ME-Mapper Version 4 Build 34

General
#1

Hi all!

Clint gave his ok for a public test. You can find a new mapper at

members.chello.at/archon/MEMap4/MEMap4Win.zip

its currently beta and I need some more testers to play with it than only the guys how write software for ME.

If you like/dislike/miss or simply want to say something, please get in contact with me a-r-c-h-o-n@gmx.de or post it as reply…

Give it a try…

Bye, Tibor

#2

Yes it’s very nice; has lots of things that palantir hasn’t got. As with all new stuff you’ll take a bit of learning to get used to it but it’s very good.

Clint

#3

Just downloaded the file and set it up for a new game currently on turn 0. I am very impressed. Some very nice features are present and the system was very quick to load all the pdfs. There are a lot of things that are capable of edit from what I have seen so far.

2 minor problems noted on my play around with it so far.

  1. Scrolling round the map is slow.
  2. Initial ruins with fortifications not shown when the turn 0 pdfs are imported. (don’t know if this is a problem with just turn 0 or will also occur in future turns).

Other than this the system looks and feels great. Well done.

Mike

#4

I am impressed as well and like alot of the features (especially the character representations and tracking on the map). Some of the issues I noticed were:

  1. Shore not being delineated from plains hexes.
  2. Not always updating the ownership/status of a pop center when it is taken/not there anymore. Granted I started a new game and then went right to uploading turn 8 so that may have something to do with it.
  3. As Mike noted: scrolling around the map is so slow as to be non-functional. I had to move around by manipulating the slide bars at the side and bottom instead.

-Corbin

#5

Nice piece of work. Some quick comments:

  • change the army composition display from:

HC LC HI
LI AR MA

to

HC HI AR
LC LI MA

to show the similar type troops in easily read columns.

  • show hex numbers and pops?
  • search by Allegiance (everything except arties) not working yet?
  • print reports? (anything you search on…)
  • after adding an artifact to a hex, I didn’t get an icon
  • view range by allegiance includes “off-map” pops (new camps) but not off-map armies?
  • replaced slashes in sidebar character skill descriptions with hyphens for clarity
  • add Nation and Hex# in rumours where known (next to characters and pops?)

Haven’t checked rigorously, but do notes carry forward from turn to turn? For example, if you do 2 LA’s, you get 2 thumbtacks, but the Artifact icon only appears on 1 hex, as I guess the artifact is a unique record and cannot be referenced twice? But the next turn, do both the thumb tack icons disappear? Leaving an A icon where an arty “may” be…?

Excellent work though, can’t wait to give the printing options a try!

As for the scrolling comments…how are you scrolling…? My mouse wheel doesn’t work, neither does it work in Palantir (dang shame both…), do yours…? Easiest way to move the map is to grab it and move it, like a pdf. Had the program on for 1/2 an hour and double click to zoom out, grab and move, double click to zoom in, you’re 1/2 way around the work or more very quickly…almost makes up for the lack of mouse wheel functionality.

Brad

#6

  1. Help/Information is all in German though I specified English when loading game. Is this to be fixed, or have I done something wrong?

  2. When I select a character and see his movement range, how do I switch it off again?

  3. I’m not sure I like the movement spells being automatically included in the movement range. It could screw up planning if you did not realise that a character only has 50% chance of actually moving to the range marked on the map. Please consider a facility to allow this to be switched off. An ideal solution would be to show the 12 hex move and the spell move.

  4. Are we going to have an e-mail list for discussion of this as we did for Meow and Palantir playtesting?

Initial impression: Highly impressed. Keep at it. :slight_smile:

#7

We’ve already been through the play test on a yahoogroup with interested parties and I requested a couple of times so it’s time to move it out into the open and see what we can find that way… :slight_smile:

Feel free to feedback here. Tibor is very good at implementing feedback.

Clint

#8

Hmm, I can’t get it to work personally. I startup the program, and select “New Game”, and it then hangs with the error report:

“Waiting for process XXXX for longer than 100 seconds. Please report this to the programmer.
The Game could not be loaded!”

It’s doing the same on both my PCs, one running Windows XP, the other running Windows 2003 Server.

Happens when I try making a new game, tried 1650, FA and empty, same thing happens. I get a “loading please wait” message, and after 100 seconds it beeps and I get the message in the error log.

Can’t find the process it’s waiting on tho in the taskmanager.

Øystein

#9

I get the same problem as Oystein as above, i’m running WinXP Pro and the program won’t load properly. I tried a few times with same results.

#10

I’m doing something even more basically wrong… I can’t get into the site to get the download… :frowning:

#11

The full address is http://members.chello.at/archon/MEMap4/MEMap4Win.zip Don’t (like I did the first time) wrongly assume that you have to add in a ‘www’. The invitation to download should (if your machine behaves like mine) then come straight away.

#12

Thanks Laurence… goddam www :slight_smile:

now to see what it’s like.

Michael

#13

When I extract the files and try to run the application… why does the program try to get onto the internet?

I don’t allow it and it hangs and dies?!

Why does it need to go online for?

#14

Oh well, gambled and hit the yes button to allow the program access to the internet…

it now hangs just like Oystein and bgp0231… I also use XP :frowning: drat…

#15

Frankly, I don’t have another decade to devote to catching up with the IT Jones’. This anxiety to develop killer apps to this game is producing more magic than Saruman in the books.

Clearly Harley is zero for three:
One. Just a year and one-half ago, Harley denied they had made any changes in this game. How insightful was that?
Two. They denied they wanted the source codes. How predictive was that?
Three. They denied they were going to make even further changes to the game. How perceptive was that?

#16

I allowed it to connect first time, maybe that was the difference. I have Norton Internet “Security” (my quotes, as I often think it causes more grief than it saves.) I find these things tend to advertise themselves all the time by making their “WARNING” messages appear as alarming as possible.

(I recently ran a registry cleanup program which claimed to find 500 “problems”. If I paid them money, I could get the full program which would clean them for me. Bloody minded, tight fisted, but also wiser from experience, I took advantage of the demo’s ability to clean ten “errors” for free and ran it 50 times, over a few days. Result: No “problems” reported by it any more, but NO apparent differences to my machine’s running efficiency, and did not solve the initial problem I was having.

So I generally tell NIS to allow progs to connect if I know, or think I know what the prog is. If worried, I’ll run a scan to try to detect any adware, then start again. All risky I suppose, but so many progs need to connect at will these days, what can you do?

I just thought I’d see if I could find any more clues for you by seeing what happened if I tried downloading and installing onto my laptop. I did - no problems, running pretty. The only interesting thing was that this time it did not connect to the Internet (or NIS did not tell me that it was trying to.) NIS is configured the same on both machines, but my desktop has just had a complete flush. Maybe it was some third party utility/module trying to connect, which I already have allowed on the laptop. Java looking for updates perhaps? Sorry, not much help.

#17

We had some problems with it ourselves. That’s part of what I’m checking.

I’ll get Tibor to look at these points and see what he can do.

Clint

#18

Thanks Guys…

#19

Same problem for me. I start it, it wants to conect to the internet. I let it but then it hangs.

Let me know when this might be sorted and I’ll try again.

Cheers
John S

#20

For us: With one machine it runs about 60% of the time. With another around 80%.

You might just want to try it again off and on - try re-booting do nothing else but go into that application and see what happens.

Clint