Bliss / Cas-Stunts track editor

[Cas]

Man, I wonder why they didn't work before, ha, ha. But alright, I'm happy now!

[afullo]

Considering that usually the worst programmer's nightmare is something like "ouch, yesterday it worked, today it doesn't!", and here on the contrary we have "yesterday it didn't work, today it does!", that's quite fine

[Cas]

As a matter of fact, sometimes the last situation you describe is even more annoying, though not in this case. It has happened to me many times that I'm making a program and I see that it often produces a problem and I'm pretty certain that I can reproduce it, so I prepare everything to make it happen and it doesn't and then, it seems to work fine, so because it's not producing the error, I can't find it and it happens when I least expect it.

In this case, I know more or less what I've touched, so I don't expect the problems to reappear, even though I don't know why it didn't work before. But I was concerned about this before because, as I changed the keyboard input system, some parts that had nothing to do with extended characters were affected (such as the Settings menu, where you enter the default paths and default author's name and even the Load and Save menus showed problems at some point).

It is my thinking that this will be the last release of Bliss version 2 because it's very complete already and, if I am to add anything to an editor, it would be things of a different kind, such as support for my future project, which would be indifferent to Stunts... for example, larger track terrains or higher layers. If I develop an editor to do that, it will be from scratch.

[Cas]

Alright... I've been saying for over a year that Bliss is complete and I'm only going to make more changes in case of bugs, but...

NEW VERSION: BLISS 2.5.7

New features:

• Colouration - Use colours to mark sections of the grid. Good for tutorials and to set rules for a race. Remember those times when you had to take a screenshot of a track, then clip a part and use a drawing program to make markings on it?  You can do it from within Bliss now with this option and the Track-shot menu
• Improved tournament protocol - Now Bliss supports Race For Kicks!  Yeah, really, it was a shame that all this time, it didn't. And besides, for anybody who would one day want to make a little championship or race event, it's much simpler now to hook with the protocol, the details of which are described in the manual

Other changes:

• Track-shots should now work well even in DOSBox... hopefully
• E-mail and website have been updated in the start screen
• DPMI server included in the package to make it simpler for DOS users, given that DOSBox no longer provides built-in DPMI. Thanks for pointing this out, KyLiE!

This update isn't crucial, as no major bugs have been fixed, but if you use track-shots and would like to use it for track schematics, I recommend upgrading.

[GTAManRCR]

This new version is so cool, you can download tracks from R4K

[dreadnaut]

This new version is so cool, you can download tracks from R4K

This reminds me of a recent work-in-progress on ZakStunts: http://zak.stunts.hu/api/seasons/2020

[Cas]

Glad you like it, GTAMan!   This was something that should've been done before. About colouration, it's been an unfinished and unofficial feature in Bliss for quite some time.

And Dreadnaut, wow!  I understand from this that I will be able to give Bliss a true full interface with ZakStunts, right?  At this moment, the interfacing to get the current track and its metadata uses official interchange information (from the json file), but for the scoreboard, I'm having to parse the HTML, which will break if at any time a modification is made to the style of the page. If you do get a stable interchange file working (a.k.a. "API"), let me know and I'll make the changes. It would make the tournament access faster and more reliable.

Bliss is getting very complicated to update. The code is too big and each piece of it has been made without thinking of the ones that came after it, of course, which has accumulated a lot of redundancy and inconsistences. At this point, I feel like rewriting the whole thing, but that would be too much work. Yet, something like changing the procedure to read the scoreboard from ZakStunts is, in my opinion, important to update if it comes up. I can see that the project involves a lot more information, but I don't think I'll make this Bliss able to navigate through past races and such. It's too much to add to this code. I'll leave that last part for Bliss 3.0... if I decide to do the big thing.

Oh, and KyLiE found a bug in Bliss 2.5.7, but it only affects the DOS version. I'm fixing that now.

[Daniel3D]

Hey CAS,
i was working with Bliss (still 2.5.5 so i may be noticing something already fixed)

I opened a test track that was a bit Hex modified (enough to crash stunts)
But Bliss could see the terrain fault without trouble, made the tiles nice red.
but i found no way to fix the tiles,. couldn't overwrite.

Fixed it in the hex modifier but it I expected maybe more because Bliss could see the bad data.

[afullo]

There is also a debug mode in Bliss, did you try even within it?

[Daniel3D]

I have to admit that I'm not familiar with that function...
Didn't do much fancy stuff with bliss so far. Just basic and simple test tracks.
I'll check after work. (In about 6 hours)
Unless CAS is quicker..

I did update to the latest version in the meantime, but that made no difference in what I tried before.

[Duplode]

I have to admit that I'm not familiar with that function...
Didn't do much fancy stuff with bliss so far. Just basic and simple test tracks.
I'll check after work. (In about 6 hours)
Unless CAS is quicker..

I did update to the latest version in the meantime, but that made no difference in what I tried before.

When you return, I suggest posting the track here, so we might try having a look at what's going on.

[afullo]

From the manual, at the end of paragraph 5:

If you  are experienced with Stunts' track format and  would like to
have more  freedom, you can  enable "manual edition" (read more about it
in the  section  about  the "switch bar"). While manual editing mode  is
active, the backslash  key can be  used  to enter a hexadecimal code and
select any  track  or  terrain  element  directly. This includes invalid
codes. Also, the background scenery selection will allow custom  scenery
codes when this mode is enabled.  In case  you don't know what  this  is
about, it is better to first experiment with  a new  empty  track and be
aware  that  Stunts may crash  or  behave  unpredictably  when  manually
edited tracks are loaded.

It seems I remembered wrong: it is MAN, not DEB, which has to be active. Note that when you press backslash no box opens, just insert the two hex digits relative to the track element or to the terrain (depending on which set of elements do you have open).

[Cas]

Note that when you press backslash no box opens

You know, I was pretty sure the backslash option was undocumented. Now I see I even described it in the manual!  Anyway, it's true it doesn't even appear in the shortcut key list in the Help menu and no signal shows when you press it, so it's very much of a technical and debugging option. Maybe I should make its existence clearer.

Version 2.5.5 was particularly buggy, but not in this aspect, so you wouldn't notice a difference. Anyway, I do recommend anyone using that version to upgrade. If you're using 2.5.4 and you're fine and don't need the newer features, that's OK, but 2.5.5, as I said, is buggy.

[afullo]

It should be a bit like the Fight Club: the first rule of a backslash user is... 

Maybe a box highlighting that it is active while \ is pressed could be useful, since if you press it inadvertently you cannot do anything else unless you input the two digits or you press ESC.. .

[Cas]

Yeah, I also should make it so that, if you haven't pressed any key for the following two seconds or so or if you pressed a key that's not a number or letter from A to F, it just goes back to normal