Asherons Call: The Voice of Decal Speaks!

It's been ten days since the release of Decal's Alpha 1 and the first group of testers have excelled at finding defects in the code.

Damnation.

On the plus side, the developers have had nine days to hammer on the problems they've reported, and good progress has been made. In fact, so much has been done that the release of Alpha 2 is imminent. Yes indeed, a new test Decal is being compiled as I type and will soon be available to the alpha testers.

Large numbers of bugs have been fixed spanning from low level architectural problems down to minor cosmetic issues. While this has consumed most of the development time, new functionality has not been neglected. Alpha 2 will will include the preliminary release of the following long-needed features.

New installer

The original Decal had no installer, and people had to battle with BAT files and arcane programs to make it work. When Decal 2 arrived, an MSI installer was provided, and while it worked fantastically for new installations, upgrading users were liable to get scripting errors and virus warnings.

As seeing a potential virus popup is not liable to inspire confidence in the legitimate 3rd party application community, the installer has been rewritten again. The new installation progress will handle upgrades and new installs with ease, and should ensure that nobody has installation issues in the future.

First release of the new .Net plugin framework

You can't move in Windows development these days without hitting ".Net" and it's expected that many plugins in the future will be written using it.
Sadly, previous support has been rather too much "Do it yourself" for most people. Decal 3 fixes this, in two ways. Firstly, the new installer bundles the PIAs (the files that every .Net plugin needs to use Decal) so plugin developers won't have to create and distribute these on their own anymore.

More importantly, a new .Net Decal framework is being written. This is "native" .Net code that wraps the Decal objects creating a friendly and easy to use framework for developers. Although we didn't originally expect to have much before December, Mekle has pulled out all the stops and I'm pleased to announce that the first test .Net development framework is included with Alpha 2.

More Developers and Testers

I did say we would add more developers every time we had a new release and as promised, we're bringing in more alpha testers to help nail the more subtle bugs and to bolster the plugin pool. This time, as well as recruiting developers whose plugins test specific areas of Decal we're adding some "test users" of existing plugins at the request of current alpha participants. This means we have a rather longer list of brave souls steeling themselves for the wild alpha ride.

Hallow Mage (ACTrade Test, Castaway Test)
Flandango (Castaway)
Wing (Castaway)
ArchUI (UST, Zyrcabot)
IPA (ACTool)
Digero (Quest Timer)
Legiondel_Superman (Visual Decal, Artifex's Boon, Board Troll, Field Report, Stoic)
Yew Wan Sum (Robochef, Loottracker, Buffy2, Allegiance Elf, Navi3)
Arboc (AC Nav, Ac Nav2, AC Com)
Isudus (Tinker Calc, Sapphire, Chat Extend, YAMP 2, AC Map)

(DISCLAIMER: plugins listed above are included only as an indicator of what that author has done. Updating them for Decal 3 will be done at the authors discretion - inclusion in this list does not guarentee they will ever be updated. I may also be missing plugins created or maintained by these developers.)

No doubt this new influx of smart people will uncover many more problems, but when the tide ebbs I'll again be inviting more of the volunteer list to help out with Alpha 3. Depending on the bugs discovered, I expect this will happen in the next couple of weeks, followed closely by the public betas and inevitable final release!

Though it might not be obvious, there is a lot of code in Decal (nearly 100,000 lines). To help manage this, the developers use a RCS (Revision Control System) that maintains the code, along with every change made to it. Because they're spread all over the world, in different timezones, each change to the code is sent to the RCS with a message stating what the code did.

Sometimes, I think it would be easier to convey our progress and general sanity by posting snippets from the change list.

Quote:
"Basic installation now works."
"Remove a remaining import("inject.idl")"
"New idl folder and files, removed old idl files"
"Put back missing IDLs"
"Die, input buffer, die"
"@!$^%!^"
"Maybe this will work *today*"

Hmm. On reflection, perhaps the handwritten updates work better.

Battered but unbowed,

The Voice of Decal