Can you make sure it is also compatible with xp?

It supports XP.

I have XP, so I will be sure to make a stink if it doesn't work.

You can rest assured.

I have added automatic conversion between binary<>text formats as an option (you will be prompted to locate the ConvertData.exe at program startup).

Everything is going well and it looks good for a release date of the second week of January.

Things are going faster than planned and I can now say with confidence that a beta for the testers will be available in 3 days or less and a full v1.0.0 release a few days after that.

I want to ask the public a few things so that I can make tweaks to the interface and functionality before making a release. This is a release for you guys to use, not just me, thus your opinions are far more valuable than what I think is the right design from both a UI and functionality standpoint.

Now, on to the questions.

1) How do you want to be prompted to setup various aspects of the editor on its first time being run?

Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, the first time the editor is run a dialog pops up that is called "Setup Wizard". This dialog has three sections so far: Allow use of ConvertData, Default save format (only available to change if you have ConvertData usage enabled), and Default Game version (Vanilla/Entrenchment, changes templates and how ConvertData are used).

2) How do you want to be able to change preferences while using the editor? 

Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, the preferences are edited by launching the setup wizard through Edit->Preferences.

3) Do you want to be able to save individual files against the default format?

Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, all files are saved according to the format you select (TXT/BIN) in the setup wizard. You cannot save individual files in a different format.

4) If Sins Editor becomes popular enough to be hosted on its own site, would you want it to automatically search for updates on startup? This would require an internet connection, of course.

Current design: There is no auto-update feature nor is there a plan for one, unless user requested.

5) Do you want Sins Editor to allow you to reload the file from the hard drive with a separate option (like "Refresh")?

Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, files opened for the first time in an instance of Sins Editor are put into memory in their entirety in order to eliminate the bottleneck of accessing the harddrive each time you switch between files. There is no option to refresh the file data from the hard drive besides closing it and reopening it.

6) Do you want Sins Editor to provide a one-time warning about deleting/adding rows from/to a file?

Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, you can delete/add rows from/to a file without any warning that doing so might cause a minidump if you do not know what you are doing.

As a side-note, here are the system requirements (only OS and .NET framework, since the rest is negligable)

Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista. (Both x64 and x86 (64/32 bit) are supported.)

.NET Framework v3.5

-Ian

I look forward to testing this out.  This may be something I put within my community.

DANMAN

I would love to test

I can't accept any more beta testers right now because I don't have much time to go over the feedback.txt they will provide me. If I have too many beta testers, it will take too long to implement any suggested changes.

The best people who are not beta testers can do right now is answer the questions in my previous post.

-Ian

This thread is relevant to my interests.

1) How do you want to be prompted to setup various aspects of the editor on its first time being run?

Current design seems fine to me, other applications like FTP clients work in a similar fashion.

2) How do you want to be able to change preferences while using the editor? 

Also the current design seems perfectly acceptable

3) Do you want to be able to save individual files against the default format?

Would be nice if the application would allow you to "Save As..." if you needed to save out of the norm
 

4) If Sins Editor becomes popular enough to be hosted on its own site, would you want it to automatically search for updates on startup? This would require an internet connection, of course.

Personally I think anyone that would be using this type of program wouldnt mind going through the effort to load up this forum topic or to load up the "official website" to check if their's is the latest version or not
 

5) Do you want Sins Editor to allow you to reload the file from the hard drive with a separate option (like "Refresh")?

Simply put, Yes. Sometime's it is neccesary to replace files within a dir after you load the client & if it doesnt "re-read" the files you would then have to close the app to re-open it.
 

6) Do you want Sins Editor to provide a one-time warning about deleting/adding rows from/to a file?

Would be a good idea for the less experienced users out there with a "Tick box" to hide the warning from popping up in the future/more advanced users.

Thank you for your input.

I will implement your suggestions.

-Ian

More appropriate preview screenshots made when I wasn't drunk!

First time startup message

http://img388.imageshack.us/img388/746/sinseditorstartupow3.jpg 

First time setup wizard (regular one lets you cancel)

http://img388.imageshack.us/img388/7708/sinseditorsetupwizardrr6.jpg

Example of editing a line

http://img388.imageshack.us/img388/1603/sinseditoreditingyw0.jpg 

Oh, I setup the file change detection based on an object cloning system rather than a modified-since-save-clicked approach that some editors seem to take. This means that you are free to mess around with the file as much as you want before saving and if you return it to its original state when it was last saved you will not get a "your file has been modified, do you want to save it?" message. I hate when programs do this, since you actually didn't change the final contents of the file before exiting / closing the file.

Also, I removed the "TXT" line from the editor's view. There is no reason to edit this line and it is a waste of display space. It is also used by my program when saving as text format, so changing it could result in unwanted behavior when reopening the file.

That's all for now!

-Ian

I like what Nacey said.

Actually, I would imagine changing it would result in unwanted behavior when loading the game Since binary files always have BIN, it looks like the TXT was inserted so that the game knows what to use to read the file, since it can work with either binary or text

That said, screenshots look good. I like the condensed editing view that hides the "children" of various settings

I don't think the TXT was removed from the file, just the view.

Ian?

Yeah I know that's what he meant. I was just trying to be a smartass

You're good at that! HAHAH

now help me with my minidump?

Weren't you going to try running vanilla first to see if it still dumped?

Yeah but I'm at work.

This Editor looks shnazy though!

Can you build a minidump reader Ian, that tells us what is causing the error?

Visual Studio is your minidump reader You wouldn't get anything useful out of it. It's basically a dump of everything in memory when Sins crashes. They can see what variables were loaded, things like that. It wouldn't do anything for us because we don't have access to the source code to tell what any of that stuff is.

The best thing is just to turn on error displaying in user.setting, makes it readable to us non-developers

Elaborate on error displaying...

Does it tell you where the error is from? Like what line or entity is causing it?

Yes it does - the line number, the line, and the file name. Just open your user.setting, scroll towards the bottom and set showErrors to TRUE.

MY GOD, why didn't i know about this before. That's so easy.

User.setting is in gameinfo? I'm doing this soon as i get home and fishing me a minidump!

It's in your user path \Setting folder.

is that in the Sins folder under program files and stardock, or ironclad folder under appdata?