Day 36: Exceptions, LowryDemo, etc

No more Cygwin

I learnt some fantastic stuff today - I can remove the need for cygwin from the AR completely and make it a fully native and portable windows executable program. Well you may need to install some visual c++ redistributables, and I'm not sure if it will work without XNA installed... but it's pretty standalone now! I have a few required .exe's that need to go around with the program, but that's basically it.

First off a big thank you to the University of Manchester for making certain file transfer protocols unusable over wifi. If it wasn't for the fact that lftp (and ftp and rsync and everything else I painstakingly tried and tested) didn't connect over wifi I would never have even looked for alternatives and learnt all the wonderful gadgetry I learnt today.

So first off, I learnt that WinSCP not only has a synchronize feature to rival lftp mirror, it also comes as a .NET assembly and a portable executable - and it works over the University wifi to boot.

Now, the fact that I can use WinSCP from inside the ExportJPEGs program (remember the .NET assembly is available) means that I don't need to use any cygwin scp or ssh or lftp or ftp or any of that gubbins. Which also means that now the only reason I have cygwin is to use the ported image magick convert tool. After a little research I found that image magick also offer a portable version that works on Windows, which comes with a little convert.exe that, after testing, works exactly as intended. Which means I suddenly have no use for cygwin at all.

Well one thing's for sure, I've completely given up on making this program portable. That's probably a good thing because I don't fancy working out how to manually port all of Goblin's code onto Linux and Mac (XNA has been ported to Mac via MonoGame and MonoDevelop, but no one has bothered with the Goblin wrappers). So from here on out, the University of Manchester AR and 123D wonder is a completely Windows based offering.

In other news I managed to destroy LowryDemo because I messed up with using the git repository and ended up with ridicuous "<<<<<<<< HEAD" lines in random files that prevented the whole thing from loading or building. It didn't even tell me which files had been victimised, so the only solution was to just revert to my backed up copy - luckily I have a few. Then I had to redo all the content optimizations I had made, moving textures and models to a central folder, setting relative pathnames for most of the models (converting them to binary first), etc.

First automated draft complete

That's right. I finished implementing the automated loader code in LowryDemo. Now it automatically loads up every single precompiled head in the heads directory, then waits for new ones. As ExportJPEGs compiles new heads, it automatically loads and adds them to the latest free model set.

It's all working!

At one point I got totally lost because WinSCP doesn't copy files the natural way. In fact it makes a placer file, then renames the file once the copying is complete. While this is a great idea, it meant that my file watcher (which watches for newly created .fbx files) completely missed the renames until I told it to watch for renamed .fbx files as well. A simple problem but it had me lost for an hour or two in despair thinking all was broken.

Tomorrow I improve it, add exception handling, etcetera.