Near Infinity future development

[drake127]

Hi folks, it's been a some time but recently I needed to mass export some TGA resources from NWN and it turned up that the fastest way was to obtain and modify Near Infinity.

 

And I was thinking ... would it be welcomed to continue development of this tool? I don't mean anything big or time consuming, just fix some bugs, update field according to IESDP etc. I found out that NI sources were released to SourceForge, yet its development was a brief one.

 

So my question is really simple, does somebody still uses NI and if so, would you like to see some new features or bugs fixed?

 

I tried to play with SVN recently and released my own Beta-Beta :-) version at http://infinity.planescape.cz/nearinfinity/

 

It can mass export TGA files, select charset when editing dialog.tlk (Eastern Europe blocker) and I played a little bit with possibility to save BAM as transparent PNG files.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Well, I do not know of the sourceforge, but the latest NI I know, come from here... it's called v1.33b19.

[drake127]

Thanks, I missed that one, could you summarize what state of development past official 1.33 Beta 19 it is?

 

(1.33 Beta 19 is latest official source release (never made it to official binary though).)

[devSin]

Yeah, Taimon's sources should be pretty up-to-date (I did a thorough scrubbing a few years ago to get the formats right, but we have learned even more since then), although we're not entirely in sync anymore. The SourceForge project only has Jon's official (ancient) b19 sources.

 

Taimon's requires Java 1.6 (mine stayed with 1.5, but you have to search around to find the sources).

 

Development is always welcome, but there's talk of moving Taimon's build to github for future collaborative development, so you may want to follow the link Jarno posted and prod Taimon to get things set up sooner.

 

The latest changes should be detailed over at the PPG forums, but Taimon's sources are based on mine, and I never documented anything (it's mostly format stuff with some miscellaneous fixes and minor changes). You can diff the SourceForge code with Taimon's to get a better overview of the changes, but 1.33 was a complete refactor and partial rewrite that Jon started (but never finished), so it's not easy to get exact changes compared to the last official release (1.32+).

[Jarno Mikkola]

Thanks, I missed that one, could you summarize what state of development past official 1.33 Beta 19 it is?

Don't ask me, I know nothing of it except that I once used the worldmap mods Near Infinity patch to greatly extend the memory size to one of the betas. I don't even know if it's required anymore.

[drake127]

OK, it sounds good. I believe that it would be great to have some sort of revision control and (just one) official successor of NI. I try to push Taimon a little. It's really bad idea to to have 4 forks of NI with its own bugfixes and several version numbering.

 

And changelog can be founded as of some "stable" milestone.

[Taimon]

Reminds me that I wanted to move this to github.

 

Dev, are your sources up-to-date?

Still need to do the merge.

[Guest temujin.]

...

Taimon this and Taimon that.

 

Is this guy the pantheon of awesomeness or what. Is there anything that he can't do?

 

 

Also, let's not ignore Kung Fu Man's version. He's also done a lot of improvements and bug fixes. Who knows, maybe a lot of things Drake is planning to fix have already been fixed.

[drake127]

Also, let's not ignore Kung Fu Man's version. He's also done a lot of improvements and bug fixes. Who knows, maybe a lot of things Drake is planning to fix have already been fixed.

I really do not care who shall supervise it. However there is no sense in fixing already fixed and maintaining several branches of NI. So it would be perfect if we all just settle to one repository and made it as official as possible.

 

I am not sure what github exactly is but I somewhat hope that it can be accessed via NetBeans and its version control plugins (commit, merge, update, diff, ...) and some sort of ticket system.

[Guest temujin.]

I really do not care who shall supervise it.

I never said anything about supervising, did I? I'm simply pointing out there is one more person who may also have done some stuff you're planning to do.

 

And yes, there should only be one version that includes all the fixes.

[drake127]

I am sure it would be good idea to contact Kung Fu Man and merge his fixes ... to somewhere. And I think that it should be first decided which version would be the base one (mine definitely not, my changes are rather minor, well documented and easily repeatable) and where it will be placed. However it is not for me to decide because I do not know the current situation.

[Guest temujin.]

well, personally I'd prefer Taimon's to be the base and everyone else could contribute their stuff on top, but that's up to him. Why don't you PM him and see what he has to say?

[devSin]

Dev, are your sources up-to-date?

Still need to do the merge.

I got halfway through fixing up some things and making some changes and verifying old changes, but I still have it all sitting out, unfinished.

 

I'll diff my local sources to the ones I have online and make any changes tonight or tomorrow. Likely the last public-facing sources I ever do, although they're still not done to my satisfaction.

 

 

Taimon's build is the base for Kung Fu Man's edits, so it would likely comprise most of any "official" repository (Jon's site is still the official distro). I'm still opposed to the bump in requirements (it especially sets the bar way too high for Mac OS X support), but it's not like I'd be involved anyway.

[Taimon]

Git is distributed. No central repository.

So every contributer can have his own version.

But we need one for the initial forking.

 

I'll set things up and merge devSin's changes afterwards.

(No eta on the merge, though.)

[drake127]

But we want to have just one perfect version, don't we? I mean if there is four forks with four devs, it would be complete mess, wouldn't it?