KevEdit users wanted

105 · Post by **105** » Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:06 pm

I'm getting tired of the ancient ZZTAE vs. KevEdit debate. The truth is, neither editor is clearly superior. I can't do anything for ZZTAE, so I do what I can to make KevEdit its best, but I can't do everything.

KevEdit is more difficult to use than ZZTAE. But once you get used to it, you can do many things very quickly. That's how I've designed it -- mainly to fulfill my own needs. I have many ideas for making it more user friendly, but I don't have time to implement everything, so new features and bugfixes tend to take precidence over making old features pretty.

btw, almost a year ago I actually fixed the a number of bugs that MadTom mentioned in another post, but we haven't done another release since then. Kev's in charge of that, and, well, he's always busy now days.

So, I need your help to make KevEdit the best editor it can be. I know you all have something you don't like about KevEdit, or some feature you wish we'd include. So please visit KevEdit's page on SourceForge and give some feedback:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/kevedit/

There are forums, a place to submit bugs, something called "RFE" for requesting new features (hint hint), and all the KevEdit source code. You will probably need to get a SourceForge login first, but it's useful to have anyway.

If anyone knows C and wants to help with KevEdit, let me know. It's almost to the point where I can start delegating tasks to people, if I have the people.

Thank you everyone.

133 · Post by **133** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 8:21 pm

So like.. is the TODO file accurate for 0.5.x? I'm all for doing another release, since it's been over a year, but there's a lot of stuff in there.

Commodore · Post by **Commodore** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 10:36 pm

I'm all for a new release for kevedit. There were a few things I can think of off hand like the blink wall rays being backwards and the "x" key selecting space while typing.

I'm sure I could think features to add. Drawing tools would be helpful. Line and circle. But come to think of it, I don't use kevedit for graphics too much.

Zephyr · Post by **Zephyr** » Wed Dec 17, 2003 10:51 pm

version 0.5 (Whatever it is - the most current) doesn't allow a full screen view. well, It does, but it has black like a wide-screen movie. This always bugged me.

21 · Post by 21 » Wed Dec 17, 2003 10:59 pm

I know it would probably be a huge pain, but some system for directly editing the stat object table in isolation from board data would cool.

133 · Post by **133** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 12:14 am

Zephyr wrote:version 0.5 (Whatever it is - the most current) doesn't allow a full screen view. well, It does, but it has black like a wide-screen movie. This always bugged me.

Windows KevEdit uses graphics mode, not text. The bars show up because your OS or video card doesn't support a 640x350 graphics mode (ZZT has an 80x25 character screen with characters of 8x14 pixels). One workaround to stretch the characters vertically to 8x16, if you have a 640x400 graphics mode. DOSEMU does this, and everything looks off. Not to mention that the lowest resolution you'll probably get out of windows is 640x480, so you have to stretch the characters to 8x19 (!!!) which will just not work.

Another option would be to use modern graphics processors: draw the 640x350 screen to a buffer, and have the graphics hardware scale it to full resolution. Now you have a blurry screen.

So yeah, that's why. I'll take a look at adding support for windows' console stuff to the win32 version of KevEdit though. I can't see why it couldn't be done.

105 · Post by **105** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 2:40 am

The DOS version of KevEdit is still available, and it lets windows handle fullscreen mode just like any other DOS program, if that's what you're after. Of course there are drawbacks to the DOS version...

Commodore · Post by **Commodore** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 3:59 am

I'm pretty sure I use the dos version... what's different?

83 · Post by 83 » Thu Dec 18, 2003 5:44 am

What I dislike about kevedit is two things:

1: The colors should be more ZZT-like... I mean... Black textboxes?

2: Swedish (and probably other non-us) keyboards acts like an american one. VERY annoying.

Commodore · Post by **Commodore** » Thu Dec 18, 2003 10:25 am

I like the colour scheme. Although the text colours make the following "!" command violet: #if flag !msg;text

105 · Post by **105** » Fri Dec 19, 2003 12:18 am

I didn't realize !msg;text was valid in an #if, but I guess it makes sense. I'll have to update the OOP parser. Thanks.

Nobody seems to like the colour scheme (I've nick-named it "rusty"). I do have plans to make KevEdit theme-able in the works, but it's a pretty big overhaul. Editing the panel and dialog artwork has always been a pain and I'm hoping to make it a bit easier.

The keyboard layout problem annoys me too, since I use the dvorak layout myself, which looks nothing like an american one. In the DOS version, this is not a problem at all. In Windows this is another problem inheritted from SDL, the graphics library we use. Ironically, the Linux version of SDL doesn't have trouble with this, so that version of KevEdit works just fine. I've tried e-mailing the SDL developers about this, but I just got ignored. Sorry.

Just to be clear, the DOS and Windows versions behave differently in the way they display text, handle input, and play music. If you have issues with one, try using the other and see if it is better. We try very hard to make them as similar as possible, but there are limits to this.

For example, the DOS version plays music to the PC speaker, the Windows version uses the sound card. The drum ticks in the DOS version don't sound like ZZT, they sound like the zzm player that I modelled them after. I haven't figured out how to do drum ticks at all in windows.

In case you aren't aware of it, all three versions of KevEdit can be found on the KevEdit download page. With luck we'll have a new bugfix version 0.5.1 up soon, so you may want to wait if you are having any of the following problems (which have been fixed):

F4 text doesn't wrap correctly
Shift doesn't work in DOS for some people (you can use F12 to toggle it instead now)
Duplicator cycle speed is wrong
Params not created for items on F3 menu
Stats editor panel not updated after editing object code or passage dest
Reenter coordinates decrease every time a board is saved (big oops)
Horizonal and vertical blink walls reversed in F3 menu

Syntax highlighting is parsed in a completely new way, so many bugs with that should go away, though new problems may occur.

I hope that clears things up a bit.

Post by **MadTom** » Fri Dec 19, 2003 12:31 am

Three cheers for bitman.

I guess I must be the only person in the world who likes the KevEdit colour style more than ZZTAE's. <:(

Commodore · Post by **Commodore** » Fri Dec 19, 2003 12:51 am

I like the colours but I fear I'm repeating myself.

I seem to having trouble getting dupes to work. also teleporters. one thing that would be helpful with the music player would be if it took into account the messages and the /idles so that it could loop properly.

136 · Post by **136** » Fri Dec 19, 2003 5:27 pm

ChromeDragon wrote:I know it would probably be a huge pain, but some system for directly editing the stat object table in isolation from board data would cool.

Yes that is good idea. Also you shud be able to edit the player stats as well just like the rest, and wen editing the stat object table in isolation from board data you shud be able to directly enter X and Y place to put it as well. And also type in eny number for the type and/or underneth type uv peces.

136 · Post by **136** » Fri Dec 19, 2003 5:29 pm

Make a extra file for colors setings, and you enter wat color ech thing shows on KevEdit.