter in 25 numbers by hand just to see what the thing does.

3) The number of provinces you can control stably in the best guess we're working with now depends on tech level (and infrastructure like roads). But even at the lowest level of technology and zip infrastructure you could probably control five provinces (if they are all close together) with no trouble. So I suggest at least opening it up so that a default civ can have five provinces or so.

One possible spot of hope--did you try using Control+c to copy (and Control+v to paste) the the text in the box? Make sure the text is highlighted, too.

I was assuming that approach. I tend to use it without thinking.

Just one possibility.

And regarding download time, I'm not sure how much we can do about that, short of spending money for a faster server. I'm just using my default webspace at my ISP for testing, so for now that'll have to do. Even connected straight thru to them, I've noticed that it can take a few seconds for a new dialog box to pop up the first time, while it downloads the Gui classes. Then every other time it comes up very quickly, since it's been cached.

Mark:

1) Okay. I'm a good ways done. I changed the thing to load a scenario file from the server on loading. Tomorrow night I'll actually flesh out those scenarios some (right now they mostly load blank worlds -- altho at least the 6000bc one has a little data in it).

2) Once I finish #1, then I'll do the Gui's for altering model values. The gamedata already has a place to store the values, it's just a matter of writing up a few more GUI panels. This weekend, it should be done.

3) I'll change the province situation after that. Might fit into this weekend.

1) I'll second Mark's request for a graphing utility, able to be assigned to every public (observable) or private variable of the game. It will be useful even in the final game.

2) If Mark has the same problem as I do, then something has to be done with it ASAP. And I don't think that creating a special downloadable application is the appropriate solution. What about subsequent upgrades?
And YES, of course I have tried ctrl+C/ctrl+V! There is no other way to access copy and paste in the save window(no right click menu - no dropdown menu)

3) I maybe totally wrong about this (as I said I am not too familiar with the game object model), but shouldn't a BEG (and an EG in general) be able to hold more than one TV and Attribute? And the collection of these attributes shouldn't be the culture object?

4) The random generator is part of every respectable scenario/map editor and it will have to be there eventually. Of course it's a bit early for it now, but we should plan ahead. At least we have a VERY GOOD geographic map generator in our hands.

Thanks for the scenario load feature. It will help a lot!

Have you considered putting out the ObjectBuilder as a .jar file? Most team members are already set up to use java2 .jars because demo4 is a .jar. Of course you still might need to change over to an application to eliminate the problems with saving files, etc.