-= Gametoast.com =-

You have it organized really well.
It hides the tremendous amount of research and effort went into gathering it all.
You do good work, man.

Thanks!
The desing/layout is better than it was before I redesigned it but I still think it could somehow be better. It's a struggle to change anything because it's pure HTML, I'd have to create a program/script to get a bit more flexibility in there but I'm too lazy for that.
I can quote that last line on your case. Many of the things I found out (drcrc.exe for example) only happened because you had the idea (looking at the shipped tools, I had never done that before).

I tried scripting the layout of my msh info page, to make it a version-able document.
It quickly became too cumbersome. (especially since it's a forum post with embedded bb code)

For future projects, I'm thinking that one of the auto documenting projects like you see in the code repository sites might work well.. perhaps even a wiki to allow for consensus based contributions. (Self revising documentation, yay!)
The only problem with those solutions is that it is yet another framework to learn.

A wiki for .msh file information would be a bit of an overkill. But for larger projects with a bigger community a wiki is definitely a good idea.

I thought of creating one text file per chunk where all the information is written down. Then I'd let a python script go over all of those files and format them into html somehow.
Most of the information is already found and documented so it's not really useful anymore I assume. I'll surely use a more flexible/modular approach for any more documentation I'll do in the future.

heh
Just "banging out" a quick html lexographer for some light document managment.


I love the idea of html, and working with individual bits of it is easy enough. But once it crosses over into the fuzzy world of css and javascript (dhtml) or php.... well, it makes me miss the library and a spiral notebook full of eraser marks and poor handwriting.

You guys have virtually eliminated the need to hex edit anything, and this is great for those that have little or no experience with hex editors. This SWBF_MSH_INFO tool would be complete if you added chunk insertion and a save feature with auto header adjustment.

That was my initial plan.
I am getting back up to speed on all this from a several month break.
I'll be back into the code on this thing soon.

Another useful feature (if it doesn't already have it)would be an auto organizer.
For example if you hex edited a chunk into another model in the wrong place
you could open the tool and save the model chunk, open the model chunk
with the tool that converts to a msh, and after that the inserted chunk
would be in its correct place.

Thats a good idea.

Like if the ENVL gets stuck in the next MODL or the previous SEGM, have a method of deciding whether the sequence of chunk types is valid and make a 'best guess' at correcting it.

I've held off on moving chunks within the program because shifting the arrays that hold the data tends to mangle it, but I'll revisit it when I reopen the code.