The Freelancer Infocard Development Suite
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Since it’s been around 9 months since I finished writing the code for this whole project, and the people I originally wrote it for left the Discovery development team just after it was finished so they never got started using it, I think it’s past time to release this project to the community at large.
This thing is essentially a web-based multi-user development environment for adding and updating the text in all the ingame resources; if it goes in the .dlls as a string table or html resource it’s editable here. The goal is not to mirror the functions of FLDev or any other standalone programs that exists, more to augment them and allow for collaborative development from multiple people at the same time, all while not requiring any of them to know anything about the interior workings of the format.
What it provides is:
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wiki-style editing system
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full-text searching like Explorer
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editable permissions for classes of resources if your team is segmented
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very deep inter-linking of resources based on ingame usage
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custom links can be added between resources
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editing interface with bbcode, rich-text, or raw XML, and converters and preview for all
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import and export with FLDev’s .ini format for eventually writing to a .dll (automatically verifying XML the whole way so you’ll never see another malformed card in the bars)
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and more!
For a demo, try out a testing version on my server, using the login info of demo/demo which will give you full read rights but no editing. You’ll have to excuse the self-signed ssl certificate warning, the devs wanted this to be secure and I didn’t feel like paying verisign for something that I can do myself. All of the content there was ripped directly from the Discovery 4.85.3 mod, with the resources from the .dlls and the linking information from parsing the .inis (scripts are included for all of it)
It’s written in php/MySQL with jQuery to make the interface nice, and while most of it is universal to any mod, there are a few things (like the ID class) that are specific to disco, but can be readily modified (changed, removed, or more types added) for any dev team who would like to use it. I’d like to thank mwerte for telling me to make this (and then quitting halfway through), Tazuras specifically for doing a lot of the interface design with me, before he left, Sovereign for testing as well (before leaving), Dusty Lens for some quick testing before leaving the infocard dev team, and really the whole group of them for asking for this but leaving me hanging for a year after I did it for them just to ensure that it would never be used but it would still waste a few months of my time.
If any dev team would like to use this, just let me know and I can put together a zip file with all the scripts, I hesitate to just provide that right now because there must be some bugs left because it was never stress tested.
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Nice work cshake.
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M1C wrote:
Sorry 4 offtopic, but mana8100 look at this: http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4039&forum=30
Thanx M1C! It looks really interesting, we’ll try it
And wondering why do they take that much time to add the proyect on the starport forge :S
