Quick poll for Zeus development

Everything about HD, MD, and their mods.

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Zeus Development?

Poll ended at Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:20 am

Mac OS X Universal Binary
0
No votes
Mac OS X UB & Windows
3
60%
Web Site
0
No votes
Mac OS X UB & Web Site
1
20%
Mac OS X UB, Windows & Web Site
1
20%
 
Total votes: 5

Sparky
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Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Sparky » Wed Mar 20, 2013 10:20 am

Vote. The poll lasts 2 days.
Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.

Modzy
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Modzy » Wed Mar 20, 2013 12:49 pm

The web approach has always been a bad idea.

002
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by 002 » Wed Mar 20, 2013 1:04 pm

Why are you asking whether or not you should have it run on Mac OS X or not? This IS a Mac forum.

rEsTnPeAcEz
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by rEsTnPeAcEz » Wed Mar 20, 2013 10:43 pm

I think that program is the right thing not website.
Just use a simple programming language like REALBasic.

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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Sparky » Thu Mar 21, 2013 11:11 pm

rEsTnPeAcEz wrote:REALBasic.
I'm not interested in REALBasic. If it's a client-side program, it's for the client-side OS platform: in the present case for Mac OS, it's Objective-C. In the present case for Windows, it's C (with Cocoatron).
I'm having problems again, though, smoothly transitioning from the concept of C to Objective-C and then adding that prohibitive layer of applying both to Cocoa.
The main reason why I switched to PHP was because scaling the cliffside learning curve that is C + ObjC + Cocoa + XCode was so annoying that I just wanted to stick with a text editor like TextWrangler and foot out some code in a language that would not tell me what my limitations were before I could tell it what I wanted it to do for me.

Modzy, your opinion has been consistent. Now I'm looking for reasons why this is so.

002, I was thinking what you said as I started this topic, but the purpose was not to criticize but to discuss reasons why. And what you are saying is related to the self-criticism implied by your profile location. Self-criticism is only one facet of the diamond -- if you over-polish that, you wear down on the overall structure of the thing to the point where it is no longer helpful but detrimental to understanding and improvement. Improvement can only result when you keep in sight the greater context and keep polishing the other facets like doing what is right and working for the betterment of other people. Remember the second-greatest commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself." So both criticism and self-criticism must be within the context of doing good, not evil, of saving life, not destroying it.
Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.

Modzy
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Modzy » Fri Mar 22, 2013 12:28 am

Sparky wrote:Modzy, your opinion has been consistent. Now I'm looking for reasons why this is so.
"Dangit guys, I forgot to fix the assault rifle's bullet, let me fix it right now in Zeus. Hang on for ten minutes while I upload, download, and re-upload the map for you guy."

rEsTnPeAcEz
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by rEsTnPeAcEz » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:10 am

Any way just stick to an app, not PHP.
Also, why did you say that REALBasic is client only, it's not like its on the web or something. The only reason you had to learn PHP was because it was server side of course.

002
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by 002 » Sat Mar 23, 2013 7:48 pm

Sparky wrote:002, I was thinking what you said as I started this topic, but the purpose was not to criticize but to discuss reasons why. And what you are saying is related to the self-criticism implied by your profile location. Self-criticism is only one facet of the diamond -- if you over-polish that, you wear down on the overall structure of the thing to the point where it is no longer helpful but detrimental to understanding and improvement. Improvement can only result when you keep in sight the greater context and keep polishing the other facets like doing what is right and working for the betterment of other people. Remember the second-greatest commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself." So both criticism and self-criticism must be within the context of doing good, not evil, of saving life, not destroying it.
I only wanted to know why you were considering having web-only and not just Mac OS X. I haven't criticized you in any way, at least not yet.

As for the location I wrote, I've had "I'm with stupid" as my location for about half a year, a reference to the many T-Shirts I saw that said that in this one (pretty fun) festival I went to for a weekend in July last summer. It wasn't in any way to target/offend/criticize you, and thus I've changed it if that was the case. Sorry.

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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Sparky » Sun Mar 24, 2013 4:20 am

002 wrote:
Sparky wrote:002, I was thinking what you said as I started this topic, but the purpose was not to criticize but to discuss reasons why. And what you are saying is related to the self-criticism implied by your profile location. Self-criticism is only one facet of the diamond -- if you over-polish that, you wear down on the overall structure of the thing to the point where it is no longer helpful but detrimental to understanding and improvement. Improvement can only result when you keep in sight the greater context and keep polishing the other facets like doing what is right and working for the betterment of other people. Remember the second-greatest commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself." So both criticism and self-criticism must be within the context of doing good, not evil, of saving life, not destroying it.
I only wanted to know why you were considering having web-only and not just Mac OS X. I haven't criticized you in any way, at least not yet.

As for the location I wrote, I've had "I'm with stupid" as my location for about half a year, a reference to the many T-Shirts I saw that said that in this one (pretty fun) festival I went to for a weekend in July last summer. It wasn't in any way to target/offend/criticize you, and thus I've changed it if that was the case. Sorry.
I wasn't offended at all, but I was comparing your self-criticism to my self-criticism, and that's what I came up with. I was noticing how I criticized myself and you criticized yourself, and considering not just THAT we were doing this, but also HOW and WHY and WHAT RESULTS... this is how a person can see whether a particular course of action is worthwhile and is part of the learning process. Investigation is also part of the learning process, kind of like how I'm trying to further investigate how to code for Mac OS X.

I'm already pretty familiar with coding in PHP and for the web, as you could see from the online version of Zeus, but I'm not familiar enough yet with coding for Mac OS X.
Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.

002
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by 002 » Sun Mar 24, 2013 8:04 am

I'm not very familiar with objective-c or really any object-oriented programming languages, either, so I really couldn't help you out there. I've only made one simple program (DeGran) in Obj-C, with minimal programming knowledge and using the internet every step of the way. I made it for those people who had Mac OS X 10.3 who wanted a simple Radians <-> Degrees converter. Now that there are many applications on the web which can be run straight from the browser, that tool is pretty obsolete. You can simply go on Google and type in "1.57 rad to deg" and Google will fill it out for you (90.0 deg 3sf). I completely understand your take with making this a web application.

It's just that I thought uploading and downloading large 13.7MB files may be impractical.

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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by nil » Mon Mar 25, 2013 2:27 pm

The same reason you dismiss Real Studio because Cocoa is the way to go on os x is the same reason I'd dismiss cocoatron on Windows.. Just an FYI. (But I never really had very high hopes for this project so you may want to consider how highly you want to consider what I post in here sometimes..)

@002: Alternatively, since degrees doesn't make sense whatsoever anywhere, you can just think in radians... Which isn't that hard. All you need is an imaginative circle and divide 2*pi as necessary.
I am no longer active to Halo or MGM, and don't guarantee a response on the forums or through email. I will however linger around the discord room for general chatting. It's been fun!

rEsTnPeAcEz
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by rEsTnPeAcEz » Wed Mar 27, 2013 3:03 am

The ratio to find radians is:
Result in radians/Number in degrees = Pi/180

Mac OS X UB and Windows App wins the poll!

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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Sparky » Wed Mar 27, 2013 7:41 pm

I'll leave the online web application version of Zeus where it is now at version 0.5.b (I think), and do a nice Mac OS X version generally in Objective-C with XCode 4.

I've stayed with Mac OS 10.6 because of Rosetta. Zeus will be compatible with Mac OS 10.6 and newer. There is nothing particularly fancy or special about it so far, just using garbage collection and such. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Presently, I continued my research into UTI usage so that Zeus can open any version of a Halo-related .map file, recognize the map file's version and other game metadata details and assign it an appropriate UTI based upon that information. The goal here is to allow you to be able to see a few things here with each file from within the Finder: first, the Halo version of that map file as the file's KIND attribute, second, to display a saved preview image of a map's scenario which is shown in QuickLook, and third, to show metadata details about each supported file type from within QuickLook. These QuickLook and Framework projects are secondary, but I'm queuing up all the filetypes that Zeus will handle at this time so that I don't have to do a juggling act later on when I'm interested in supporting another filetype. I think that's the best way to say what I'm trying to say.

I have a question for you: Zeus introduces a new Zeus-only file format which is called "lightning bolt" (the file extension is .bolt) which serves as a project archive... it's basically an application-managed .zip file to facilitate integration with BDCN's future asset sharing interfaces. You upload one Zeus project file to the BDCN and it takes all the details from that file and adds them to the Halo Asset Database on the site. This Halo Asset Database (or perhaps Blam! Asset Database, if you prefer the acronym BAD instead of HAD) will be the future integration of the present HDM Mod Database. With the HAD, you'll just upload your Zeus project archive (the .bolt file) to the BDCN web site and the web apps should take care of the rest of the details...

That is the goal for the .bolt file type, but now my question for you regards the UTI's of the .map file types. Would you prefer that I use the import setting, or is it OK if I use the export setting? Export means that Zeus would become the main handler of .map files on your computer by default, while the import setting would have Zeus be just some side app for that file format. I think it should be the main handler, especially since this will be the first and perhaps only application that assigns and uses UTI's for Halo .map files.

Does anyone here have any strong objections to my setting the UTI's for .map files in Zeus as Export? It seems like a trivial question, but there should only be one mac application with any particular file type set as Export, and I wonder if you would mind if I therefore declared the .map file format to be a proprietary format declared by Zeus... rather than by the Halo game, for example (which doesn't use UTI's anyway, as far as I have seen).

My second question will be regarding what to name the new Halo assets' UTI's once we've determined which program will take credit for the proprietary formats in question. I was thinking perhaps something like this:

com.bungie.halo.etcetera
or
com.microsoft.bungie.halo.etcetera (I really do not like adding "microsoft" to a UTI for Halo 1, if you catch my drift).

Presently, you have a preferences file in the user preferences folder on your hard drive called:

com.macsoft.halo.plist

This is probably from the Halo UB released by MacSoft. But you can even see here that MacSoft used their own UTI for their app. I, however, would prefer to use something a little more... official and scholastic, along the lines of the INCY.
Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.

nil
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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by nil » Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:27 pm

@rEsTnPeAcEz: Degrees is just arbitrary made-up. All you need to remember is that "they choose 180 degrees to be pi" - which your ratio is easily derived from.. (pi * x = 180?). Anyway, can be avoided almost entirely by thinking in radians..

@Sparky: Objective-C has three modes of memory management: MRC (manual reference counting), ARC (automatic reference counting), and GC (garbage collection). Garbage collection was introduced in 10.5, but is now deprecated (aka, don't use it). ARC requires 10.6 and a 64-bit Mac (but so does a lot of other features in Obj-C).

Nitpicks: The OS is called OS X now, not Mac OS X. And it's Xcode.

I've no comment about the UTI's.
I am no longer active to Halo or MGM, and don't guarantee a response on the forums or through email. I will however linger around the discord room for general chatting. It's been fun!

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Re: Quick poll for Zeus development

Post by Sparky » Thu Mar 28, 2013 9:46 am

nil wrote:@rEsTnPeAcEz: Degrees is just arbitrary made-up. All you need to remember is that "they choose 180 degrees to be pi" - which your ratio is easily derived from.. (pi * x = 180?). Anyway, can be avoided almost entirely by thinking in radians..

@Sparky: Objective-C has three modes of memory management: MRC (manual reference counting), ARC (automatic reference counting), and GC (garbage collection). Garbage collection was introduced in 10.5, but is now deprecated (aka, don't use it). ARC requires 10.6 and a 64-bit Mac (but so does a lot of other features in Obj-C).

Nitpicks: The OS is called OS X now, not Mac OS X. And it's Xcode.

I've no comment about the UTI's.
I thought 3.14 was 360 degrees in Eschaton, the same value as 0. I must have mis-recalled that.

It is the deprecation of things which is why I chose to do an online app using PHP instead. And there, I suffered the problem of people not upgrading to the most recent versions of PHP. So I had problems on both ends of this nonsensical snake.

I feel about UTI's now how I felt about them before. To proceed with coding an Objective-C app seems like a thrust in the dark, a waste of time. That only compounds the questionability of the usefulness of coding Zeus, as its value in life is not revealed to myself at this present time, and furthermore there may not be any value in it. But I don't work with hobbies, I do things for specific reasons and according to motivations which I do not state to anyone... sigh, I have problems. But that's despite the point.
Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.

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