Decal Development Forums

[The Voice of Decal]

Well, it's been a long time since you heard from me, but I assure you, I didn't forget all of you out there reading this..

We've been hard at work trying to improve decal, and while we still have a long way to go, we decided we needed to get some of our changes into the plugin developers hands, since they were so far reaching.

There are a few things about this release that you MUST remember though:

1. This release is, as was Alpha 3, intended for PLUGIN DEVELOPERS. Really. We're not kidding. This means that end-users should AVOID installing this, because all plugins will break. Wait until the plugin developers have released plugins compatible with Alpha 4.
   
2. This release is built with .NET 2.0 Final/RTM. You need to uninstall the Beta 2 framework and install the release .NET 2.0 framework.
   
3. This release requires D3DX. If you have do not have D3DX installed, you can obtain the setup files at http://decal.acdev.org/files/D3DXSetup.exe
   

We've made a *LOT* of changes, I'll list a few of them below:

• IRenderSink is dead (This means all of the old hud implementations no longer work)
  
• HUDView is fully functional as far as we know (huds are dead, long live huds!)
  
• DecalPlugins.View, IView, and IViewDisp somewhat rationalized. (IView and IViewDisp are due to be merged in a future release)
  
• IViewEvents.Activate and IViewEvents.Deactivate events renamed to be OnActivate and OnDeactivate in the PIAs. No change for non-managed languages.
  
• CharStats Win2k fix
  
• CharStats fixes around Monarch/Patron in various scenarios
  
• CharStats fixes for .Exp for Attributes and Vitals
  
• CharStats also no longer loses the servername when you fail to login
  
• Changed plugin initialization/startup to a little later.
  
• Included DHS in Decal Core
  
• Miscellaneous Setup fixes, more still to come.
  
• Reworked WorldFilter (Ok, so it doesn't look at all like it used to. This is a *BIG* change!)
  
• Decal.Adapter enhanced to support HUDS
  
• Lots of other Decal.Adapter work. (Renames, cleanup, other breaking changes, along with some new features)
  
• Rebased all native-code COM DLLs.
  
• Fixed View Title corruption
  
• New ACHooks event ContainerOpened which is fired when a chest or corpse or similar item is opened, and fires 0 if the container is manually closed.
  
• New ACHooks property OpenedContainer which you can call to find out which corpse/container/chest is open (0 if nothing is open).
  

There are still many things that we've not finished, and much work still to do, and I can guarantee this won't be the last time we have breaking changes, since we still haven't completed our rework of the rendering system.

Here is just as a hint of some of the things we're working on and thinking of:

• Complete rework of the in-game rendering system (all views and controls affected)
  
• Misc feature additions to HUDS (As we think of them and get time to implement them, since we're using HUDS as a lab for the view rework)
  
• Rework of the "Browse" plugin installation infrastructure to work in a halfway sane manner
  
• Decal.Adapter: IDecalDirectory infrastructure and integration for LifetimeService, Plugins and Filters.
  
• Decal.Adapter: Wrap "common" filters like WorldFilter and CharacterStats
  
• Decal.Adapter: Reflection based, late-bound COM proxy for use by unmanaged components wanting to use fully-managed components
  

There is a lot more that we want to do, that is just a very small portion.

So, without further ado, you can find Alpha 4 here: http://decal.acdev.org/files/decal-alpha4.msi

[Gouru]

Biggest change in WorldFilter is to the WorldObject, it has been GREATLY reduced in size, and getting properties is now done using indexed properties of .Strings, .Longs and .Bools. Intellisense should work properly with these so that when you use them you will get a list of the properties available. You can also enter the id of the property (from the Ident message in the protocol) and that will work properly. If new items are added to the Ident message in the future, you will not need to wait for a new version of WF to use them.

The other neat option...
FOR EACH wo in World.Inventory
ChatOut wo.Strings(keyName)
NEXT

(works with any iterator)
_________________
Gouru
"Let Memory Loss Be Your Strength"