I made a small update this evening to RPGAM.
- There is now a View menu which lets you show/hide the Library Explorer and Audio Explorer.
- A change I made in the API affects the format of RAML files. “items” elements need to be renamed to “children” before attempting to load files from a previous development build. A simple search/replace in your favorite text editor will take care of that.
And thank you to the anonymous user who submitted a few enhancement tickets for RPGAM. I’ll be breaking those up into several tickets, each with a specific feature:
- Add drag and drop to Library Explorer
- Tagging and Dynamic playlists
- Set appropriate default directory for Audio Explorer
- Audio Explorer should remember last used folder between application sessions
- Audio Explorer should ignore hidden files and folders
- Add ability to hide panels (Library Explorer, Playlist Viewer, Song Player, Palette Viewer, Audio Explorer)
I’ve been having an issue with audio playback on the Mac. The problem boils down to SWT thread support in the Apple Java VM. It occurs in 1.5 of the VM, but not in 1.4. Unfortunately I am using some Java 1.5 features in my code which would make it difficult to run on 1.4. And SWT doesn’t yet have support for 1.6, which I don’t think is officially distribute for Macs yet anyways.
So, what are my choices?
Drop Mac support, for now
The main problem with this is that I know there are some Mac users out there, including myself!
Switch to using Swing instead of SWT
This would require a fair amount re-coding/re-learning. Swing also doesn’t look as nice as SWT. It would simplify the distribution a little bit, but I’ve already got that solved and automated. But Swing should work on Mac without a problem.
Switch to Java 1.4
This would also require some effort and be moving backwards. But it would allow Macs to run the app and play audio. At least until 1.4 is no longer supported/distributed by Apple…
What do you think I should do?
For the curious, you can see details of the problem here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=238436
Thanks to Kevin Barnes of the Eclipse project for being so hopefully in tracking down the source of this problem!
Update:
I tried another approach. I tried using QuickTime for Java and ran into a similar problems where the UI and audio library don’t want to co-exist. I figured I’d use QuickTime for Mac and JavaZoom for Windows and Linux.
I did a little more work on the train in this morning and at home this evening.In this release:
- Added support for the FLAC audio format.
- Adventures are now Libraries and use the .raml extension (RPG Audio Mixer Library). I did this to make the application a little more generic and to open up the Library to organize for Systems, Genres, Campaigns, Adventures or whatever else a DM would like.
If you happen to have files in the previous format you need to do two things:
- Rename the file from whatever.raa to whatever.raml
- Edit the file (it’s XML) and change the opening and closing <adventure> tag to <library>.
Chec out the Download page to get the latest development release of RPG Audio Mixer!
I just got back from vacation, but even without my laptop I managed to squeeze a few bug fixes and tasks out. Here are some of the things I did this past week:
- Added validation to Rename Resource dialogs - doesn’t allow name to be blank
- Resource names are now validation when renaming AND at creation time.
- Added name validation for renaming Songs and Effects as well
- A lot of work in the project Wiki including: cleaning up the main page, creating pages like Program Requirements, Development Requirements, Functional Spec and Help Wanted.
- Updated the Downloads page with the new development releases.
- Fixed a bug when reading in Adventure files (missing JAR in Classpath)
- Work on the Ant script for building, deploying and uploading automatigically.
Here’s a screen shot of the current version:
