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Ruby Vgap Viewer (RVV)

5 Sep 2005 PHost regular movement (and fuel usage) prediction reenabled (the rest of the hostrun is not yet; I just need the fuel usage *now*)
4 Sep 2005 Minesweep in THost reenabled and extended. Web detection is automatic and correct. Host type auto-detected.
3 Sep 2005 Myriad of Markers (in the core). Keep an eye on the GUI to reflect that. Big speedup for the recent FilteredMap approach (which got really slow for predicting turn 100).
Ruby VGA-Planets Viewer is a flexible, colorful viewer for VGAP-3 data. You could think of it as a portable EchoView, but it will be much more.

The power of RVV comes from its onderlying handling of data. RVV knows the following types of views:

  1. All data straight from the RST (including data from messages)
  2. As in 1, plus RVV-derived information
  3. As in 2, plus all historical data
  4. As in 1, plus user-set data
  5. As in 4, plus all historical data
  6. As in 5, plus objects you had deleted yourself
Ultimately, all fields of all objects can be set by the user: information from your own objects would end up in a TRN (TRN not yet implemented), information for enemy objects is regarded as a better estimation than RVV could make for derived data (implemented), or a command that the enemy is expected to give for his ship/planet (implemented). You can even insert and delete objects of certain types (hence View number 6 in the list above).

This is combined with powerful hosting simulation. For one, derived data and also user-set enemy commands are taken into account when predicting the next turn. Secondly, when a new RST arrives, RVV meticulously tracks the entire hostrun, using each and every message, VCR (and util??.dat) in the exact order of the hostrun. This means when your Ship Bazooka has mission Minesweep, RVV knows which minefields it *should* sweep; and can verify by reading the messages whether it did. If there is a deviation, it can put markers on the map to alert you about unexpected events.

It is impossible to do this perfectly. In the above example, Bazooka might have been towed, and thus report on wrong minefields; since THost does not tell you Bazooka was towed, RVV can't know (well, center of minefield and distance to it provide some check; but not if you're (still) inside).

RVV should be portable. If possible, should fit on the CPU, RAM and screen of a PDA (like my iPAQ, but at the moment it runs out of memory rather easily). The CVS version uses ruby/wx, which runs on *nix, windows and Mac OS 8 and 9.

RVV is not (yet) a VGAP client, you can not edit your data (you can, however, edit enemy data and use that in the host prediction :)

Status

The underlying datastructure is in place. The infrastructure for the hostrun and parsing messages is in place (and an example of the verifying code is in the build_bases hosting phase). Simulation for THost is almost, complete. NicM has started to write a GUI (viewing only; does setting data work?) with the wxWidgets toolkit. This should provide native look and feel on all platforms.

However, there isn't much of the smart stuff implemented yet (e.g. the minesweep example above is not). Addons are not recognized and certainly not auto-detected.

See the ToDo for the upcoming 0.7 release.

Older Version

The only reason to use it, is that it provides more information and that it uses more colors show that (and it zooms better). It is PHost aware, the new core can't track/predict PHost. The screenshots below are from the old version.

Warning: This older RVV uses Ruby-Wise, which means it will only run on X-Windows systems for the moment. Porting to other toolkits shouldn't be too hard.

I definitely need a series of new screenshots of the stable version :)

     
Planet Temperature and Natives Planet Owners 81/162 LY connections
        
Neutronium (red), Duranium (green) and Supplies (yellow); the area of the circle indicates the amount; dashed circles are on-ground, solid arcs are in-core, arc-length indicating density, Multi-player info, total cargo and all overlapping minefields at that spot, Enemy base with info from turns 11, 14 and 19,

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