ENIGMA Development Environment

This topic is mostly for RetroX, but other people are always welcome to contribute.

Currently Enigma's plugin to LateralGM, affectionally named The Plugin (written in Java by yours truly) has a WORKDIR variable which resolves to LGM's WORKDIR, which resolves to LGM's jar directory. The question is, why do we need the jar directory?

LGM uses WORKDIR for the following:

• Finding Plugins
• Finding DND Libraries (lib/lgl files)
• For some reason, to populate gmlkeywords.properties from a file outside the jar, if one exists (probably for external override)

ENIGMA uses LGM's workdir for the following:

• To populate Enigma's WORKDIR (EnigmaRunner.WORKDIR = LGM.WORKDIR, more or less).
• To ensure that EnigmaUpdater knows that the program needs a restart when LGM is updated. (this could be replaced with a direct jar lookup)
• For some reason, it calls `make` to build enigma, and then locates enigma dll, in this directory. Not sure why. Will try to replace with ENIGMA's workdir now.

ENIGMA uses its workdir for the following:

• Not yet, but it should be used to call `make` to build enigma, and then locate the enigma dll, in this directory (see a couple lines up).
• Finding the "Compilers" directory
• Finding available API systems in "ENIGMAsystem/SHELL/"
• Provide a directory for ENIGMA's dll to run system commands in (via callback), e.g. Exec()
• Provide a directory for Subversion's Working Copy
• Finding "settings.ey" - a temporary thing that Josh and I set up for the EnigmaSettings pane.
• A directory to quicksave/quickload "definitions.h" (Can pretty much be scrapped, especially once the new file format is available)

Point is, the plugin does need to know ENIGMA's directory somehow, and in a cross-platform fashion. The simplest thing I could think up and implement at the time was "hmm, everything can just go in one program directory, so I'll just look at LGM.jar's directory". For some other directories that I can work with, consult Java.
Here is a listing of directories and other things that I can get using Java's "System.getProperty()" method, if it helps any, but please only use these directories in a cross-platform manner. For instance, do not assume that settings can be stored in `$user.home$/.lgm/` because that's a unix-only manner, and does not reflect for Windows (and probably doesn't for Mac either). Also, avoid trying to get the current Operating System as much as inhumanly possible - there will be a system that you did not account for.

java.class.path	Java class path
java.library.path	List of paths to search when loading libraries
java.io.tmpdir	Default temp file path
java.compiler	Name of JIT compiler to use
java.ext.dirs	Path of extension directory or directories
file.separator	File separator ("/" on UNIX) (not necessary, because new File(directory, child) handles this for us)
path.separator	Path separator (":" on UNIX)
user.name	User's account name
user.home	User's home directory
user.dir	User's current working directory

This topic has been moved to General ENIGMA.

http://enigma-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=833.0

How would an XML file be easier than a simple text file? A properties file is just a bunch of key= value pairs, a super-dumbed-down version of XML. It's the equivalent of ini if you remove all the domains and replace the keys with domain.key

We now have a wiki page documenting the process:
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Translating

It's not unusual for a language that interfaces with MySQL to reuse existing connections when you attempt to connect.
In php, calling mysql_connect() with the same information twice will return the same handle.

It is worth noting, however, that keeping a connection open for too long without querying will cause the connection to timeout. This is usually default of about 8 hours.

Generally, you should open a connection whenever an instance starts needing to access the database. I say instance, because you could have two instances running and they'd need to access the server simultaneously. It's inadvisable to try this multi-instance approach with only 1 super-global connection.

Beyond that, I'm not sure of the overhead of opening and closing a connection. You might want to ask on a mysql forum or forum of the language of your choice.

Death2DBZ: I'm not buying it :þ

Catch the clown worked fine for me, and it includes 2 sprites. If it doesn't work for you, open a thread at the help desk or ask on the IRC.

Wouldn't you believe it, apparently there was a mixup and I wasn't supposed to ascend with everyone else for some reason. Fornication or some such like that, I didn't really understand what he was saying because I didn't have EnigmaBot and the !define function there with me, but anyways, he sent me back down, so I guess I can resume work on enigma after all.

At any rate, after testing on windows, I got:
+++++Make completed successfully.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Compiled game is clearly not a working module; cannot continue
Built to C:/Users/IsmAvatar/enigma-dev/[Temp files]
mingw32-make[1]: Leaving directory `c:/Users/IsmAvatar/enigma-dev/ENIGMAsystem/SHELL'

I deleted Windows/gcc.ey and let it regenerate, since it's doing it wrong. Let's see how that goes. If that doesn't work, I'll find out what's wrong.

Update: Regeneration corrected the [Temp files] reference. Testing catch-the-clown.

Update:
+++++Make completed successfully.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Compiled game is clearly not a working module; cannot continue
Contents of gcc.ey are not up to spec1, indicating "$tempfiles" where spec1 specifies that you must use "$tempfile". Fixing now and retrying.

Update:
Fixed. Catch-the-clown works on Windows with r756.

Shh, we've made the channel rapture-exclusive.