Mappie 1.4 Development notes

[Marinka]

Been busy, 1.4 is comming a little slow.

Improved locatopm-finder in log watcher.



More info:
The location finder/marker looks for locations in log files. For it to mark a loc, it needs to find two numeric values with sign-flags near them. It would mistakenly ignore numbers appearing near quotation marks, so if a location appears at the beginning of a line it wouldn't mark it! =(

[Marinka]

New: Tracking Rings
In Progress: Working. (Center/stretch/tile)

Tracking Rings:
In the Log Watcher you can specify a tracking skill (Like, for a ranger) and it will provide a ring that specifies your tracking range on the map. It's for sure accurate at skill 200, more testing is needed for the other skills...

Background Display:
Display a bitmap for the background image of Mappie, instead of sysdefault.
Available in Bitmap form only. Win default API can't read TGA, and I don't yet have a library that can. I have a spec sheet for the TGA format, but it would take much more time to implement by hand then I'm willing to put in.

[Marinka]

Yippy! I finally got the new optimize routine working.

And it does work way better... As a test, I had the old and new versions try their hand at the same map... 72,000 lines in the map. (I figured it would be a good stress test) and here's the results:

Old way: I hit cancel at 17 minutes.
New way: Full optimize in 8 seconds.

700 file (60 meg) batch: 5 minutes. :)

I've run it through lots of testing, and the new way is faster, and cleaner.
The new way is able to get a more comprehensive analysis of the map in a mich shorter time. As a result, Full optimize and Regular optimize now work just the same.

Bug fix: The new way also removes 0 length lines, which the old algorithm ignored, for some reason...