b114

During some part of a previous conversion from engine values to character.settings values, several places were accidentally changed to use NeedsDefaultLevel (a number) or NeedsDefaultValue (a tag) when the other was called for. Fixed.

Fixed a recent bug in the Sheet View for sending Edit items to the Edit dialog, resulting from the conversion of the selected traits collection to SortedTraitCollection.

* Plugins

All the plugins included with GCA should now be the code versions, rather than the pre-compiled versions.

a113

Fixed a bug in the processing of damage breaks due to an earlier change from Collection (1-based) to List (0-based).

Fixed a display bug that sometimes resulted in the new Applied Modifiers list in Simple Edit getting all scrunched up.

Fixed a bug created in b112 related to checking for ownership of a bonus that is supposed to be removed. This bug prevented bonuses from being removed, which in turn resulted in multiple identical bonuses getting applied.

Added some data validation checking to the Edit Traits dialog, to check for unmatched parens or quotes.

Added some data validation checking to the Advanced Edit Traits dialog, to check for unmatched parens or quotes.

Was given a valid reason for letting modifiers be reduced to level 0, so I have restored that. In turn, I have added a default level name of ‘none’ to display when applicable.

Changed the wording of the instructional text on the Resynchronize dialog slightly.

There has been an issue since the beginning of Unified View, where clicking on any list in a box that was not already the box with focus would cause that box to scroll into view, usually selecting a bunch of items in the list unintentionally. I was unable to find a way to avoid that behavior without either building something new, or just subclassing the panel and then overriding the behavior of that event handler. So, I have done the subclassing thing, and that behavior should no longer happen. However, that means that scrolling a box into view is now the responsiblity of the user.

b112

Changed some of the process GCA uses to check for updates. Previously it was partially asynchronous and partially synchronous. It will now all be synchronous (this means you can’t do other things in GCA while the check for updates is running). It will also pop up the Working dialog while performing the process.

There was a shockingly convoluted system in place for sending messages to the logging pane. I simplified the system and shuffled around a few related routines while doing so.

Did some code cleanup in various areas and with various controls.

Found a pretty insidious little bug that had to do with the ownership of modifiers and traits when making copies of them (such as when making copies to undo changes when cancelling out of dialogs). This resulted in the ownership appearing to be correct, but not actually being so, because ownership was actually assigned to an identical object that was not actually in the correct ownership tree. I believe this mattered only in a tiny number of cases, but that’s still an issue. Anyway, it should now be fixed.

Made some changes to the Simple Edit and Modifiers dialogs in support of correct handling of undo when cancelling out of the dialog.

* Type Safety and Object Cleanup

Did a little more of this.

* Modifiers

It was possible to decrement a modifier to level 0, but it almost never provided any indication that you had done so (unless it had levelnames() set to account for that). At least it always set the value to a neutral value, so it no longer affected cost. But this just strikes me as extremely odd behavior, especially for non-leveled modifiers. GCA’s history is very long, so it’s possible that I did this for a reason back in the day, but I can’t think of any good reason for it now. So, I have now set Modifiers to have a minimum level of 1.

* Simple Edit

I’ve moved the Current Modifiers Applied block up above most other things.

I’m trying a new list for the Current Modifiers Applied block, as a listbox instead of a text block. You can do basic manipulation of the modifiers here, such as incrementing, decrementing, or removing.

b111

Changed some flags in GCATrait to use boolean states instead.

Had to perform some surgery on trait lists in Unified View to correct a logic error, and there and in Classic View to fix issues caused by some previous work and by the new boolean states.

There is an option to gray-out library traits for which the character hasn’t met the preqeqs. When this option is active, and a trait makes use of certain optional features, a crash could result. That should now be fixed.

I added the double-width option to the gear drop-down on trait boxes in Unified View.

Noticed there were some other oddities related to ctrl key combos in trait lists, so adjusted my copy/paste fix to fix that.

Traits pasted into character lists should now be selected.

I have created a small program called ‘thecleaner.exe’ that gets installed into the GCA5 system folder. When uninstalling GCA5, this program will be run to clean up the known source folders (\books\, \characters\, \images\, and \plugins\) in the *system folder only*. Without this, the update system might install new files to those folders, and they will not normally be removed by uninstalling, because the installer did not put them there. With this little program, each folder is fully removed, and no remnants should be left behind in the Program Files folder after an uninstall. Again, this *does not* delete anything from your Documents folder.

* Type Safety and Object Cleanup

Did a little more of this.

* Resync dialog

Rejiggered things to adjust better to resizing, and allow for it to be resized.

Removed some things from the dialog for which support was never added.

* Build Campaign Book dialog

I have hooked back up the Settings tab, and it now allows for changing many of the settings discussed in the last build.

You can choose whether or not to work with two groups of settings: Campaign and Rules. When saving the book to disk, GCA will only save the settings for the groups that you choose to include, but will include all settings from those groups.

Also updated some of the code so that deleting traits and changing libraries will work a bit better. Note that if you change libraries, any existing work on your book will be lost, so be sure to start with the right library.

* Updater

I have built a new system for packaging updates of the various files (books, images, etc.). This new packager ZIPs the changed files to reduce bandwidth requirements, and creates a manifest of all the files in the update.

Supporting the new ZIP files, GCA itself has been updated to download and extract the ZIPs before running the Updater.

The new system also considers an update ‘package’ to be the correct state of the GCA install files. This means that any files that GCA finds in the system folders that are not reflected by the new ‘state’ will be flagged for deletion by the Updater. (There are ‘bins’ of files, so an update can ignore all the Plugins, for example, and GCA won’t delete them; it knows they were ignored.) This very much reinforces that users should not change the files in the system folder.

This new process should allow us to make changes to the files included in the system folders, and not have outdated files left behind. It also means that files no longer being used can be deleted by the system automatically, without any additional work by those creating the update.

Note that GCA passes the file deletion requests to the Updater, so those will only happen if there is something else pending (file copying or new installer) that needs the Updater to be run.