More wishes

[dirkdeftly]

Some of this stuff might have already been covered, but I'll say it anyway. (I added poll to see how many people agree)


Autosave: Save presets you're working on at customizable intervals nto a recovery folder, and if they're saved and not changed afterwards delete them from the recovery folder (to reduce clutter). And if you go to 5 or so other presets (that number should be customizable too), it gets deleted from the recovery folder as well.
So if you open a preset but don't fiddle with it, it doesn't go into the recovery folder; if you open a preset and fiddle with it it goes into the recovery folder, then if you either go onto 5 other presets after, or save and don't fiddle further, it gets deleted from the recovery folder.
This way if you've just opened someone's preset and started to pick apart their code, then go onto something else, it doesn't clutter up your hard drive. But if you are working on it and WA in it's infinite wisdom decides to shut down, you have that preset stored so you don't lose your work.

Multiple instances: Open new presets in new windows. Add something to the Settings>Display menu for 'Automatically stop rendering all presets when other windows are opened' - if checked it automatically stops rendering presets in all other windows when a new preset is opened in a new window, or when you click a different window. (the active or new window should, of course, start rendering). Also add the option of rendering multiple presets at the same time. (wouldn't know why someone would want to do this, but heck, why not, someone might.)

-Main/Open new preset warnings: When you hit - when Main is selected, or open a new preset without saving, make an annoying pop-up that says 'Are you sure?' Those annoying pop-ups can save lives, ya know. But if possible, instead of setting off a trigger when something changes, compare the loaded vis with the one you saved/loaded from, so if you added something and then deleted it it won't annoy you.

Undo/Redo button: An alternative to the -main/open new preset warnings. I think it's pretty self explanitory. It'd be great if you could do a multi-level undo (where you can undo several things instead of going back and forth between with/without)

Preset listing: I dunno what you guys were or were not thinking when you designed the thing.... Add a sub-folder viewing ability, two buttons at the top (seperate from Fullscreen and Dock in config) saying 'Sort folder' and 'Sort all', Sort folder sorting all of the presets in the folder you're looking at (alphabetically), then sort all sorting every folder under and including the one you're looking at. Also, the listing should wrap around the screen instead of going straight down, and be compatible with the scroll wheel on the mouse and the page up/page down buttons (the last two incase you have 800 folders or something).

[dirkdeftly]

Crap, I forgot to add multiple instances to the poll...or set it to multiple answers...Oh well :P Ignore the poll then

[jheriko]

All of those ideas are cool, except for the sorting thing since AVS seems to auto-sort presets now (I only noticed this happening recently). Especially the - main warning. How many times have I lost entire presets by doing that??? In fact, I don't see the point in - Main when you can just do presets->new. An undo feature would be cool too.

[Zevensoft]

Nullsoft should also fix the 'Only recurse 1 subdirectory' bug with the pop-up menu preset loader.

[dirkdeftly]

That's kinda what I was getting at with the 'allow preset listing to view subdirectories' thingy...(not a direct quote, mind)

I don't use 2.51 (wa3 standard, right?) so I wouldn't know about the sorting. But I forgot to mention: When the folders/presets get to a certain number, when you create new folders, it kind of randomly places them around the bottom of the list instead of at the bottom, and when you create new presets, it places them completely randomly. Needs to be fixed so that all new folders/presets go to the bottom of the list all the time.

[Tuggummi]

If you number your presets (example: Atero-01-presetname) And after you have made all the presets arrange them in the windows folder by name and then move them to a new folder. This should arrange the presets correctly from 01 to xx. What i have experienced, avs arranges the presets by date, but there are exceptions in this too i have noticed. Mostly they are sorted by date.

[jheriko]

If you number your presets (example: Atero-01-presetname) And after you have made all the presets arrange them in the windows folder by name and then move them to a new folder.

I used to do that.

Winamp 3 seems to do the sorting for me now though, so I just copy them over to Winamp 3 before I make an installer and use the Winamp 3 files for the installer source. That way I can delete them from
Winamp 2, test my installer then have them sorted in Winamp 2 as well.

I think Winamp 3 is the way to go for designing AVS, its slower, so it forces you to try and make them run faster, and some things that work on WA2 seem not to work in WA3 AVS where as everything I've made in WA3 has worked perfectly in WA2, that way you can be sure that nobody gets to see any bugs.

[Tuggummi]

I have also noticed that the sorting depends what operating system your using. Example Win2K sorts the files in avs by name no matter what. And again my own Win98 sorts them mostly by date.

[jheriko]

It could be that I switched from Win2K to Win2K advanced server recently. In fact it was about the same time that I switched to wa3. I could be horribly wrong and I'm giving winamp 3 far more credit than it deserves.

[Zevensoft]

Another good thing about Winamp3, is that when it crashes (Illegal Operation), AVS still works fine (Until you click close that is), giving you time to save.

[dirkdeftly]

Except that WA3 sucks big fat testicles.

And I want to be able to sort them manually. I don't want to have to number my presets. I know AVS is capable of auto-sorting; if you have a new folder with a bunch of presets in them, they'll sort down automatically (as Tuggummi stated). Why there's no way to do that manually mystifies me.

[UnConeD]

Actually AVS does not sort. The sorting in new folders is because of the way a filesystem is organised on the harddrive. By copying them in order, they'll show up in order too.

Defragging should re-sort them.

[jheriko]

Originally posted by UnConeD
Defragging should re-sort them.

That's like going from London to Paris via New York.

[dirkdeftly]

Exactly, jheriko

I'm not looking for a solution that takes three hours to do. I want to be able to click a button and have it sort instantly. Is that really so much to ask? It's not even that complex. Fifty lines of code, tops. Twenty if you know what you're doing (but judging by WA3, Nullsoft doesn't...)

[jheriko]

20 lines of code sounds like a lot to me for a sort, maybe 6 or 7 would be ideal. :P

[dirkdeftly]

That was just an estimate. I was thinking (since i don't have that much C++ experience) something like keeping a list of every charachter alphabetically (3 lines), making an array of every folder and AVS (5 lines), comparing the charachters in the folder/filenames to that list of characters (5 lines), then making a new array of folders/files accordingly (5 lines), and finally outputting that to a reference file (2 lines). Of course I'm totally wrong because there's shortcuts that I don't know about around all of that

[jheriko]

Load the contents into array. - 1 loop
Sort the contents (bubblesort or quicksort or which ever you like). - 1 loop

you should only need to write two loops to do it all at the most, that first one is unrequired if the names are already stored in some kind of array like data structure. You can use the ascii codes to alphabetically sort things that way a number compare can be done (< or >) rather than checking it against an alphabetical array, you can also quite easily work around capitalisation by forcing the strings to lower case for the purposes of the sort, or by using some clever mod maths.

Give me the AVS source and I might even do it!

[UnConeD]

Atero, I still don't see why you're so anti-Winamp3. Considering the insane revolution it is on the inside, I'm surprised it works nicely.

If you're experiencing problems, it might be related to a 3rd-party component too. For example, due to some crashes while debugging an APE, my Winamp settings had become corrupt, so I deleted all .ini files.

After this, Winamp3 would crash when I started it. A quick debug revealed that it was the Winamp2 Plug-in manager which crashed without the .ini's, not Winamp3.

[Zevensoft]

They also need to fix the 'ch' variable bug.

[dirkdeftly]

Oh yeah, forgot about that: Sometimes variables will get read wrong by AVS and for some reason stop working. You have to change each one in a set to a different name before they'll start again. ...Fix it.

UnConeD: WA3 doesn't crash. It just plain sucks. The menus are hard to use. AVS is hard to get at. AVS is hard to use. That's enough reason not to use it.

[goebish]

I prefer WA2 too....WA3 eat too much CPU ressources and that cause AVS to render less FPS....

[UnConeD]

AVS hard to get at? Just click its button in the thinger!

I do agree that it needs some work, but most of that's related to the default skin. The menu item's are too small and several handy quick-access locations that WA2 had are missing in WA3 (eg. the 5 letters left of the time display that allowed you to go directly to preferences, double-clicking the song title, shift-stop, ctrl-play, etc.).
I get the idea that the Nullsoft people control most of Winamp through the keyboard shortcuts and therefor don't realise how lacking it is on the mouse-side.
Like for example, the Thinger should scroll when you move your mouse to one of its sides (and faster the closer you get to the edge). Clicking those silly buttons sucks.

Oh and it needs 'Show window contents while dragging/resizing' too. No one has turned that Windows setting off since Win98, yet WA3 still uses the ancient behaviour of the dotted rectangle.

[Zevensoft]

Unconed, it's because resizing wasabi in real-time would be murder on a cpu basically. It's a really slow *cough*API*cough*.

And Nullsoft need to rewrite AVS properly. I've been watching a few demos on a commodore 64 recently, and they had things like phong-shaded toruses @ 128x128 15fps and ray-traced movements @ 160x100 30fps, all on a 1mhz processor. And I'm running a 733Mhz processor. And at those resolutions, all I get is about 90fps. Maybe someone could rewrite most of the routines in ASM perhaps? Or use hardware acceleration for renders/trans?

[UnConeD]

Actually I believe almost all the critical AVS code is in ASM. That's why it requires MMX. I don't see your point with the C64 though. The demos you're referring to are hyperoptimized, probably run at a fixed resolution, fixed color-depth, etc.

If you do the same in AVS, you'd probably use a superscope which is slow as hell for pixel per pixel drawing.

Oh and the real-time resizing is not too bad. It doesn't have to do 100fps, I just want to be able to draw windows and list headers without having to release the friggin mousebutton a hundred times to see if it's okay. Remember that when you start dragging, it only kicks in if you move more than 2 pixels. That makes minute adjustments in height/width even harder.

And graphical hardware acceleration only works good if everything is hardware accelereted, so no go there.

[Zevensoft]

Requires MMX? Then how come it works fine on my friends AMD Athlon XP 2000+ which, according to 3DMark2001SE, doesn't have MMX support?

That's another thing AVS needs, a super-fast pixel-based render.

AVS would resize quicker if it used the resizer that the main (default) skin uses. But this would mean the borders would get bigger too.

And Render/Superscope could be hardware accelerated, considering that lines look like crap at angles when the line width is larger than 3.

NULLSOFT REALLY NEED TO FIX THE INCORRECT LIST PLACEMENT BUG!

[jheriko]

Originally posted by Zevensoft
Requires MMX? Then how come it works fine on my friends AMD Athlon XP 2000+ which, according to 3DMark2001SE, doesn't have MMX support?
.
.
.
And Render/Superscope could be hardware accelerated, considering that lines look like crap at angles when the line width is larger than 3.

NULLSOFT REALLY NEED TO FIX THE INCORRECT LIST PLACEMENT BUG!

1.) I have an Athlon.. it supports MMX, I don't beleive that AVS needs it though, I could swear I ran it before on my old-old machine without MMX, but that could have been a previous version.

2.) Wouldn't you have to change the whole AVS pipeline to implement hardware accelerated ssc since the AVS screen is stored in an array before it is put out to the screen, and isn't that array what is used for all of the other effects. You'd still have to output the contents of the array to the screen anyway so surely if anything implementing a hardware accelerated superscope feature would slow it down because you would need to run the old superscope routine as well to make the rest of a preset works with the superscope (I'm thinking trans effects) like it normally would. I agree that the line width >2 bug is really annoying.

3.) Yes. Definately get that bug fixed, or make AVS open source and I'll fix it, even if it takes weeks for me to sift through the code to find it.

[chrisc]

I like to sort the avs files better.

[mikm]

I love all the ideas...I've lost a good number of presets by accidentally pressing the spacebar or through crashes.

[UnConeD]

This has already been said a lot, but I'll repeat: usually when AVS crashes, you can ignore the error dialog and save your preset before hitting 'close'.

[Karnov]

Or, use the old computer mantra

"Save Early and Often"

If everybody did that, so many problems would be resolved, and most things would run a lot more efficently

(oh yeah, itd be easier in AVS if you added CTRL-S hotkey for save)

[mikm]

I have Crashguard so I can save through Windows crashes, but occasinally my whole computer restarts w/o any apparent reason