Well, to answer the various points raised:
Drak, I think that just having to relearn literally everything is half of the 'unfriendliness'. Of the remaining half, a large portion is due to no ImpFilter. Of the remaining percentage, its just minor annoyances like not having Intellisense to helpfully pop up object properties. I have to go browsing the keys to find the ones I want, and checking properties for existance before I use them. Is it a huge deal? no. but I'll tell you this much, the adapter not even being available unless you have the exact same IDE version seemed like a huge step backwards in interoperability. I know its not Decal's fault, but still. Other minor issues are the lack of both tools and other developers to assist. Again, not Decal's fault, but it does make information harder to come by. There just aren't that many people hanging out in #acdev these days.(those that are there have been great, as I said above) Other annoyances seem basic, yet no one knows whats up with them. Take for example, edit controls. They have no background and when I try to set one using portalimgsrc, decal itself bombs as soon as the game is entered. Without a background, edit controls are essentially invisible. I still can't get them to display a background. I also use List controls, and those are displaying a nice default background, so I went searching for info on the forums, and only saw recent posts where List controls were deemed 'Bad' and to be avoided(by Gouru I think, so I'm not sure if that's serious or not. They seem to work.). Well...what else am I supposed to use for a list? Its these kinds of things that make developing in Decal 3 feel a lot shakier and less friendly that the days of old, when we had a solid knowledge base, base controls we can trust, and as messy as it was, there was probably a call or event for just about anything and all you had to do was type '.' to see them.
Please don't take this as trying to knock Decal 3. Its a much-cleaned up design and I of all people(being a developer myself) appreciate its potential. It just doesn't have the maturity, stability, functionality, or ease of use of the old decal..yet. Its getting there.
Haz, I have zero FPS loss. Literally. Zero. Explanation? Fine. I have an X800XT PE vid card on an A64 3400 w/1G 2-2-2-5 RAM. In 1680x1050, max detail, standing in the mansion basement, I get 60FPS no matter which direction I'm facing, which is the sync rate I set it to.
If I take sync off, I get from 150FPS-350FPS in the same spot. Decal or no decal, plugin showing or not, running in a window or not, I get the same numbers.
Back to Drak, I created the plugin using the C# template I found on the decal site, which uses interop. If you have a C# framework for Adapter, post it. In either case, as of a day ago, no one had pushed alpha 5 out to the public. Has that changed?
As for recipes, Robochef has always been as complete as I could possibly make it and this trend will continue. The recipes will be in XML format, just as they are now, but that is no indication they will be interchangable. What I *am* changing is I will try to auto-update the XML from ingame rather than make people go to a site and download the updates. Coverage will be complete.
I think that covers everything.
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Current developer of Mob Tracker (mobtracker.yewsplugins.com)
Current developer of Rare Tracker(raretracker.yewsplugins.com)
Current developer of Craft Bot(craftbot.yewsplugins.com)
Email:yew@yewsplugins.com
