ENIGMA Development Environment

I'm starting this topic to discuss viable solutions for the ever-looming non-functional Manual/Help button in LateralGM.

Obviously, the problem is that LateralGM doesn't ship with a manual, so there's not much to open. This could be a temporary thing - maybe some day we'll have a manual to ship with. It could be a permanent thing - the concept of a flat-file manual may be obsolete. Obviously, people still want a button to link to help, although it may not necessarily have to be the traditional Official LGM Manual.pdf/chm.

I think there's a general agreement that an official LGM manual.pdf/chm (offline file) will not be happening anytime soon. It would require a significant community effort to pull it off, and frankly, it's not high priority compared to some of the better uses a community effort could be put towards.

One very attractive option is to somehow link it to the Wiki. I really like this idea, but it does disadvantage our users who work offline. Realize that "working offline" isn't a dinosaur concept - when you take your laptop on a trip, it's not unlikely that you will have long times of being offline, and if you can't figure out the exact specifics of function X, you can't make any progress on a significant aspect of your game.
The other question about this is how will it be displayed? In the default browser? In our own little browser window? (Probably the prior - just launch the default web browser) A lot of the wiki follows a fairly standard convention, making it parsable so that we could potentially present it in whatever way we want (for reference, see EnigmaBot on the IRC, ask him to "!get show_message" or whatever function and he actually fetches and parses the description from the wiki)

Another attractive option is to allow the user to launch their own manual. Many users download a copy of the official GM manual and bring it with them. This comes in a few different flavors (html, cfm, pdf). Plus, some day there may be a similar option for an LGM manual. This is a nice modular idea, but difficult to implement because of all the different possible ways a manual can be represented. Do we just give the user an arbitrary textbox for "execute this command" that gets executed when they click the Manual button?

Of course, you're probably thinking "Couldn't we do both? Wiki for online users, launch for offline". Or some variation of that. Of course, then we'd need to flesh out the details for BOTH options, AND figure out how to decide which one to execute. To give you an idea, when we do the wiki option as the default, we launch firefox (or whatever browser) and it's out of our hands. Firefox launches, goes "oh, gee, I don't have internet. Here, have a nice NO INTERNET page" and that's the end of it - LateralGM doesn't know whether it worked or not. To fix this, we could do a network connection test - send a network ping or something to the wiki, and if that doesn't work, use the offline version.

So yeah, just a couple ideas I wanted to throw out there and see what you guys think. It'd be great if you could come up with some mock-up designs of any UI adjustments (e.g. Settings Panel) that would need to be done to make it a reality. Or maybe just a description of how exactly you'd want it to work.

Opening this to the Public Forum.

This topic has been moved to Help Desk.

https://enigma-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=1232.0

When you log into webchat, you should see a "tab" in the top-left appear that says "#enigma" and then inside the window you should get a welcome message welcoming you to enigma. If you're not at this point, let me know. Otherwise, continue:

Next, you must click on the white box at the bottom of the page. A caret will appear, allowing you to type. Type something, then press the Enter key to submit your text. This is very similar to IM. Just notice that the textarea at the bottom of the page must have the focus (the caret must appear).

Hope this helps.

We tried to make a deb once. And then a newer Ubuntu came out, and the person who made the deb never reappeared.

Point is, we don't know how to make a deb. So bear with us. We used to make periodic zip releases of stable versions, but stuff changes too quickly that we want everyone to have the bleeding latest (especially if your distro gets an update that breaks something). This is why you deb. But we don't know how.

To date, the jar is maintained by me. Anybody who has package repository access is allowed to build a custom version of LGM, maintain a link to it, and update the package url to point to their new url. I'm not sure where the package repository is hosted or who all has access to it, but I could try to find out.
At any rate, nobody has shown interest in building their own LGM, so it's always been mine.

I'm not sure how studio's networking works. I simply implemented a small set of functions based on what *I* thought people might need. They would probably need to be adapted for studio. This would simply be done by adding a studio protocol (like the ftp and http ones that I've coded) which defines the set of studio functions, and they either wrap the appropriate functions or adapt them. My functions would then persist, exposed as back-end networking functions for those who desire more control. They already have a naming convention, so that's already there for you too.

Basically, the announcement is that I've renewed our self-signed certificate and enabled SSL on this site, meaning that you can now use https for security while browsing and logging into the enigma website, forums, etc.

However, that's hardly in english, so I'm going to dumb it down into something you guys can actually understand and read, and in the process I'm going to show my ignorance of the technologies and probably explain something slightly incorrectly. Feel free to correct me, but I think I will get the gist of it, so...

Http is a great way to send and receive plain text, and maybe even some binary data like images and files. But it's not exactly secure. If you log in over http, the following happens:
You generate some packets with your username and password, and send them in the general direction of the server. This information is pretty much plain text. Along the route, it will go through your network, to your router. Then, your router sends it off to your ISP, and it bounces around the internet before it gets to the server ISP, the server's router, and then the server. At any point along that line, a number of computers can easily "sniff" those packets and see what's in them. Anybody on your network can (connected to your router). Your router can, but they're never set up to, because it's useless information for them to keep storing packets. Your ISP can. After that, it bounces around the internet, where not many people really care about it. Then it gets to our server's ISP, router, and server, where nobody's going to sniff it because we pay good money for that server, so it's going to be secure.

There is encryption, and there's a fairly standard way of doing that, and that's called HTTPS, courtesy of SSL. When you use https, your packets are encrypted at your computer. People can still sniff it, but they can't see what's inside. Eventually it gets to the server, and the server knows how to decrypt the packet because it more or less told your computer how to encrypt it (also, the server sends you back encrypted data, which only you can decrypt, so that's nice. Makes loading a page use a tiny bit more cpu, but hey, encryption ftw).
This is done through the magic of certificates and signing and keys and other stuff I won't bore you with. But the certificate is important to explain because it is "self signed". When the server is telling you how to encrypt it, you want to make sure you have the right server, and that our server isn't just someone pretending to be our server.

We provide a certificate, and your browser needs to trust it, because nobody else can provide our exact certificate, but they can provide their own certificate and pretend like its ours. To prevent this from happening, we can ask some other company will sign our certificate - preferably a company that is known to do good signing. Your browser has a list of a bunch of well-known ones already written in. Which means that if our certificate is signed by a company that your browser knows, it will automatically trust our certificate - there's virtually no chance that you're being phished.

However, we haven't asked some other company to sign our certificate (yet), because it costs money, and some of them (like digicert, probably the best-known one) cost hundreds of dollars. We're not paying that. So we've self-signed our certificate until we can find a cheap signer (we're looking into it and we'll make a decision very soon).

So, if you want to use our website/forums securely, you need to navigate your browser to https://enigma-dev.org at which point your browser should hopefully yell at you and say "This certificate is self-signed! Are you sure you trust this website?!" and you need to decide if you trust it's us, or if you think it's a phisher. Since we just set this up, it's unlikely that anybody phished it that quickly, so I'd say it's fairly safe to trust it. In firefox, this is done by "I understand the risks - Add an exception".

The alternative is to continue sending your password to the server as plaintext. If someone's going to phish, it'll be even easier to steal your password that way, rather than all the hastle of setting up a certificate and stuff like that. So frankly, there's no reason not to trust our certificate - even if it is phishing, because what's the difference?

At any rate, NOTE, if we get our certificate signed by someone else, we'll probably need to replace our certificate. Your browser will automatically recognize that one, so you won't need to take any steps, but the old certificate won't be valid. So you could just wait until then, rather than taking the extra steps to trust our self-signed (possibly temporary) certificate - and we'd understand. It's your choice. Our self-signed certificate is provided for those who want that extra layer of security, especially in their own network (even in the meantime).

I've mainly done this for myself, since I'm on a network with a bunch of people who are network programmers and use packet sniffers on a daily basis.

Anyways, there you go. Now you can use our website through https.
Please make sure you see the Lock icon next to the URL (in firefox at least. Or whatever it is on other browsers) before submitting your password.

Enjoy
-IsmAvatar