ENIGMA Development Environment

Could you clarify why you feel a sprite sheet resource is more useful than a subimaged sprite? Why does this have an advantage over ENIGMA simply plopping all subimages of a single sprite into one texture (or why is that infeasible)?

I don't have much of an opinion of Oracle. I stay mostly uninvolved and uninterested in the politics behind Java. I will say, it's to be expected - a large company acquires a product, they're going to tend to rush things and not spend as much time focusing on it. Hopefully the bug gets fixed soon, but at least the word is out there so people know not to use that update.

I'll also say that I do have some respect for Oracle, and frankly, I'm glad/surprised they're touching Java at all. After they acquired Sun and then started laying off Java workers, I was afraid Oracle Java was going to go completely stale, and we'd only have the OpenJDK implementation features to rely on. But since Oracle keeps pushing on, it gives OpenJDK the fodder it needs to keep pace.

Thank you for the detailed report and explaining the circumstances leading up to it. I was aware of the problem, but wasn't certain what caused it (only that it was intermittent), but you've pretty much zero'd it down, so now it should be much easier to provide a quick fix for it. I'll look into it when I get a chance. It is currently logged on http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Plugin:Bugs

Sorry for the minor loss of context, but the mods agree that this discussion is valuable to the community regarding General Enigma and understanding why we're doing what we're doing.

Also, none of us think you're a dick, and your post doesn't sound dickish. It's a professional concern, and expresses the concerns that others watching ENIGMA may have as well. We're glad you brought it up, we're happy to answer it, and we hope you don't mind too much if we share this with the rest of the community as well, rather than hiding it away in Off Topic.

The parser was broken and high maintenance. We more or less would have had to keep updating it every time the kernel had a minor update, which was sorely detracting from our ability to solidify the existing systems and fixing the existing bugs, because Josh would always have to go and fix the parser again. A parser rewrite was unavoidable and necessary.

user don't have to understand how compilers and programming work to be able to

Almost sounds like a feature request.

At any rate, we were working on the install process to release something, when suddenly the parser broke. Once the dust settles from the new parser, it should be a simple matter of following the instructions on the Install page to have a working product that a user can simply run ENIGMA on their platform and then compile and run the existing example games, plus modify them or make their own game.

Actually I wouldn't care, but I think having separate names has logistical benefits (did ENIGMA crash or LGM crash?), plus ENIGMA is still not the primary use of LGM. The market for LGM is still mostly dominated by GM version conversion (giving an interesting new meaning to the name Lateral), then corruption recovery, then ENIGMA, then ID defragging tied with plugin development.

I'd also like to mention that I have somewhat recently ensured that both examples (Catch the Clown and Maze) are up-to-date, and I do test Enigma on Win7 64 bit periodically, including just last week (it worked great, and both examples ran fine).

I feel like we talk about feelings too much.