ENIGMA Development Environment

Hello Jhasper!

In order to better assist we will need some additional information from you.

* Is this the first time you've used ENIGMA or LateralGM before?
* Do you have administrative privileges on your account?
* Could you attempt to run LateralGM/ENIGMA with administrative privileges and see if the error is corrected?
* How did you attempt to open ENIGMA through enigma.exe or through double clicking the LateralGM jar file? I see you also attempted to start LateralGM from the command line, this will only work when you use LateralGM separately from ENIGMA. If you want to use LateralGM without compiling games feel free to move the jar file somewhere else on your computer.

I'm not so sure about that then Harri, I don't really think I like that idea either. I support the idea of distributing the change log with the release inside the ZIP, but I see no reason to add it to revision control, we would literally be revising our own revision logs (is this not what git should be doing for us?). I fully support people's ability to use ENIGMA or any software offline, even if you have internet there's many parts of the world that don't including a lot of public parks and such where it's nice to stick software on a thumb drive and away you go. I don't even know if you can get internet/wifi on a plane or not yet cuz 9/11. Anyway I did think that maybe we could set up that git change log generator project and make it auto commit with one of the many bots we have to a repository that contains change logs for all ENIGMA projects. But I didn't like that idea because of the same reason I don't like you suggesting it.

I always did the change log as a more human readable form of the git revision log for those who may not know how to use git. Because of my historic inability to make nice commits I've also used both github's revision history and the change logs I've made to find stuff.

Are you guys ignoring my post about Breakpad? It's a really good idea, lets you debug without having debug symbols in the code using Google technology.

Alright Josh is good with it. As a first experiment I've moved all of the LGM releases over there, it was a total pain digging up the old commit logs but I did the best I could. Best thing to do is just to make sure we do it every future release.

https://github.com/IsmAvatar/LateralGM/releases

I linked the forum posts with the change logs instead of putting them into the release description because most of them are super long which makes browsing that releases page a bore. I will continue to do this for future releases but may add some small additional details. From now on each new release of LateralGM and major build will be a new release on GitHub and a new forum post, so it won't be one long forum post as was done in the past.

I'll do the plugin jars next but I don't think I'll dig up the specific commits for them, I'll probably just base them all on the most recent commit then do it correctly for future releases. I believe we should continue to version the plugin against the LateralGM version but I'm not sure yet.

If we are going to do this for the ENIGMA portable zip then the ENIGMA tracker also needs to work out a proper version number and we need to start incrementing it to mark the releases.

So basically we can use the tags for marking major milestones or w/e and the releases can be generated for each major milestone/revision. Does everyone like this?

Ok that's weird, figured I would have documented that one, it's in fact, the only one I did not. I honestly have no idea anymore lol.

I found the story interesting though nothing new. I've thought about this myself before, I think it's something we all think about at one point another if we were rich.

It some ways the thought depresses me but I would probably just continue to find more projects to work on. I've always had a money doesn't matter philosophy and that's the best way to look at life. It's not the answer to all your problems, just live your life the way you want and be happy with what you've done.

I want to propose this since I've been making more use of it in recent projects. When we archived the old LGM versions we stuck them in our dropboxes which is, despite me having created a shared ENIGMA dropbox, still subject to link rot. I never did attempt to migrate our old and new releases to GitHub because I never understood the feature until now.

Basically if we move all of the ENIGMA ZIP's, old LGM jars, and all those old revisions and packages over to the GitHub release pages we get static links.
For example:
https://github.com/IsmAvatar/LateralGM/releases
https://github.com/IsmAvatar/LateralGM/releases/download/1.5.7.1/lateralgm1571.jar

Instead of what we have now on the LateralGM: Revisions Wiki page:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrigtjk0yld8zsy/lateralgm1571.jar

Notice how the GitHub version is not subject to link rot? This is by GitHub's own design for the very reason we are intending to use it. Using the GitHub release pages also allows me to archive the change logs in the description. This is important because our forum is also subject to link rot as topics are moved and the forum board evolves, people will still be able to find the change log well into the future (considering GitHub is probably more likely to be around in 10 to 20 years than we are). This also means we don't have to make so much use of third parties like dropbox since setting up proper file transfer to ENIGMA's server would be a lot of work and cumbersome to say the least (which is why we are still struggling to finish the EDC). This also means that every contributor can establish a release if they have appropriate access to the repository.

There are some things that need addressed. Primarily the GitHub release mechanism automatically versions the repository and detects change logs. So if you don't enter a description it automatically detects the changes made to the repository since the last release was made, which we can make more effective use of in the future. This will make our initial migration of the old releases cumbersome though as I'll have to paste all of the change logs there and you'll just have to ignore the one GitHub shows in cases where a change log can't be found (I have them for all of my releases just not LGM 1571), which is not that big of a deal. This also means however that ENIGMA needs to establish version numbering and so do all of the other projects including JEIE, etc etc.

Once this is done however I would update all the appropriate documentation on the Wiki and related links. I would not delete the old revisions archived on our shared dropbox but the Wiki and everything would be updated to reflect the new release process. I also would not delete the old revisions page right away until some point in the future when the links become broken or our shared dropbox has been fragmented.
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/LateralGM:_Revisions

I would continue to maintain the Extra Packages page for quick links to all of the latest releases. The page would just be updated with the rest of the Wiki.
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Install:Extra_Packages

I've experimented with archiving two old releases of LateralGM on its repository.
https://github.com/IsmAvatar/LateralGM/releases

I also believe this would reduce the confusion of random people finding LateralGM through Google and not knowing where to download it. The GitHub release mechanism is pretty common and you know people have come to get used to it, myself included. It also makes formatting the change logs nicer by allowing us to use markdown and link to specific tickets instead of by URL like I do now.

I'd like to know what you all think about this, I think this is the way to go and I am looking to do all the footwork to make the change. I'd just like to take some feedback and suggestions on it first.

Also I will need additional privileges to a few repositories such as JEIE to do the releases which I asked IsmAvatar about before but never got a response, hopefully I can get a hold of her.

Edit: Actually it seems like it is possible when drafting the releases to base them on a certain commit, but I don't know how far back we'd have to dig. I could probably dig for all of the releases I made but maybe not the ones for 1.6 and 1.5 as they may not have been migrated from Sourceforge.

Actually Harri, Josh already took the liberty of writing this all down, so you know what guys, let's table this discussion.
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Coding_conventions

Here's what we are going to do:
* Link this page from the main wiki page under the contributions section (I already have).
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Main_Page
* Try to persuade new contributors to follow these conventions and guide them if they need assistance in configuring their code editor.
* Do not over trivialize a pull request where the formatting is incorrect, just mention it as a side note, pull it and fix the formatting yourself so they know for a future patch submission. This way they will not be discouraged by the rejection of their first commit.
* The coding conventions can be followed loosely, just don't let it get out of hand.
* Continue to correct areas where the formatting is wrong. This includes a lot of places I may have touched because nobody ever really explained the coding conventions or why they are important to me.

Do not go crazy trying to run a formatter over everything like I suggested I was going to do, this problem has been enough of a distraction already from bigger things that need solved. Harri also mentioned that he's already fixed a number of formatting problems. Just please follow this advice as we continue into the future.

I didn't propose we make our own styleguide

I know, the reason I said that was because I didn't want you to get distracted, there's more important things, I just wanted your input.

Maybe I can merge my branch then. Or you checkout it, because it has a lot of changes.

That would be nice, when I have time I am going to run the formatter over LGM because it has gotten way out of hand and I let it get that way. Nobodies been in there to do some cleaning and now that I know how I am going to do that. But also I was going to address the issues you and egofree were having and fix any of the remaining JoshEdit problems cleanly if there are any. So it would be nice if you have whatever changes you've made into ENIGMA master so I can get a working copy set up and fix these other issues by like Sunday.

Maybe egofree's mentioned Atom could do it as it basically renders html.

I would use the feature if any editor ever added it. Egofree's suggestion would probably be the best because look at how Eclipse parses HTML and Javadoc's to provide documentation in the IDE from the source code (this was something we did want to do with LGM). An editor that can do that is the best place to implement what you want.

This is a little bit off-topic, but since you are talking about text editor, there is a totally free and open-source alternative, which is is fine also : atom editor (https://atom.io/).  It has also tons of plugins available. (To install new ones : File->settings->packages).

Also, DaSpirit had me try Atom and iirc it didn't work very well and it was very laggy I believe because it's written in JavaScript. Don't take my word for it though examine the program for yourself. I really liked Sublime when I just tested it and its package management, but I recommend you support free and open source software over proprietary software such as Sublime.